In (Some) Defense of Dark Souls II

I'm not proud to say that all of the Souls games, at one point in time, have gotten to me.

For "Bloodborne", it was probably some setup in a chalice dungeon.

For "Elden Ring", it was probably some endgame boss, Malenia or Elden Beast or whatever.

For the original "Dark Souls", it was the Darkwraiths leading up to the Four Kings fight.

Reflecting on those moments of pure unbridled rage and swearing off the games ever and ever, I realize how insignificant they were in the grand timeline of playing these games. I mean, you don't have to do the chalice dungeons (they're fun as heck though). You don't have to fight Malenia (in fact, I have sworn to never battle her again, and my life I think is overall happier) and you can set Elden Beast on fire. As far as the Darkwraiths ... it is what it is, I suppose. Sure, these moments reveal great flaws in the game design, but they're sort of emergency-level flaws that only happen rarely, like an unusually heavy rain leading to a flood or a freak tornado.

And now that I have played "Dark Souls II" I can confidently say, the other games were at least designed with a dam. You appreciate how meticulous the designs of the other games are because of how bad the second "Dark Souls" is.

Alright, let's step back. I didn't intend to spend this entire article making fun of the game, because I also wanted to talk about things I liked and even loved about it.

So let's keep the criticisms short and sweet, so as to correctly appraise the game and try to understand its fans' love/hate relationship with it:

1. Yes, "Dark Souls II" has way more enemies than the other games. It's a tedious slog. You feel this early in the ironically named No-man's Wharf where, to get to a critical lever at the top of the map, you have to fight around twenty enemies, with two being "elite" enemies (lots of health, lots of damage, can't be stunned et cetera). Iron Keep, depending on how you play, will be filled with unstaggerable, high-health, high-hitting enemies, on narrow platforms over lava. And none of this is itself a problem, UNTIL you die, in which case you have to kill every enemy all over again, largely because of how far enemy aggression lasts and how narrow passages are.

2. Yes, "Dark Souls II" has terrible enemy placement. Beside having lots of enemies, many are clustered tightly together and are triggered to attack you at once. This is pretty infamous in the Lost Bastille, where in the tower leading to the Ruin Sentinels, the moment you open a door and take one step through it, up to six enemies can be triggered to attack you at once. If you take a few more steps, you might add four more. And while these aren't elite, they're pretty darn close - high damage for sure. Let's not even talk about Iron Passage and its unreachable snipers. Again, none of this is felt more painfully than on your death, as you then have to spend the time baiting enemies one by one all over again.

3. Yes, "Dark Souls II" has terrible enemy design. I don't know why the greatshield won't deflect Falconers' sword strikes, and I don't know why Sanctum Soldiers can't be stunned with a greatsword swing. "Elden Ring" gets this right: the Black Knights still feel like humanoid enemies, but they have lots of other things in their kit that can punish players. I think enemies get dramatically different poise mid-animation - for example, Alonne Knights are truly unstaggerable mid-attack but not before and after. It doesn't help that they're designed to begin animation almost instantly.

4. Yes, "Dark Souls II" has janky hitboxes. For whatever reason, whenever the Hunting Dog attacks, it will attack with the first half of its model, so your intuition doesn't work. The Crystal Lizards can't be hit by swords, every one of them: Straight Swords, Greatswords, etc. This is also true of the Rampart Hedgehogs, which do fight back, which is total fucking bullshit. And, as I like to play with greatshields, most overhead swings completely clip through them.

5. Yes, "Dark Souls II" is way more cruel than the other games, to the point of deliberately wasting your time. The Black Gulch is filled with statues that shoot poisonous bullets at you. And when I mean "filled", I mean the walls are literally lined with them, such that you have to destroy every statue every. Single. Time. Another time waster is in Drangleic Castle. There's a certain room where you have to do a thing to unlock the other rooms; however, behind every room is a miniboss. And they respawn. And every one of them triggers when you enter the center of the room. And they attack you at once, and they follow you everywhere, and you don't get invincibility frames when they knock you over.

