In yesterday’s post, I talked about my favorite NPCs in Dark Souls. Today, I’m going to discuss my fave NPCs in Dark Souls II (Scholar of the First Sin) and maybe Bloodborne and/or Sekiro, depending on how this goes. Just a note. Except for Lucatiel, the rest are in no particular order.
1. Lucatiel of Mirrah. She is by far my favorite character in the game. So much so, I’m tempted to leave it at one and just move on to the next game.
I will not do that, though. Let me say why I love her so much. First, she’s an outsider like I am. Second, she’s very handy with her sword. She is one of two characters you can take into boss fights, have her survive three of them, and she’ll give you her stuff the last time you see her. Then, she dies. In the next room, her brother invades you and if you’re wearing her armor, it’s especially poignant.
I did not know this the first time I played, obviously. But it added to my next playthrough, knowing her pathos. Or whenever I found out. I’ve played the game dozens of times by now and have platted it so I don’t remember the details of when I figured out what about it.
It was always heartbreaking to me that Lucatiel died just before her brother showed up because her whole quest is looking for him. Then again, maybe he invaded because she died. Who knows? I love her mask and hat, too, by the way. It’s so badass.
2. Lonesome Gavlan. I did not know that was his full title, by the way. It makes things much sadder. He’s a big and hearty Gyrm whom you meet in No Man’s Wharf. he’s chugging beer from a big ol’ stein when you meet him, and he’s a man of very few words. He wants to wheel and he wants to deal. And, what he really wants is souls. Lots and lots of souls. That is the currency in the Souls games, by the way. so he’s a vendor.
Others of his race (Gyrms) are enemies. They are basically big dwarves (in the fantastical sense) who are stronk and like axes. I’m gathering that the lonesome in Gavlan is because he’s been kicked out of Gyrm society for one reason or another. Or that he does not want to be in that society, which might be because he doesn’t want to fight), and they are pretty cool.
It was fun in the Retry of this when the lads ran into Gavlan because Gav (from RKG) took an immediate shine to him. Gavlan resembled Gav from big bushy beard to having a big mug o’ beer in hand. Gav said immediately that he liked him before Gavlan even said his name. Once he did, Gav’s face brightened up and he was thrilled.
Gavlan moves twice, but he doesn’t really say much other than he wants to wheel and deal, that he wants souls, and that’s about it. Still. In a game that is pretty sparse on NPCs, I’ll take it.
Yesterday, I started ranking the From games that I have played. That means Demon’s Souls is not on the list because it is not yet on PC. Believe you me, I will play it if and when it is ported to the PC, but until then, it remains off the list. I have played 6 From games, and the ranking has remained pretty much the same until Elden Ring.
To recap, 6. Sekiro 5. Bloodborne.
4. Dark Souls II (Scholar of the First Sin). Now. I want to say that in terms of how much I play the games, I have played this more than the first game. But, I would say that the first half of the first game is better and more incredible to play than this game. Much more so. I put these two very close together, and I could flip-flop them easily.
Let’s talk about this game for now, though. It got a lot of shit when it came out, and I’m not saying there weren’t valid criticisms. There were. The mobs are ridiculous and very much feel like they wanted to prove they were harder than the first game. In the first game, there were mobs, yes. But you were able to carefully draw them out one by one and could deal with them patiently. In this game, they’re thrown at you and you have to deal with them as best as you possbily can. Especially in the DLCs. The amount of mobs (and the enemies don’t stagger) was ridiculous. I still don’t like the DLCs for this game–well, actually, I don’t like the DLCs as much for any of the From games BECAUSE they are deliberately hard. Yes, the games themselves are hard, but it rarely felt as if that was the main purpose of the games.
I appreciated the sequel for trying to be innovative. I didn’t always agree with how they did it, such as cutting your health every time you died and starting you with one Estus, and you had to find Estus Shards to get more sips. I wouldn’t have minded as much if they started you with, say, five and made you find more, but one was very skimpy. There was one in Majula (the hub world), but it wasn’t easy to find. And two was still very little.
They did add Lifegems in that game, which mitigated the pain somewhat. They were consumables that could be crunched to slowly (oh so goddamn slowly) regain health. I cheerfully abused the situation by loading up on 99 Lifegems (the limit) when I was able to afford them and crunched them throughout the level. There were two other versions of the Lifegems (better), but I rarely used them.
