I don't see what everyone else sees in this game or really the NieR series at all for that matter. It's a repetitive slog with shallow and unbalanced combat. On normal mode it's nearly impossible to die, on hard mode I was getting one-shot from full health so much I found the game unplayable, so there was no "balanced" difficulty where the game actually provided a fair challenge. The combat does not offer a lot of diversity since you fight every enemy by doing a precision dodge and then attacking it with an overly simplistic system that doesn't offer enough options compared to other character-action games. The story is good but it makes me think this game is hitting a very young target audience because it's giving an existential message in an extremely on-the-nose and melodramatic way. People talk about this game's story like they have never seen or read any decent piece of media about the apocalypse before. This game has a lot of opportunity for environmental storytelling due to its post-apocalyptic setting, but it instead decides to not take that to its advantage at all and tell the entire story through cutscenes and the setting is mostly a drab backdrop.

The OST I think is the only part of the game I loved as much as everyone else, but I can just listen to that by itself without actually playing the game.

I really need to stop spending money on FOMO early access survival games just because my friends are playing them. The potential this game has is cool but the odds it gets realized ever are low, and currently its just a sequence of a bunch of ideas stolen from other games tacked onto gameplay loops intentionally designed to waste your time.

Survival games have so much potential as a genre but they just always come out as these really grindy, skinnerbox games that just infuriate me to play. I've only ever liked 2 survival games, Subnautica and Minecraft, and its because those games actually make exploring the world exciting and rewarding, and also aren't intentionally designed to waste your time by forcing you to grind levels to craft things and making you watch bars go down constantly.

This was a major improvement over the original release in nearly every way. I think by this version of the game Dark Souls 2 genuinely was a really good game, if youve never played the original the enemy placements were completely changed up in this release which improved the level design in lots of places, and the 3 DLCs it comes with do stand with some of the best levels of Dark Souls 1 in terms of quality (with the exception of the awful optional gauntlets that were intended for co-op). All of the Souls atmosphere is here and DkS2 does some awesome things that its unfortunate didn't come back after this game, such as bonfire ascetics, a much more fleshed out NG+ mode, and more fleshed out multiplayer and covenant features. You could definitely tell this game came out before "Soulslike" really became a genre because it focuses a lot more on the RPG and character building aspects of the game less than the combat and enemy designs - combat has a bit of a floaty, clunky feel and the boss fights really feel lacking until the DLCs, but the build variety in this game was great, even more great than the first, and the series wouldn't reach that level of player agency again until Elden Ring. I would recommend a Dark Magic build if you're playing this for the first time since magic really takes advantage of what makes this game stand out from more polished, recent Soulslikes.

Dark Souls 2 is unfortunately permeated by one major flaw that makes it hard to play by today's standards for a lot of people used to Soulslikes and that is the fact that dodge roll invincibility frames are tied to a stat, and very often even with this stat leveled up you will get hit mid-dodge-roll. Shields were also nerfed from Dark Souls 1 so avoiding some attacks requires an unreasonable level of precision especially with this game's notoriously wonky hitboxes. But I still think this one isn't worth skipping (although some of the optional bosses definitely are worth skipping).