I understand the hate for Dark Souls II. It does not live up to its pedigree. It takes the "git gud" marketing of the first game and works it back into the game itself (seriously the intro is just a long speech going "wow.......game so hard..........ur gonna die...........heheh"). In a lot of ways it doesn't seem to understand what the previous game was doing. Even as it's being very derivative, it entirely misses the kindness of the original, the way that game wanted you to succeed. It's a confused game, one clearly being pulled in a hundred different directions by a B-team with little in the way of a coherent vision.

But look, it doesn't take long to realize and accept that this doesn't have the ambition or detail of DS1. It's nowhere near as refined, goes back to Demon's Souls style branching semilinear paths rather than a seamless connected world, and is basically a bunch of riffs on the mechanics and lore of the first game. I like looking at it as a series of what-ifs for fans to toy around with, like Lost Levels was to Super Mario Brothers. Much like Lost Levels, difficulty in DS2 is much stiffer, clearly intended for those who are already invested. It likes to troll the player where DS1 would go out of its way to give them a shot. That's not to say DS2 is too hard, but instead that its difficulty is shallow.

I'm pulled back and forth because I really do love Dark Souls II, yet I could find a thousand criticisms to throw at it. Dark Souls II attempts to be Dark Souls as it was received...the meme version of Dark Souls, not as it really was. As a fan, that does hurt me a bit. Yet despite that, we're still left with a gorgeous atmospheric action rpg with combat depth unmatched outside of Fromsoft. We've got one of the best translations of the metroidvania formula to 3D. We've got a really fucking good game that just happens to be surrounded by masterpieces.