Oh, dark souls 2. How cool you were for the totally wrong reasons.

Dark Souls 2 feels more like a fangame of the original Dark Souls. Hey, you guys liked fast travel, right? Here you go! You wanted dual wielding right? Here you go! You didn't like twinking, right? Soul memory! It goes on.

It results in a game that somehow had the best pvp mechanics in the entire series but its pve fell into the floor. There were some cool things that never really got replicated in the others, such as the sheer mountain of worthwhile things to find and build diversity, but the absolute death of the series atmosphere a long with iframes being tied to a stat AND the boring level design makes it a 60 hour long letdown.

What more can be said about Dark Souls at this point? It paved the way for a whole breed of styles that would seek to capture its charm, and a whole bunch of games that realized that it is infact fine to be difficult.

I've always thought that the level design was pretty overrated myself. It is kind of a cool look at what metroidvania design would have been like if it survived the transition to 3D, but I find the levels themselves to be pretty.. cobbled together and empty of things to find. Like, it's cool that you can go throuhg the valley of drakes to get to different spots, but the valley of drakes sucks. And this isn't even mentioning how obviously half finished the 2nd half of the game is.

It is still the parent of not just a game style, but also a meme. And for good reason, too. Praise the sun and all that.

(Doubles as a review for Bloodborne itself, too.)

Old Hunters is definitely the finest piece of content we've gotten in the whole series. It's got loads of atmosphere in each stage, lots of weapon variety and enemy types and the level design takes a step up aswell, with the bosses.

The original bloodborne starts strong, but I think fumbles in the middle pretty hard when you start wandering around the woods forever up till Rom. Both floors of yharnam, the church, is all great, but the woods just doesn't have a really great atmosphere to it. The transition to the more haunting aspects of the setting is fantastic, but the gameplay starts taking a nosedive at that point, with bosses that become all too easy and enemies getting repetitive. The final boss is the best one From soft as made though.

World breathed a level of QOL that the series desperately needed going forward, but it has some missteps. The endgame is tired and boring, the weapon aesthetics are so absurdly uninspired to the point of making upgrading weapons feel almost tedious, and there is WAY too much CC at the hunters disposal.

Still, I think there's a lot of things to keep in iceborne, and at the end of the day, it is probably the most polished title overall. So I hope monster hunter stays away from handhelds from now on.