In the RKG Discord, it’s Return to Drangleic month. Drangleic is the castle in Dark Souls II (Scholar of the First Sin), and I joined in with enthusiasm. I am in the minority that I thought the game was good when I first played it. I started with SotFS; I must say atht it is far superior to the vanilla game. I tried the latter years later and did not think it was worth it. I stopped roughly a fourth of the way into the game.
I’ve maintained from the start that FromSoft had a thankless task in making the sequel. Dark Soul became a surprise hit that swept a very small niche within the gaming community. Those who were drawn to it loved it to distraction, and they had very rigid ideas of what made the game good. There was no way the sequel was going to live up to the hype. How could it? It had to have all the hallmarks that made the first one so popular and yet, it also had to innovate so it wasn’t called a carbon copy.
The few innovations they made were not well-received. One was that you lost your health by increments every time you died. Maximum health, I mean. It capped at 50% and you could get a ring that capped it at 80%, I think, but people were not a big fan of this. I didn’t like it the first time I played it, but I can understand why they did it. The first game was lauded for being so hard, so they probably felt they had to up the difficulty to make the sequel stand out.
They were also going to have a light mechanic bassed on the torch. Things were going to happen when you lit all the torches in an area, but they cut it for time. The few places they kept it, one was for receiving a certain armor set (my favorite in the game. One time, I lit all the sconces, got the invader, and she dropped her armor in a spot I couldn’t reach. I was NOT happy), but the others didn’t seem to have a tangible reason for doing it.
The one thing that they did differently that I really appreciated was that on NG+, there were differences in some of the boss fights. Like in the Flexile Sentry, they added rising water and two of the manikins. In the Lost Sinner fight, they added two Pyros. In the Freja fight, they had her come out early and if you beat her back, you could take a hunk of health off her bar. I thought that was an interesting mechanic, but you had to reach NG+ to see it.
The game also caused the enemies to despawn if you killed them 10 times in the vanilla game and 12 times in SotFS. People were so very not happy about that. There is a covenant that changes that, but it also makes the enemies much harder. It’s good for when you need to farm for the plat, though.
I think if it hadn’t been billed as a Dark Souls game, it would have been better received. It’s a good game in and of itself, but it pales in comparison to the first game. But, I enjoyed playing it more than the first game because there is fast travel from the start. I have played the first game maybe ten times. I’ve played the second game at least fifteen times if not more. The third game? Dozens. DOZENS, I tell you.
Continuing on with my thoughts on how I’ve changed concerning the FromSoft games. Here is part two. The last time I played the game, I was breezing through it like it was nothing. I had the Zwei maxed out and all the most powerful Pyromancies. I went in the back way to Blighttown because I could, and I took down O&S without even sweating. I was shadow-matching Ian as he made his way through the game for the first time. I quit when I hit the Tomb of the Giants because I just couldn’t be stuffed and because he was crushing it.
Did I do the DLC? I don’t remember. Probably not because I normally wait until right before Gwyn to do that. I was frustrated because there’s a glitch in the remaster version that doesn’t allow for saving or connecting online, which I don’t care when I play for myself. But if Ian had needed to summon me, it would have been a problem.
It’s incredible all the different way you can play the game. Games, really. I watch videos and the amount of people who just mess around is insane. Fists only runs, Soul Level One runs (onebro), no hit runs, bows only runs, and more. naked runs, and more. I am proud of myself when I can kill Kalameet and it only takes five or six tries.
I tried a onebro run in Dark Souls III, which I read later that it was much harder to do (and technically can’t because there is no level one character) than in the original. I made it about a fourth of the way into the game (to the Deacons of the Deep) before conceding defeat. I just did not want to go on any further and gave up the good fight.
Side Note: I made my onebro a male character because I always play as a female. I thought it would be fun and much to my surprise, one of the NPCs, Anri, is a different gender depending on which you chose to play as. They are the opposite gender, I mean. There is a reason for this (spoilers, I guess). You ‘marry’ Anri and stab them in the face, so I guess we have to reinforce the het norms that men and women can only marry each other.
Imagine my surprise when I met Anri when I was a onebro and she was a woman. I had only known the male Anri, so it was weird when she was a she. I don’t watch playthroughs of the current FromSoft game until after I’d played it, so I didn’t know that was a possibility until I did my onebro. Then, of course, once I started watching playthroughs, it was 99% men who played as men so their Anri was a woman.
FromSoft released Demon’s Souls in 2009. This was before I was into video games and I wouldn’t have been able to play it, anyway, because I don’t have a PS3. Now it’s because I don’t have a PS5, but we’ll get to that later.
