Yet another post about Dark Souls II (Scholar of the First Sin) because apparently, I can’t stop writing about it. Here is post three, which makes this, yes, post four. Why am I continuing to write about this? Because I’m still playing the game and I have more to say. I will always have more to say about From games. Look forward to my 1,000 page treatise on Elden Ring, coming soon to a Kindle near you.
I’m at the end game. I will never stop making that joke as long as it’s funny to me–and only me. See, when I was playing Elden Ring for the first time, I had the belief (mistaken in retrospect, and *spoiler*) that Leyndell Royal Capital was the last area of the game. I don’t know why I thought that, maybe mixing it up with the fact that you had to kill two Shardbearers to get into it. Maybe that made it seem like the last area of the game to me? Anyway, I geared myself up towards getting there. Once I did, I thought, “Yes! End-game.” Oh, sweet summer child was I.
I mean, it’s the end-game, yes, but it’s only the beginning of the end-game. Depending on how you play the game, there can be a hundred hours left. Or is that just me? When I reached Leyndell, I was roughly at a hundred hours played. By the time I finished the game, I was over double that. There were two other mandatory areas, one of which is absolutely massive. There is also another big optional area that ends in what most people consider the hardest boss in the game.
And, of course, you can go back and do all the bits and bobs you hadn’t done before. My first character is currently sitting after beating the final boss, but before entering NG+ because I want her ready for the inevitable DLC. FromSoft DLC is balls hard, and everyone knows you want to play it in NG and not NG+ or above. She’s 70+ on Int and probably at least 50+ on Faith. Minimal on everything else. I spent the first 100 hours at 18 Vigor, which is so tiny. So very tiny. But I didn’t want to waste the stats because I needed them for Faith, Mind, and Intelligence when I could.
Back to Dark Souls II (SotFS). Look. I’m someone who defended this game when I first played it. No, it’s not as good as the original (overall). Yes, I can understand the objections. But, if you took the name Dark Souls off it, you’d think it was a pretty dang good game. As I mentioned in the last post, however, the negatives are really irritating me this time.
Such as the fact that they decided to make your roll shite. Roll is god in the original game, so this was quite the odd decision. There’s a stat, Adaptability, that you have to crank up to 20 or so to get a Dark Souls roll. Which, fine, I guess, but that’s a lot of levels to waste in the beginning, especially for a sorcerer who only starts with 6 Vigor, 6 Endurance. Oh, and there also is a Vitality stat in this game, which dictates how heavy an equip load you can have. And, of course, as a Sorcerer, I needed Attunement slots as well.
The one positive to this game is how easy it is to level. They keep the souls needed for each level fairly low (though it increases with each level as usual), so it’s easy to get over a hundred in levels and beyond. I’m pretty sure part of the reason they made each level so cheap is because you needed so many of them.
I’m not even to Drangleic Castle yet, so I’m not halfway. I just beat The Duke’s Dear Freja with the help of Bashful Ray and Ashen Knight Boyd, two NPCs. One thing I love about SotFS is that there are NPCs for almost every boss. Summons, I mean. I think that was their nod to making the game harder and with so many bosses. Hm. I don’t know if this was in the original DS II or an addition for SotFS. If it’s the latter, then I would say it’s in response to the criticisms of the game. Either way, it’s a nod to making the game easier for people. There were not this many NPC summons in the original game–which I feel the need to play now as well. Except I want the damn online system to work again because I have no qualms about summoning now that I’ve beaten all three DS games solo.
What else is frustrating me about SotFS this playthrough? The weird backstab window. For some reason, it’s not straight back-on, and it seems different for each enemy. I can’t do it with any consistency whereas in Elden Ring, it’s backstabs for days.
And let’s talk about platforming. It’s bad in Elden Ring (in all From games), but it’s horrid in DS II. They make it so it’s easy to fuck it up (and, indeed, slant it towards fucking up) and there’s even one jump in the well that is made to deliberately mess you up. There1’s a thin plank that if you jump on, it breaks and you die. That’s just mean because it looks like any other plank.
The biggest issue with this game is that they are trying too hard to be, well, hard. I know that Dark Souls casts a long shadow, but trying to outdo it is a lost cause.
They couldn’t win no matter what they did, but the worst thing they could have done is what they actually did. They took the surface things about the first game that everyone talks about and amplified them. “People talk about how hard the game is. We’ll make it hard!” “Mobs are giving you trouble? How about three times the enemies?!?” “Oh, you’re complaining about the platforming? We’ll make that even worse.”
They didn’t get that it was the lore (which is basically the same in the second game with a few interesting twists), the discovery, and the accomplishment from beating truly difficult things (without them being artificial, for the most part).
But, as I said before, it was a no-win situation. Dark Souls was such a surprise hit and the fans were so rabid, there was no way a sequel could live up to it. Because what made it brilliant was what made it hard to replicate. That sense of wonder and surprise–how do you make a game that gives you the same thing, but in a completely different way?
I think they did the best they could with what they had at the time. I think Dark Souls III is a better game (than the second) in part because they made it a tour of all the greatest hits, rather than try to reinvent the wheel. And it’s just an objectively better game. But again, it’s because they CTFO and said, “Let’s just do what we do best.” Oh, and Miyazaki was at the helm, which immediately elevated the game. No shade to whoever was in charge of DS II, but it clearly wasn’t Miyazaki. That just underscores his genius, though. It’s easy to see which game is his by the little details.
Before Elden Ring, he was quoted as saying (and I’m paraphrasing) that he couldn’t help making poison swamps. He knows people hate them, but he can’t stop himself from making them. Which is hilarious. And, yes, we accept that it’s going to be a thing in his games.
In Dark Souls II (SotFS), the poison area is miserable. There is a poison swamp blocking off the bonfire, and you can’t NOT get poisoned by going through it. That, by the way, is a big issue in the second game–making bonfires unsafe. In the first game, there was nothing better than seeing a bonfire and knowing that you could just exhale. In the sequel, they decided it would be a good thing to make bonfires stressful. It’s not. No one wanted that, nor did anyone think it was a good idea.
In this game’s poison swamp (Harvest Valley and Earthen Peak), it’s just poison all the time. Which, it is in other games, too, but it’s much more potent in this one. You have to keep healing, which means wasting souls on Lifegems to double crunch them (two will fight the poison and then stop it).
There’s a very thin line between difficult, but engaging and flat-out miserable and unfair. This area is the latter. There are also poison pits you can fall into, poison pots you have to break through, and enemies that shoot poison knives/arrows at you. It’s just way too much and relentless. No one liked Valley of Defilement in Demon’s Souls or Blighttown in Dark Souls, but at least in the latter, you didn’t have to care about the poison that much because it was lowkey and you could Estus your way out of it. The poison is STRONK in the second game and will kill you in a heartbeat.
It’s still on my list of top five favorite games), but I’m reevaluating it post-Elden Ring. Time has not been kind to it.