I know, I know, gamers everywhere are playing Dark Souls 3 and I’m only now playing the second one. Given how much I liked the first game, this might sound a bit odd but I was put off when I heard that the sequel is considered markedly inferior to the first game. Then with the news of all of the DLC, I decided to put off getting it until the inevitable definitive edition for the PC was released with all of the bells and whistles included. I actually got this a while back but have only just gotten around to playing it due to my backlog. Note that this post will only be about the main game which I’ve just finished. I intend to write a follow-up post about the DLC content later.

The upshot for me is similar to that of everyone else: Dark Souls 2 is a good game but it utterly fails at recapturing the magic of the original. More annoyingly, there are clear signs that the designer had no idea what it is that made the first game so special. It appears to me that they were aware of these criticisms and tried hard to amend them in the SoTFS edition. I didn’t know at first how extensive these changes were, beyond the obvious graphical and balance updates, but I soon found out a lot of the online guides are no longer reliable due to all of the changes. I’d say that the update helps a bit but comes nowhere close to eliminating the problems. As when I wrote my original post about Dark Souls, I’ll summarize my thoughts with a list of what I liked and what I didn’t like.

Likes

• Updated stats system is definitely an improvement on the original. Every stat is useful for something so there’s no useless stat like resistance. I also like how there is now stuff like Fire BNS and Lightning BNS and how they scale off of Faith and Intelligence. Even the speed of drinking Estus now depends on a stat!
• Dual-wield power stancing is cool and a lot of fun. I didn’t use it much but I did play around with it here and there. I loved how there are all sorts of new animations for them. Having new stuff to experiment with is always great.
• Equipment seems better balanced so that there’s no must-use item. Fashion souls is a real thing and very satisfying.
• Stuff like burning bonfire ascetics are a great idea. The multiplayer stuff seems much better now even though I’m a PVE player. The Rat Covenant is nasty though. No idea why they implemented that.
• Updated graphics are shiny and spiffy. What they end up doing with it is a different story and it’s a real shame that the list of likes is so short.

Dislikes

• The quality of individual levels varies by quite a bit but overall it has little of the brilliance of the original. Some levels, such as Forest of the Fallen Giants (except that it’s not a forest!) and the Lost Bastille are decent but mostly they are topologically much simpler than the levels in the first game. Many levels look big but when you navigate them turn out to be annoyingly linear and simple. Prime offenders would be Drangleic Castle and Aldia’s Keep.

• The quality of the art is all over the place. I hate how the game isn’t quite dark enough. Some levels that use universal lighting too much look hideous to me. These include Harvest Valley and Shaded Woods. The game just lacks the amazing sense of atmosphere of DS1. Compare the first time you enter Darkroot Garden with entering Shaded Woods. The mood is all wrong.
• The worst failing is that the world of DS2 doesn’t complete and consistent at all. While playing through this, I’ve actually been watching the Kay Plays Dark Souls series on YouTube so I know it’s not rose-tinted glasses that make me remember how fantastically the world of DS1 is inter-connected in all sorts of interesting ways. By contrast, the levels in DS2 look so different one from the other and they connect in ways that don’t make sense at all. Combined with the ability to teleport all over the place, it feels like a series of individual videogame levels rather than any sort of world at all. I can’t express strongly enough how disappointed I am in this regard.
• The frequency of bonfires and the abundance of healing items are the main reason I think this game’s designers didn’t understand what made DS so good. There’s practically no survival horror aspect to the game now. Heck, there are even consumables to restore spell castings! That’s ridiculous! I honestly never permanently lost any souls while playing the game, it’s just so easy to recover your lost souls upon death. Contrast this with the numerous and highly memorable times when I died in an inconvenient spot that made it extremely difficult to recover the souls.
• The plot is incoherent. I get that they tried to fix this by adding the Aldia stuff but it’s still terrible. Like so much else it mainly seems like a retread of the first game so that everything happens again, except that untold eons have now passed. Unfortunately the game does a terrible job of explaining all this so you’re shuttled from one place to another with no clear idea why you need too go there and what it is you have to do there.
• The bosses in this game are awful, as in so awful that I don’t understand what they must have been thinking. The very first boss fight, the Last Giant, is already underwhelming as I just hug his legs and barely saw any of the rest of him. Hug switch, switch legs as he stomps, wail away, dead boss. The other bosses are barely any better. Half of them feel like cut-and-paste copies of DS bosses. The other half seems to be giant armored humanoid knights with gigantic weapons. There are some exceptions. The Executioner’s Chariot was a pretty interesting fight but by far the large majority are either duds or boring. The Covetous Demon is an amazingly dumb and ugly boss.

Mixed

• The quality of the new regular mobs are kind of a wash in my opinion. I still think they haven’t shown enough creativity in this department but there are enemies that I thought were pretty cool. Many players complain about how many enemies now track your movements to an unrealistic extent and that’s true. But I think it creates opportunities for new fighting strategies. A good example is the Heide Knight. I found it immensely frustrating to fight them at first because of their ridiculously good tracking and unpredictable movements. They basically look like they’re doing drunken kung fu with swords. But then I switched to using a spear with these guys and suddenly they’re super easy. Because of this, I often switch around between the rapier, a spear and a mace depending on the mob. I don’t remember needing to do this in DS except for bosses.
• Parrying seems much more difficult in DS2. You really need to know the enemy’s moveset very well and predict if they’re going to do a slow attack or a fast attack. As a result, parrying never became part of my regular arsenal whereas in DS1 I used it fairly regularly against tough humanoid enemies. On the other hand, enemies in DS2 were easy enough to handle using standard tactics that I never really felt that I needed to learn to parry. The only time I missed parrying were against the very many NPC invaders that I believe were added in SotFS. They have immense health and poise, sometimes infinite poise, so that there’s almost never a moment when it’s safe to attack them.

None of these means that DS2 is a bad game. On the contrary, it’s an excellent game. Some of my favorite levels were in fact levels that many players complain about, precisely because they force a different kind of challenge than the usual. Examples include Shrine of Amana and even Black Gulch. Unfortunately it’s just not a worthy successor to DS1. Maybe trying to equal something that is considered one of the greatest games of all time was never on the cards. But even so, I’d say that DS2 comes nowhere close. It comes across very much as an effort by the B-Team who remixed the best bits of the first game but didn’t really understand it. I’d still recommend it as an enjoyable action RPG but I’m sorely disappointed.