Dark Souls was released in 2011. That’s over ten years ago. I had started to play video games by then, but nothing hard. I heard about the game from Ian because his brother mentioned it to him. For years, I joked that I owed Ian’s brother a kick in the shins (or a punch) for mentioning the game to Ian.
I started playing it a year or so later (probably longer than that because I got the Prepare to Try edition, which was released in late 2012), and I was immediately lost. Not physically, but mentally. Up until that point, I had played games like Borderlands and the sequel, Torchlight, and Diablo III. Trying Dark Souls with only those games under my belt was an exercise in frustration.
I started as the Pyromancer because I love fire, which is unwittingly the most newbie-friendly class. I did everything wrong in that first playthrough because I wanted it to be pure. I didn’t want to look anything up, which was to my detriment.
Side Note: Many people say you should go in raw to a FromSoft game. No videos, no trailers, no articles, no nothing. That’s the way to get a true experience, they insist. If you can’t tell by how I’ve worded that, I don’t agree. When you land at Firelink Shrine, there are three ways you can go. The graveyard, down to New Londo Ruins, and to the Undead Burg.
The right way to go is the Undead Burg, but it’s the most hidden of the paths. The staircase down to New Londo Ruins is right by the bonfire. The path to the graveyard is fairly open and straightforward, but you do have to go through an empty room. The path to Undead Burg is a bit more bendy, but you’ll get there eventually.
When I first played, I went to the graveyard and got ganked immediately. Many fans say, “You’re supposed to see how hard it is and go another way.” It’s fucking Dark Souls! Their tagline is ‘Prepare to Die’! Their whole thing is being hard. For someone who has never played the game before, what is the meaning of ‘too hard’? So, no. I don’t think that’s a brilliant move of Miyazaki’s (and don’t get me wrong. He’s definitely brilliant). What is ‘too hard’? If you’ve never played a From game before, you have no barometer. Yes, OK, the Northern Undead Asylum is the tutorial and not as difficult as either the graveyard or New Londo, but there’s nothing to indicate that the jump up is unreasonable.
Many people quit at this point. Some people looked up what they were supposed to do. I’m fairly sure I was one of them, and isn’t that the better answer? In the first case, you have people who quit the game and never look back. In the second group, you have people who actually play and finish the game.
I look shit up all the time now. I try to be as pure as possible, but I’m not above looking up tips on beating a boss I’ve been fighting for hours, for example. Or how to make sure I don’t fuck up an NPC questline. In addition, the community coming together to find secrets in the games has become an integral part of the experience itself. There’s something thrilling with dishing about the current From game with hundreds if not thousands of other people who are just as enraptured by the game.
Dark Souls II (Scholar of the Frist Sin). Post number a million on it. Here was the last. Still playing it, currently in the absolute worst area of the game, barring the DLCs. It’s Shrine of Amana, and while it’s better in SotFS than it was in the vanilla game (apparently), it’s still grim. It’s hard to tell where you can and can’t step because the water edges are not clear (at least not for me. And this is with the gamma cranked). There are sorcerers strategically placed so that anywhere you move, they zap you with homing missiles. Plus, underground asshole creatures that inflict bleed. And still. I was progressing apace through it and almost through the first of three bits (in the second part of it) when I felt my controller rumble.
Forlorn has invaded me! Grrrrrrr. Forlorn is an NPC who periodically invades you throughout the game. Or maybe ‘Forlorn’ is a the name of a group of people and they are different ones. At any rate, I was not pleased and died to Forlorn. For whatever reason, that pushed me over the edge. I tried to run through the area, but died when trying to open the door to the hut that is the end of part one/beginning of part two. You do not have invincibility as you open the door, which I knew, but had hoped would not be true.
That’s another change in this game that is bullshit, by the way. In the first game, when you entered the mist door or any door, you had invincibility frames that got you through it. In this game, you do not. You can be hit out of the animation, which is frustrating as fuck.
Anyway, I was so mad, but I realized that it was best just to kill the enemies and make my way methodically through the area. But I also realized that I was just not here for the artificial difficulty of this area. I’ve mentioned before that the line between ‘difficult, but fair’ and ‘fucking bullshit’ is very thin. This area is definitely on the other side, but also, I think I am. What I mean is that since my medical trauma, I have a different point of view on the difficulty in general. It’s never been why I play the games, but I did take some pride in soloing the bosses.
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.