6. The damage calculations are sometimes strange and arcane. An anecdote: in the self-induced madness to get the platinum trophy for PS4, I had to go through the lava in Iron Keep to get the Chaos Storm pyromancy. Because there are so many enemies in Iron Keep, one usually does not go through the lava as a means to take even more damage - and the lava is very damaging (the whole premise of making the players go through lava for optional content seems like a troll). One way to reduce fire damage (which the lava damage is (developers: lava != fire)) is to smash water jars, so as to splash the water on yourself and increase resistance. Neat idea, but ... how would a player know this? None of the common enemies in Iron Keep deal fire damage. I'm also not watching my health bar religiously. I think details like this are interesting though (for example, lightning damage increases in water or in rain), but it's like, how do players find this out without a guide? Then there's just weird mechanics I can vaguely grasp but seem random; like, the moment of opportunity to get a counterstrike seems fuzzy. I know there were many times where I thought I could kill an enemy in two hits, when, in reality, a third hit is needed because a sliver of health is left. Doesn't help the "you have to play Dark Souls II cautiously" argument, huh?

A curious compare-and-contrast. In the original "Dark Souls", with a greatshield-and-claymore build, I would regularly farm the Royal Sentinels just outside of Ornstein and Smough's boss room, starting from the bonfire in the palace's hallways (where you reunite with Solaire). In comparison, with the exact same build, the Mastodon Knights just outside of Drangleic Palace infuriated me to no end. I think there are a number of variables at play: 1. you fight the Mastodon Knights on a narrow bridge, so you can't roll around them, 2. the nearest bonfire to the bridge is many, many encounters away, particularly with invisible enemies you can't lock onto, and 3. I had a reliable but slow strategy for Anor Londo's Silver Knights, while the path to Drangleic Castle is full of tricky enemy formations. And then there's probably reason 4: because armor is less useful in "Dark Souls II", the Mastodon Knights can two-shot you, while a similar build in the original can make reasonable mistakes.

Another comparison is: "Elden Ring" does not put three Trolls in a narrow passage before a boss fight. That would be a huge waste of your time, because if you've beaten one Troll, you've met the challenge, right? But "Dark Souls II" does this (Aldia's Keep, if you explore the area and get all the goodies).

And, sure, some complaints are confined to certain areas. For example, Shaded Woods is a generally stress-free run. But that points to the lack of polish, no? I mean, the final bonfire to Scorpioness Nakja has almost no encounters; you can just book it. Like, why was this level designed this way, but those levels are designed to be as infuriating as possible?

Let's try a thought experiment: after the Smelter Demon bonfire in Iron Keep, there is a really neat area involving raised platforms. When you enter the area, you see a raised "flat" area with enemies on it; this means you can draw all the enemies at once to you, making them surround you. You have the option of pulling a lever which lowers this area into the lava and changing it into a series of narrow platforms, so that enemies only come to you one at a time, with the caveat that flamethrower traps cover portions of the platforms. Flanking these raised areas are two archers; one of these archers is in another "trapped" area, where switches on the ground can trigger lava flows that make it harder to move around.

This is a really cool set-up for a level and, frankly, is more advanced than the bulk of the set-ups in "Elden Ring". HOWEVER. Between the archers are three Alonne Knights and two Ironclad Soldiers (which are near mini-boss level), meaning even attempting to fight one has a good chance of triggering all of them to attack you at once. Remember, the very design of the level already disadvantages you. Also, to make this clear, this isn't the only encounter between the bonfires - before this level you fight two Alonne Knights and one Ironclad, and after this two more Alonne Knights and two Ironclads in a narrow passage.

Not analyzing the other encounters, but if it was one Alonne Knight and one Ironclad Soldier, that would be enough, no? You're dodging the archers, watching out for the pitfalls, and you're gauging the distance between the much faster Alonne Knight and the slow-but-hard-hitting Ironclad. Which means this level can be fixed if you remove literally three enemies.

You'll probably notice a recurrent theme across my criticisms: these are all "little" things, except probably the criticism on enemy placement and number. I mean, interactions with the greatshield? Hitboxes? Strange level design? You can figure a way around it.

And this is what the Souls games, except "Dark Souls II", get right. I no longer think the Souls games are great "games", as in, games with a well-defined set of rules and actions and consequences. I think what they get right, from an artistic standpoint, is that they're well-crafted fantasy worlds where the true game is interacting with these worlds.

