I would like to apologize for all the times I said "Dark Souls II is bad for a Souls game, which is still pretty good."
It's truly incredible that a game which so obviously prioritizes quantity over quality still manages to feel so small. Every level is little more than a series of hallways connected by elevators, tunnels, trenches, and canyons. There is never any sense of place. When I played Bloodborne again recently, I constantly felt tricked by the sheer amount of detail outside of the play area, that the game was compensating for something; it's incredible that Dark Souls II came out only one year earlier and tries to cover the same tracks with little more than JPEGs of mountains. It's a PS3/360 game, sure, but it's still the most ugly and empty Souls game of its generation.
Combat is basically ruined. Positioning-focused playstyles are virtually useless because of how strong the enemies' rotational tracking is, not to mention many enemies have a slam attack that limits your walking speed even if it doesn’t make contact. Parrying has been slowed down to the point where it can't really be used reactively to most attacks. Dodging has had its effectiveness tied to a stat that most players won't understand the significance of unless they read a wiki or otherwise engage with a community outside of the game itself (undermining both the combat and the game's own integrated social features), and the hitboxes are sloppy enough that it doesn’t feel right anyway. Every aspect of Dark Souls II's combat design discourages active play; the shield is more central to the game's "conditioning" than in any other From Software game simply because it’s the only effective defensive option left.
Dark Souls II's ending is the same as the first, the player's character is given a choice; unlike the original however, the player does not actually choose, the choice is only implied. The fact that there is a Dark Souls sequel at all in the first place has already invalidated the player’s decision at the end of the prior game. Link the fire or let it die, the curse will return all the same. The entire game seems dreadfully aware of how pointless the endeavor of making another Dark Souls was in the first place. Its world has no believable structure, its characters have no memories and only sparse motivation. The gameplay has changed form not to try to be interesting on its own merits, but to induce the same feeling as the first game to the detriment of all else.
Dark Souls’ bloodstain system was an effective way of encouraging the player to learn the game; your souls are left wherever you died, and surely since you got there once before you can do it again, and probably have an easier time of it with newfound experience. Dark Souls II does everything it can to reproduce this effect not on the player-end, but within the level design. The game is full of dark areas, but if the player lights a torch it stays lit forever. Some areas have as many as four NPC invasions, but a defeated invader stays dead. Even regular enemies will stop respawning if the player kills them enough times. Dark Souls might have felt like a wall that you were chipping away at, but the change wasn’t happening in the game, it was happening in your head, in your hands. Here, the gameplay absolutely is just an obstacle to whittle away at.
Towards the end of the game, the player travels into the memories of dead giants. Their tree-like corpses give off some strange glow, like the insects in the game’s intro cinematic. To some extent I wonder whether this is meant to imply that the entire game takes place within a mere memory, that the lack of insight into the characters and the fragmented geography is meant to represent things not remembered. Perhaps too, the only value of the game is its intellectual property, the memory of Dark Souls.
People have always speculated about or wished for a sequel to Demon’s Souls or Bloodborne, but the conflict of those games is over, the threats which drove their premises are out of the picture. Dark Souls was itself the same, a total work, and making a sequel was always a fool’s errand. Some complain that the diegetic emphasis on dying and losing you souls is some kind of cheap marketing ploy, leaning into the games’ reputation for difficulty, but the very use of the Dark Souls brand was in the first place a cynical decision. What else was there for them to do?
Quelaag was a spider lady because the first flame was fading, and the witch of Izalith tried to conjur a new one; this artificial flame became chaos, a cursed lava that transformed people into insectoid demons.
Najka is a scorpion lady because Dark Souls had a bug lady too, and they want to do another one like that.
Sure, in the beginning Quelaag also probably started out as “just a cool idea for a boss”, but what made Dark Souls truly special was that everything, even silly video game bullshit like the monsters you fight, had its place in the world. Why was Blighttown poisonous, and why did the people in Blighttown look the way they did? Because Blighttown was in the runoff of the Lordran sewer system. Why are the Gutter and Black Gulch poisonous? Because it’s Dark Souls! There has to be a dark and difficult poison level! Why do the people of the Gutter look all sickly and green? There is no particular reason, every hollow in Drangleic looks like that. It’s interesting that Hidetaka Miyazaki has said that he tries to make sure that even the monsters in his games have a sort of nobility, and that the only game in the series that he did not direct immediately took the sharp left turn of making the undead look like stupid green zombies.
Dark Souls II makes a lot of great quality of life adjustments that would carry over into future entries, but virtually all of them feel like bandages on mortal wounds dealt to Dark Souls’ design. You can re-spec your character, likely because by the time you realize how important adaptability is you’ll be so far into the game that you’ll need to kill multiple bosses to add a single frame of invincibility to your dodge roll. Changing or removing weapon infusions no longer requires lowering your weapon level, and it better not since they got rid of the actually useful scaling infusions and replaced them with the brilliantly useless “mundane” weapon.
The environmental design and aesthetic of the DLC areas is absolutely the highest point of the game, but it isn’t enough to save it. It’s the same game, with the same combat system, and the same types of encounters seen in the base game.