Post three about Dark Souls II versus Elden Ring. Well, mostly about DS II/Scholar of the First Sin (SotFS). Here is the second post about it; it includes a link to the first. I really do think FromSoft had a thankless task in making the sequel, but I must admit, post-Elden Ring, the game suffers in comparison.
I don’t know if it’s because I had the medical trauma in between, but the negatives of the game are really popping out this time. Remember that I have played it dozens of times, though not as many as I’ve played DS III, and I prefer to play it (the sequel) over the original. Mainly because you can fast-travel from the start, tbh. Yes, the first half of the original game is objectively better than this game, but that doesn’t make this game bad. And, for as much as people want to faff about how great the first game is, we all know that the second half is, well, trash. Miyazaki didn’t have enough time to finish it because the big wigs at…Namco? I think? were pushing him to finish it. So, he half-assed areas like Lost Izalith (for which he publicly apologized) and could not do his true vision on the later-game bosses.
It’s funny because when Ian finished the game for the first time recently, he talked about the second half because he had never played it before. He had made it up to Ornstein and Smough before quitting. So listening to him talk about the second half of the game as he played it was very interesting. He didn’t have the preconceived notions about it even though he had heard the second half was shit, so he was able to see more of ethe wacky beauty of it than other people. He appreciated the different aesthetics of the different areas, which actually made sense. Those of us who have played the game dozens of times are inured to the first look at it because, well, we’ve played it dozens of times.
Seeing it through his eyes made it new again. And, yes, baby skeletons day care (Nito-land), spooky ghost town (New Londo Ruins), Seath’s whole deal (Duke’s Archives and Crystal Cave), and lava-land (Lost Izalith) are very distinct and you can instantly tell in which area you are in a glance.
And to be fair, he crushed the second half of the game, rarely getting stuck for very long. He did have trouble with the DLC, but that was to be expected. As is the FromSoft tradition, The DLC is ten times harder than the base game. It’s for the true fans, which makes me interested to see what they’ll do with Elden Ring DLC. Sekiro DLC wasn’t really DLC. I mean, it was, but it was just making the bosses harder already, like they needed that, and a few other things I didn’t care about. Then again, Sekiro is my least-favorite From game of all time. Not the worst From game, but my least-favorite.
It’s funny because everyone says you can’t beat Sekiro if you don’t get the combat system down. Incorrect! You most certainly can, but you’re not going to have fun doing it. I am living proof of that. I hear about people gushing over the game, saying it’s like a rhythm game once you get the hang of it. Yeah, well, I suck at those as well, so there you go. It’s a spatial issue and a reflex issue. I cannot get the timing right for the life of me. I spent hours practicing parrying on the Silver Knights in Anor Londo in the first game. By the end, I was able to parry them 75% of the time. Which wasn’t amazing, let me tell you.
I try every game to master the system. I honestly do. I have practiced the parrying to mostly no avail. I cannot riposte in Bloodborne for the life of me, but I found a workaround–using the Augur of Ebritas will stun an enemy, allowing me to get the visceral with a much more generous window.
Then, Sekiro, I still have nightmares about trying to master the deflect in that game. I tried so hard, but I could not do it except by accident. Of course I kept trying throughout the game because it really makes the game easier, but I just could not do it. I had to whittle away at the health of every boss, which made for grim times. Doing Demon of Hatred and Isshin, the Sword Saint through attrition was a test of my patience. Beating Isshin was the best feeling I’ve ever had in a video game, truly transcendent, but I knew that it was a once in a lifetime feeling. It’s funny because Luke from Outside Xtra made a quip about how it wasn’t fair that he could fight a boss a million times, die every time but one, and the one time you beat the boss, that’s the last time you fight. He pointed out that it wasn’t really fair because if you went back, the boss could probably kick your ass again.
I did not enjoy my trip back to Sekiro. I tried to do Father (Owl) again, and he thoroughly kicked my ass. Many times. Not only was he kicking my ass (on NG+), but I wasn’t even making a dent in his first health bar. I had some thought in the back of my mind about getting the plat, but if I was going to do that, I had to kill Father (Owl) again, which seemed impossible. Plus Isshin, which, ha, no. I gave up on it and never went back.
I really wish Bloodborne would come to PC. I don’t know if it ever will, but if it did, then I would actually consider platting it. Except for the dreaded Chalice Dungeons. I hate them. A lot. First of all, they are so samesy that it’s boring. Much like the catacombs/caves in Elden Ring, but worse because they seemed designed to be the same. At least in Elden Ring, there’s a different gimmick to each one. In Bloodborne, they’re all the fucking same. And I get hopelessly lost wandering around in them.