Basically, the Souls games satisfy one's itch to be a hero in a truly dark world, which is a surprisingly rare experience. For example, it's easy to be a superhero, even children can imagine themselves as one. You simply have to imagine yourself as dominant over every other human being. The Souls games, in contrast, are really good at towing that line between hope and despair, which you understand implicitly by the controls.

It's fun to watch a sword bounce off of a shield or armor. It's fun to watch a weapon complete its swinging animation. It's fun to time out one's dodges and steps. The whole experience just feels real. You feel a connection to the game's world. This precision of detail isn't superfluous, it's important - in fact, it's more important than any other aspect of a game, it seems.

I think the conversation around areas feeling "lived in" and "realistic" is a little canned, though. I don't mean this at all. If we break a game down into its basic elements - specifically, 3D action games like the Souls games - a level is merely the interactions a player has with a game, in the form of puzzles or enemies or whatever. With "Elden Ring", a lot of your interactions consist of staring at the meticulous architecture. Otherwise, the level is filled with memorable encounters with (hopefully) memorable enemies, and these memorable encounters, in a sequence, form a theme, that reveals something about the whole game to the player.

I don't know why people put all those poison statues in the Black Gulch. I don't know why a bunch of priestesses are hanging in Amana Shrine, knee-deep in water and firing magickery at me from across the entire level. I really don't understand why someone thought putting buttons in random, sometimes unseeable places in the Sunken City made for a positive living experience (at least in "Elden Ring", the giant buttons are in obvious places). I just don't get it.

They only mean one thing: I, the developer, want to waste your time. I want you to stare at a wall you would never have thought of staring at before. I want you to run through a level at half-speed while men with maces run at you in full speed. I want enemies to chase you because it hurts my pride when you trivialize the game that I designed.

"Dark Souls II", in many ways, is just dumb and blunt. I think that may be the most accurate criticism of the game. It is meant to be a weird death-metal version of the other games. The original "Dark Souls" is firmly fantasy, and feels like a dream; all of the design decisions in the first "Dark Souls" can be described by the concept of the Painted World of Ariamis: a world so enchanting it feels more real than reality. "Bloodborne", which I believe was developed in parallel with "Dark Souls II", actually accomplishes the death-metal feeling of "Dark Souls II". "Dark Souls II" has a kind of "bro" feeling: "You have to battle a hundred warriors at once, bro! A million-to-one odds, bro! You're supposed to feel like existence is POINTLESS, bro!" Cue bull's horns and headbanging.

And that's also why I think "Elden Ring" should have been more like "Dark Souls II".

Elden Ring as Dark Souls II II

In sharp contrast to "Dark Souls II", the enemy placement in "Elden Ring" is a joke.

Most graces have only one encounter in-between. Most of these encounters are not interesting. To be clear, I'm referring to graces in legacy dungeons, the areas in the game where there SHOULD be lots of action.

For example, in Raya Lucaria there is a graveyard between two graces (checkpoints, basically, same as bonfires). You can pretty much run through all the slow-moving enemies in the graveyard and make it to the other grace, skipping all encounters. Another example is in Farum Azula, where, after the Godskin Duo, you can run straight to the next grace, some platforming give-or-take.

This should be inverted: "Dark Souls II" should have less enemies, and "Elden Ring" more. For two reasons: firstly, the world of "Dark Souls II" should be way less populated than it actually is, and vice versa for "Elden Ring". (I really don't get why people are just hanging out in Iron Keep. In "Bloodborne", at least, it's like: we're a cursed race living in the ruins of our fallen civilization which succumbed to madness and existential dread thousands of years ago. This makes sense.) Secondly, "Elden Ring" is a lot easier than "Dark Souls II", from game mechanics alone.

I mean, in "Elden Ring", you can jump. This trivializes so many common enemies, that don't do fifty backflips in the air (which is a problem in that game, but not too big of one).

Most of the difficulty in "Elden Ring" comes from the bosses. There are very little "mean" set-ups in "Elden Ring". And yet you have more tools. You're not limited by casts, for one ("Dark Souls II" limits spell usage; "Elden Ring" uses the generic blue bar), and if a player hates a dungeon, they can just leave. The "Elden Ring" developers may have been aware of this, as the fun dungeoneering is virtually all in the optional catacombs.

Which leads to the big problem of "Elden Ring": as vast and intricate as the world is, it's very empty. As a number of players have complained about, replaying the game involves a lot of horseback riding and ignoring the intricately-designed world.

