I’m not a very thoughtful or articulate person so this ended up being a little long for me, but I hope it didn’t turn out too bad, I wanna talk about this game cause I like it! This is a game that is always sitting in the front back and center of my brain, and is a complete enigma to me still to this day. Not because of anything in the game itself, but because people can't seem to keep their heads on their shoulders when talking about it. It's almost impressive that I haven't seen many other games where it wasn't just deserved that are met with such genuine negativity by some people, that goes past just criticism into genuine toxicity. Have you ever been called slurs over a mostly single player game (I like that this makes it sound acceptable over multiplayer games, it's not)? Probably, but I got it here, and Pokémon, but I haven't really seen discussion surrounding POSITIVE things in this game, because the conversation is always swamped with bullshit, and I think there's a lot of good to say about this game. MOSTLY GOOD even, shocking, I know.

Dark Souls II really harkens back to the early eras of FromSoft games where they just made whatever the fuuuuuck they wanted. Corporate greed and unfortunate dev cycles I'll mention later aside, being headed by mostly different talent really helped give it that wild west shoot the shit feeling. A level of weird experimentation that we haven't really seen since the start of the Miyazaki days. Look, I love Miyazaki, I love his ideas and his games. It's just nice to see this game being so visually and to an extent mechanically distinct from Miyazaki's games (except Bloodborne I think, I haven't touched that one yet). Except one game. You know which one? Demon's Souls. Demon's Souls was the first of it's ilk and it showed in how weird and whimsical the game puts itself out as, and that's something that I haven't seen from a souls game since then... Besides Dark Souls II. From the moment you leave Thing's Betwixt this game immediately sets it's tone apart from the first game in a way that really sets itself apart from any of these other games, Majula especially is a perfect tone setter. Whether it carries that through the entire game or not can be debated but regardless of what one or another person will say about that I really respect this game’s identity.

They really tried to step up and set itself apart from the first game with this, which presented a lot of it’s own hardships, which you can read a lot about in the Dark Souls II Design Works. They wrote these for all of the games but this one is by far the most interesting for how troubled and absolutely miraculous this games development was. Yui Tanimura gets a lot of (completely undeserved) shit for this game despite the fact that he wasn’t even originally directing the game, and completely repurposed and finished the game in ~1 years time, and when you’re working on a heavy time constraint with a new engine that’s not exactly a walk in the park. I think a product is worth criticizing in any state but I always roll my eyes at criticisms of his character specifically, especially considering he was literally the second most important role in the development of Dark Souls III AND Elden Ring, assuming they were ever appropriate in the first place. A lot of this has just been me talking about the social status of the game rather than the game itself, but I think in this case it’s the most polarizing aspect of the game really.

Now I'll talk about things in the game that I really like! Like for example; the scenery. This game has the most visually striking areas of all these games easily, not necessarily best, but they stand out and they can be VERY appealing. Dragon Aerie 1, 2, 3, Shulva, The Sanctum City, Brume Tower 1, 2, and Frozen Eleum Loyce, Castle Drangleic 1 2, visually some of my favorite areas from most any game’s I’ve played. I think visually standing out is important for a game, and though this genre wasn’t very populated at the time at all, it did well standing against its piers, It’s piers being Dark Souls 1 and Lords of the Fallen I guess, but the feeling of seeing a lot of these grandiose locations that are really played off as fancy set pieces is something that I missed in these other games. Even simple things like boss rooms go out of their way to be some of the most memorable moments in the game. Another thing I really like in this game is its characters. Sure, there are some weirdos here and there that you don’t really think about much but that’s part of what brings this games world together for me. Not necessarily bad characters, just characters that aren’t really doing a whole lot. You have people like Lucatiel who have a goal and an entire arc who you’re constantly running into throughout the game and getting invested in, but then you also have Gilligan. He fuckin loves ladders and I love him for that. Or Gavlan and his fixation on poison and souls and nothing else. It’s that level of humanity that I really like in this game, not that I think that every character in these other games being all doom and gloom is bad all things considered, but people in this time in Dark Souls 2 just kinda getting by and living life is really quaint coming from the first game. Aldia really brings it together for me, though. Really what brings this whole game together, the dichotomy between Aldia and Vendrick really does a good job of reflecting the 2 different sides of the events of this game. The conflict with the queen and the start of the war on giants, and Aldia’s fixation on his research on breaking the curse and the “sins”. The way this game subtly ties itself back to the first game is done in such a good way so as not to directly follow up the events of the first game, but still tie them together in a way that still makes learning about the connections between the 2 really interesting, and Old Dragonslayer is just funny, idk what to tell you man. I’d give examples but that’d be too much more to put in here. Also a lot of great ancillary dialogue from Aldia and Vendrick 1 2 respectively. The DLC is an entire other racehorse I could tackle but I’m kinda over writing about this stuff, but Tanimura getting to helm those projects from the get go really shows that he knows what he’s doing.

I could also get into how much better this game is for equipment variety, some of the coolest armor and weapon designs out of these games. Some standouts; Faraam set, which is still one of the coolest sets of armor from any of these games, the Mad Warrior set that’s just a straight up Predator (I don't have the full set for this one oopsie), the Moon Butterfly set, the Black Witch set (another favorite), Invisible Armor of Aurous 1 2 (they were so smart for this), etc.
This game also has the coolest twin blades that just disappeared until Elden Ring where the move set was made significantly less satisfying to play with, and power standing which also went away after this game, but was kind of brought back with Elden Ring where you can just properly duel wield weapons of the same type, but I really don’t like the way it was done in Elden Ring for a few reasons, but the main one being a reason to just omit proper duel weapons which were just cool, but Dark Souls 2 has some of the coolest weapons out of these games. Puzzling Stone Sword (an image won't really do this one justice), Red Iron Twinblade, Curved Dragon Greatsword, still my favorite weapon from any of these games, Drakewing Ultra Greatsword, Crypt Blacksword, Key to the Embedded, King’s Ultra Greatsword, the list could keep going. My big dumb sword has never been so cool and big and distinct before and I love that.

I love Dark Souls. I love Dark Souls 2. I love Dark Souls 3. They’re all very different games with their own ups and downs, but this games ups especially stick to me for just how much it tried to stand out. Whether it failed or succeeded in most regards will never not be debated, but I think it did a really good job of what it set out to do… 2 years after they started making it. Yui Tanimura needs to make a new souls game by himself so people can mald and seethe forever, not that he needs to prove anything. ESPECIALLY since he already made the single coolest thing in a game ever. Respect for all the Burnt Ivory King’s, Fume Knight’s, Sir Alonne’s, and Sinh, The Slumbering Dragon’s out there, you’ll have your chance in the spotlight again someday.