I didn’t even bother with the parry in DS II or III. Even though they are slightly different in each game, they’re just not for me. I much prefer the combat in Elden Ring because of the guard counter and the jump attack. You can still parry in the game, but it’s much less necessary because of the wide variety of options.
In comparison to Elden Ring, Dark Souls II loses much luster. Dark Souls III can hold its own, but Dark Souls II (SotFS) pales in comparison.
I wrote about Dark Souls II/Scholar of the First Sin (SotFS) yesterday, and I have more to say about it. I don’t think FromSoft could win when it came to making the sequel because the original was so beloved. It only came out on consoles at first and took some serious campaigning on the part of PC players before it was ported to the PC. And the port was shit. Utter and complete shit. It took a modder named Durante to offer dsfix to make the game playable. In fact, if you were thinking of playing the game on PC, you were counseled to not even think of it if you didn’t include dsfix with the specific specs he recommended.
There was a love for the first game that was unparalleled. Yes, there was an appreciation for Demon’s Souls, but it was definitely not as loud as was the fanfare for Dark Souls. Because of it, expectations for the sequel were at an all-time high. Simultaneously, Miyazaki was working on Bloodborne with what is known in the community as the A team. Or at least that’s what the community started calling it after the two games came out. Implying, of course ,that Dark Souls II was made by the B team (or flat-out saying it).
Here’s the thing. There are many things wrong with Dark Souls II/SotFS. I’m not going to deny it. Playing it after playing Elden Ring makes me see all the flaws in high relief. I absolutely hate the unfairness of the mobs where there’s usually an enemy hidden somewhere who jumps out at you or is located in an area that is juuuuuust out of reach. I did No-Man’s Wharf yesterday, and all the hatred for this area came flooding back.
Not because it’s hard, per se. I expect FromSoft games to be hard, obviously. The mantra of ‘hard, but fair’ is very uneven in this game. And this area is a prime example of From trying too hard to be difficult.
First, let me say, I forget how fragile I am at the beginning of every From game. This one especially as I play as a Sorcerer because there is no Pyromancer. Why? To be different, I think. You can get Pyromancy later in the game, but you cannot start out with it–which still irks me to this day.
Sorcerer is a really weak class. I don’t care what anyone says. It starts with puny stats for everything except Intelligence, and you don’t even get a real weapon or a shield to start with. You get a staff and a puny dagger. 30 Soul Arrows, which is not a lot in the grand scheme of things. I can’t tell you how fragile I felt the first time I played. It was agonizing and felt artificially hard.
I finished the not-plat for SotFS/Dark Souls II and it wasn’t nearly as painful as the other two, especially DS III. I found out that the best way to farm for the Sunlight Medals (and I can say this because I platted the game) is to put on all your best item-finding gear, go to the first bonfire in the Brightstone Cove Tseldora area, and use your best magicks/biggest sword to mow down the seven Falconers in the area. I didn’t do this at first because it’s so annoying to have to draw out each one without getting swarmed. I could still get two-shot by these assholes, which was frustrating. Plus, with the extended length of the enemy range, it was too easy to proc more than one of them.
The problem was that the rate of getting the Sunlight Medals in the other areas was extremely low. In this area, once I got my routine down pat, I was able to get one medal almost every loop. The answer was to use Heavy Homing Soul Arrow to draw one enemy to me without alerting the others. I used Soul Spear to take care of two of the archers. For my sword, I used the Black Knight Ultra Greatsword which has the added bonus of setting things on fire. Here’s the last post and this is the continuation of that post. I was able to get the last ten or so Sunlight Medals in less than hour, which was amazing.
Once I was done with that, I made sure I had all the magicks I could get in NG+. It was a good thing I checked because I missed two–a sorcery and a hex. If I had had to go into the DLC in NG++, well, let’s just say I would NOT be happy about that at all. I was miffed as it was because I had to run through more than half the game again. Or did I? I looked up the fastest way to get to Drangleic Castle because there is an alternative to getting the four big souls and opening it that way. I knew about it from the first time I played, but I never thought about it because it seemed ridiculous. It’s getting a million souls and opening the door that way. Riiiiight. A million souls? Well. That was much more reasonable in NG++ with the boss souls I was carrying around with me. And all the other consumable souls, too. The most common way to get a great amount of souls as fast as possible was…