You could do worse, and many trying to ape the Souls style certainly have, but this one is really only recommended as a curiosity.
It's truly incredible that a game which so obviously prioritizes quantity over quality still manages to feel so small. Every level is little more than a series of hallways connected by elevators, tunnels, trenches, and canyons. There is never any sense of place. When I played Bloodborne again recently, I constantly felt tricked by the sheer amount of detail outside of the play area, that the game was compensating for something; it's incredible that Dark Souls II came out only one year earlier and tries to cover the same tracks with little more than JPEGs of mountains. It's a PS3/360 game, sure, but it's still the most ugly and empty Souls game of its generation.
Combat is basically ruined. Positioning-focused playstyles are virtually useless because of how strong the enemies' rotational tracking is, not to mention many enemies have a slam attack that limits your walking speed even if it doesn’t make contact. Parrying has been slowed down to the point where it can't really be used reactively to most attacks. Dodging has had its effectiveness tied to a stat that most players won't understand the significance of unless they read a wiki or otherwise engage with a community outside of the game itself (undermining both the combat and the game's own integrated social features), and the hitboxes are sloppy enough that it doesn’t feel right anyway. Every aspect of Dark Souls II's combat design discourages active play; the shield is more central to the game's "conditioning" than in any other From Software game simply because it’s the only effective defensive option left.
Dark Souls II's ending is the same as the first, the player's character is given a choice; unlike the original however, the player does not actually choose, the choice is only implied. The fact that there is a Dark Souls sequel at all in the first place has already invalidated the player’s decision at the end of the prior game. Link the fire or let it die, the curse will return all the same. The entire game seems dreadfully aware of how pointless the endeavor of making another Dark Souls was in the first place. Its world has no believable structure, its characters have no memories and only sparse motivation. The gameplay has changed form not to try to be interesting on its own merits, but to induce the same feeling as the first game to the detriment of all else.
Dark Souls’ bloodstain system was an effective way of encouraging the player to learn the game; your souls are left wherever you died, and surely since you got there once before you can do it again, and probably have an easier time of it with newfound experience. Dark Souls II does everything it can to reproduce this effect not on the player-end, but within the level design. The game is full of dark areas, but if the player lights a torch it stays lit forever. Some areas have as many as four NPC invasions, but a defeated invader stays dead. Even regular enemies will stop respawning if the player kills them enough times. Dark Souls might have felt like a wall that you were chipping away at, but the change wasn’t happening in the game, it was happening in your head, in your hands. Here, the gameplay absolutely is just an obstacle to whittle away at.
Towards the end of the game, the player travels into the memories of dead giants. Their tree-like corpses give off some strange glow, like the insects in the game’s intro cinematic. To some extent I wonder whether this is meant to imply that the entire game takes place within a mere memory, that the lack of insight into the characters and the fragmented geography is meant to represent things not remembered. Perhaps too, the only value of the game is its intellectual property, the memory of Dark Souls.
People have always speculated about or wished for a sequel to Demon’s Souls or Bloodborne, but the conflict of those games is over, the threats which drove their premises are out of the picture. Dark Souls was itself the same, a total work, and making a sequel was always a fool’s errand. Some complain that the diegetic emphasis on dying and losing you souls is some kind of cheap marketing ploy, leaning into the games’ reputation for difficulty, but the very use of the Dark Souls brand was in the first place a cynical decision. What else was there for them to do?
Quelaag was a spider lady because the first flame was fading, and the witch of Izalith tried to conjur a new one; this artificial flame became chaos, a cursed lava that transformed people into insectoid demons.
Najka is a scorpion lady because Dark Souls had a bug lady too, and they want to do another one like that.
Sure, in the beginning Quelaag also probably started out as “just a cool idea for a boss”, but what made Dark Souls truly special was that everything, even silly video game bullshit like the monsters you fight, had its place in the world. Why was Blighttown poisonous, and why did the people in Blighttown look the way they did? Because Blighttown was in the runoff of the Lordran sewer system. Why are the Gutter and Black Gulch poisonous? Because it’s Dark Souls! There has to be a dark and difficult poison level! Why do the people of the Gutter look all sickly and green? There is no particular reason, every hollow in Drangleic looks like that. It’s interesting that Hidetaka Miyazaki has said that he tries to make sure that even the monsters in his games have a sort of nobility, and that the only game in the series that he did not direct immediately took the sharp left turn of making the undead look like stupid green zombies.
Dark Souls II makes a lot of great quality of life adjustments that would carry over into future entries, but virtually all of them feel like bandages on mortal wounds dealt to Dark Souls’ design. You can re-spec your character, likely because by the time you realize how important adaptability is you’ll be so far into the game that you’ll need to kill multiple bosses to add a single frame of invincibility to your dodge roll. Changing or removing weapon infusions no longer requires lowering your weapon level, and it better not since they got rid of the actually useful scaling infusions and replaced them with the brilliantly useless “mundane” weapon.
The environmental design and aesthetic of the DLC areas is absolutely the highest point of the game, but it isn’t enough to save it. It’s the same game, with the same combat system, and the same types of encounters seen in the base game.
You could do worse, and many trying to ape the Souls style certainly have, but this one is really only recommended as a curiosity.