I'm not saying the solution is to mindlessly add in more enemies but ... a world with Ancient Dragons' Lightning Strike ... just seems to be begging for lots of enemies to pulverize!

Another really neat feature of "Dark Souls II" (really more a feature of the "Scholar of the First Sin" edition) is that, unbeknownst to most players, you're given lots of summon signs - some at the beginning of a level. This would actually help with the game's balance a lot if you weren't hollow most of the time (meaning, you've died before without "resetting" yourself).

Frankly, I think "Dark Souls II" was balanced primarily around co-op. I'm okay with this, I just wished this was advertised a little harder, by the devs or videogame critics.

That's one of the reasons why "Dark Souls II", in an interesting way, is the most "human" game of the Souls games: you're in a world with other people who also have goals and ambitions. You're not motivated by the same quest of becoming a god or something. I mean, sure, the only actually fleshed-out NPCs are Lucatiel and Benhart, but "Dark Souls II" excels with the concept of warriors fighting alongside other warriors. "Elden Ring" kinda has the same concept, but it only revolves around Millicent at best, and her questline is so convoluted it's not unlikely you'll miss her summon signs.

(To demonstrate the - comical - disparity, if you want Millicent to help you beat a major boss in the game, the Draconic Tree Sentinel, the one true guardian of the only gates leading to Leyndell, Royal Capital, you 1. have to exhaust her dialogue in Gowry's Shack (the game doesn't indicate she'll even be there), 2. find some thing in the Shaded Castle, waaaay out of your normal gameplay path, 3. give her that thing in some place that you may not naturally have been to and wouldn't have any reason to look, and then, finally, 4. fight the Godskin Apostle somewhere. Benhart of Jugo: 1. Free Rosabeth from stone; 2. talk to Benhart, who says, "Well hot damn, now I can continue my journey, thank ye kind stranger." And this works for literally every fucking boss you can summon him for, even when you're in a FUCKING MEMORY.)

(I love Benhart.)

Sure, you have Spirit Ashes in "Elden Ring", but they're ... ashes. They're not real flesh-and-blood people, at least not aesthetically. Say what you will about gank areas like Iron Passage or Cave of the Dead (which I actually love), but it is indeed fun to storm a place with warriors.

Another neat thing about "Dark Souls II", or the Souls trilogy specifically, is covenants. I'm not a PVP person at all so perhaps my analysis is very off, but covenants in "Dark Souls II" are interesting because the "defensive" covenants have genuinely interesting area layouts. For example, in the original "Dark Souls", Darkroot Forest is just long and flat; in contrast, Belfry Sol gives you ballistae to use (admittedly slow) and my understanding is that there are a lot of traps in Doors of Pharros. "Elden Ring", as others have noted, barely have covenants - for invasions, you either have a fancy "Bloody Finger" or "Recusant" title.

Considering the factionalism - like, the actual fleshed-out in-game factionalism - of "Elden Ring", having players defend Raya Lucaria or Leyndell would be pretty cool. Hell, considering how badly Ensha wants but a half of the Haligtree Medallion, you could use that as a means to taunt people to invade you (not really sure how that works as far as rewards, though).

I will say, of players, I'm probably the one who enjoys NPC invaders the most. Because the rhythm of the game can change depending on the weapon and build, invaders are generally a refreshing challenge. And, again, it helps to make the game feel populated. (Not in New Game Plus, though. Because they're added on top of regular enemies, they contribute to the padding problem. (To add, New Game Plus will sometimes add pairs of invaders in the same area, both with lots of health. Again: there are too many enemies in the game.))

At the very least, it's a way to show that people are still doing things in "Elden Ring". "Dark Souls II" is better at conveying a world where people are still engaged with the activity of living and defending themselves. This should be flipped: people in "Dark Souls II" should be thinking, "Why the hell do I even bother anymore", whereas people in "Elden Ring" should be thinking, "Oh my god, there's a kingdom that needs running!"

In fact, that's what "Dark Souls II" excels at: telling the classic hero's story. I mean, the original "Dark Souls" is more like a series of paintings, of impossible locations whose ambience sucks you in more and more. Well, okay, a great deal of areas in "II" are not memorable (I'm struggling to remember Hunstman's Copse, and The Gutter just makes no sense). In contrast, the NPCs are a lot stronger. Vengarl is memorable, and Manscorpion Tark is ... my man. This all culminates with the final run to Drangleic Castle, which begins with that epic crawl up that giant staircase and becomes a nightmare once you realize the castle doesn't end and connects to the Shrine of Amana.

