have finally overcome the hurdle of 'not finding this game fun' by doing a playthrough with a huge club and smacking the shit out of everything. have realised they nerfed straight swords to shit here to encourage use of the expanded rpg mechanics and that's why i was having a bad time

as for everything else? i am literally completely neutral on it now LOL - ds2 has some of the older fromsoft games' vibes for sure but i do think it lacks a lot of the genuinely interesting design + aesthetic decisions of games like evergrace or shadow tower abyss

the soundtrack is particularly mediocre, i wasn't a huge fan of sakuraba's ds1 offerings but his compositions here are as uninspired as they come, and while i think yuka kitamura's work here fares better overall, it's still not nearly as good as the later games' OSTs

fun little game with some good ideas though! just obviously made with a lack of time & confidence, ambitious in scope but not entirely willing to commit to what it puts forward, i long for the original version of this game before it changed hands as well as the one that got to deliver on its revised set of concepts fully