All of the big themes are captured, but there are a lot of neat little ideas in "Dark Souls II" as well. As annoying as the ghost-spawning statues are in the Undead Crypt, they're really fun to interact with. And I really like the stone soldiers in Drangleic Castle coming in waves. Considering the amount of healing / support / area-of-effect spells you get in "Elden Ring", there's potential for a "raid"-type of level where players bring varying tools to the table, based on their build (I haven't played "Nightreign" at all but on its face it looks like the best party compositions are "do as much damage as you can"; not a complaint, just an observation).

And, to be frank, Brume Tower and Frozen Eleum Loyce beat out any legacy dungeon in "Elden Ring", even in terms of aesthetic. Shadow Keep, which is by far the best legacy dungeon in "Ring", is still inferior to these two. In Brume Tower, the hide-and-seek with the Ashen Idols is fun as heck (even though they're offset by the awful enemy placement), and Eleum Loyce has so many great interactions, with the wind freezing certain areas, the Eye of the Priestess, etc, etc. It's a shame these brilliantly-designed levels are wasted on "Dark Souls II".

And though I have a lot of issues with Shulva - I really dislike the design of the Sanctum Soldiers - I love the Sanctum Knights. Sinh is extremely frustrating to fight, but the game gives you two NPC summons: Edde is absurdly tanky, and Feeva heals people. Because of them, the fight can become a "Final Fantasy"-esque turn-based boss fight, where the real challenge is in being patient. The change of pace is actually quite nice, and I wish "Elden Ring" was more thoughtful in its boss designs.

An Earnest Review, as Earnest as I can be

But I'm never playing "Dark Souls II" ever again.

I think I genuinely only like the run-ups to Brightstone Cove and Sinner's Rise. The best levels are really in the "Iron King" and "Ivory King" DLCs, and I hate the enemy placements in those so much I never want to play them again. I can't think of levels in the other games that are so bad that I wouldn't put up with them.

There also doesn't seem to be much build variety - from my understanding pure strength and dexterity scalings are neutered, and armor doesn't help much at all; this is also why the typical "joke" answer to a new player is "level ADP", because offensive stats are not as "useful" or "impactful" as in the other games. In fact, if there's any offensive stat absurdly above the rest, it looks to be Intelligence, because of access to Sorceries and scaling for Pyromancies and Hexes. (Miracles are only good offensively AFAIK at the end of the game, with a specific chime.) And you get infusions early, and, as others have mentioned, elemental-infused weapons generally have stronger scaling than those without. And in terms of weapons, we're not talking about "Bloodborne" levels of moveset diversity; it's basically, take your pick of weapons that go left-to-right or up-and-down or straight-out. Which is why rapiers are so overused.

So...yeah, no.

Thinking on it - I guess this is just a "Dark Souls II" review at this point - if I had to put the game accurately before a complete newcomer, I would consider first that the Souls games already have an offputting reputation, for being hard. In reality, a review of the games should not discuss whether the game is good or not, but whether the player is getting something out of the game in exchange for giving it patience. For example, "Sekiro" is considered hard, and yet fans try to downplay it or try to justify the difficulty as being rewarding.

I would say:

1. The original "Dark Souls" is really not that hard. The game is ultimately not a test of your reaction speed but your decision-making skills, and these get so much better as you learn how enemies and environments operate. I really love it.

2. "Elden Ring" is pretty darn hard boss-wise - thinking more of the average bosses like Astel or Fire Giant and not the polar ends - but it's so visually and thematically consistent that I think it may be the greatest example of environmental storytelling I've seen in a game ever.

3. But "Dark Souls II" is not worth it for someone who enjoys a game as a game, as in, you have the most fun beating enemies and progressing through levels. It's an interesting experience. If you love many of the design concepts surrounding the Souls games you should play it, but one should be reminded that most people play games not because of their ideas but because they're games. Most people are not interested in fantasy simulators. It's sort of interesting I have to caveat "Dark Souls II" in this way, because I think none of the other modern-era FromSoft games have struggled so much to be games.