Dark Souls 2 Was WORSE Than You Remember
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Dark Souls 2 retrospective and review analysis in 2023. This will be a deep and detailed dive into Dark Souls 2, and Dark Souls 2 Scholar of the First Sin. Ill be talking about why DS2 doesnt get as much love in FROMSOFTWAREs lineup and especially compared to Dark Souls and Dark Souls 3. Dark Souls 2s gameplay and all bosses analyzed and review.
50 Comments
All i heat is a bunch cryin somebody call the wahmbulance
I have 31 hours in dark souls 2. That was 30 hours too many. I have 3500 hours in ds1. I have over 5000 in ds3. 700 in bloodborne… and now I have about 1200 in elden ring. First picked up dark souls at the end of 2012. I didn't actually get or play SOTFS until 2019 though. It's the only soulsbornring game that I don't have at least 1 save file that's at ng7+. It is the ONLY souls game that I have less than 1 playthrough of. And that's even knowing full well that I had to dump levels into ADP first and foremost.
You forgot to mention how you have less stamina in Dark Souls 2 compared to other games… or at least that's how it feels. I swear I had way more stamina on DS1 allowing me to do more things, while DS2 I could hardly roll and respond with a hit.
by far had the most fun with darksouls 2 out of all the souls games
"Doing something very unique like DS3". Like what? In DS3, there is nothing going on but bosses with fancy moves. I'm sorry but this video is too subjective. You said "unpolished" frequently, but to me, DS3 was way unpolished including its Firelink Shrine. The colors are dull, too many empty spaces, and most of the skins are copy pasted from Bloodborne. I'm afraid if they listen too many complaints like this, the series will be more simpler, repetitive, and more easier outside of bosses. I enjoyed Elden Ring a lot, so my concerns are kinda gone, but also I see some cancerous DS3 elements carry on, thanks to the people like you.
When talking about DS2, we need to first decide are we talking about SOTFS or Original because SOTFS made everything just worse.
Example those life gems. Original did only have certain amount of gems you can buy from vendor and that was it. SOTFS enabled Melentia, the hag merchant to sell them infinitely for no real reason.
Another and probably the biggest thing is enemy placement. SOTFS added bunch of new enemies on top of the old encounters which made a lot of areas what they are now, gankfest.
It is sucha damn shame that most players only know DS2 as this current SOTFS version.
Vanilla ds2 ancient dragon was a pain
I liked this video, even if I disagreed with almost everything that was said. I think many of the complaints about 2 could be said to 3 or 1 too, as they apply to them as well…all 3 are great games and I love them equally.
agility determines i-frames, not adaptability. adaptability and attunement just synergize to raise agility.
You're really just taking a contrarian's stance, aren't you?
I got a couple of points: DS1 and 3 are about learning, but DS2 has "artificial difficulty". That take basically makes the assumption that DS2 needs to feel like DS1 and DS3 and that it wants you to learn the same lessons (which is a fair assumption from a sequel), but it really doesn't. It tries to stand apart from DS1 (which is a questionable choice for a sequel imo) and the criticism shouldn't focus so much on what the game does wrong compared to DS1 and DS3 but rather how it's a weird sequel that maybe should have been a standalone game in the same universe.
A whole lot of the criticism can be boiled down to "this game defies expectations in all the wrong ways considering it's a sequel".
Take the consumables for example: Everyone seems to argue that lifegems break the balance of the game. However, because they are so slow to charge up your health, they aren't as broken as you make it out to be. I'd say they work well with the despawning of enemies and the fact that you seem to face a lot more enemies at once, leading to more mistakes, making exploration usually more of a battle of attrition (if you have learned how to properly handle ganks) and gives you the option to explore more at once before having to reset the enemies and running through the same gauntlet again (so making use of the lifegems lets you play more before the enemies eventually despawn if you struggle with an area). And considering that one of the main reasons people seem to die is not handling ganks very well and getting stunlocked if they're not careful (or running into traps), the lifegems don't let you bruteforce your way through the game without having learned the primary lesson of the game.
In general, the game is less about the "execution" and more about decision making especially with regards to your resource recharge/expenditure.
Boss runs also aren't supposed to "I ignore everything and run to the boss". Many people seem to have gotten used to the fact that you can simply outrun enemies and only do the boss when DS2 doesn't want you to do that (as you don't get i-frames on the fog wall). And if you struggle with the run + boss enough, the enemies will despawn, leading to an easy run back after all (although you can criticize this mechanic for leaving the world empty after some point).
In the end, most of the criticism doesn't feel like the game is bad per se, but more so that "i wanted it to be X, but it ended up being Y and I don't like that", and the judgement on that can easily change depending on the mindset with which you tackle the game.
Counterpoint: Majula. That's it. That's my whole defense. That's my whole Adaptability.
If DS2 had the 360 movement of DS3 it would be perfect to me. I love most of the things complained about in this video. And the story, ambience, and design is my favorite of the 3 games.
I never watched your content in the “zombie golden age” I watched waffles and rad Austin and a few others, but your reviews are excellent
Hey thanks for being so upfront instead of worrying about being controversial and ending up like an apologist.
absoluteley the worst game, i hated everything about it. the way it looked and played. i commend those who like it.
Dark souls 2 is great and has many fans.
I felt like my main problem with DS2 was that there were so many things that made me ask what the hell Yui Tanemura was thinking with the design.
Primarily with the way hollow characters could still be invaded but couldn't summon. DS1 had a fair compromise where if you wanted to get help for a fight, you had to become human again at a bonfire, opening yourself up to invasions.
They could have fixed this by allowing hollows to summon shades but not summon regular spirits.
I actually thought it was a glitch when I had my first NPC invasion in Dark Souls 2 when I was hollow.
Slander!!!!
Best coop souls
The amount of hatred I have for the iron keep
This video is a giant nothing burger. If you spend any time listening to his script its mostly saying nothing.
Good 2nd monitor entertainment nonetheless
kind of a casual thing to say about ds2, but thats none of my business
"ds never rubs it's difficult on yout face" it literally has a "prepare to die" edition
Yo hol' up… you LIKE Dragonrider?
I agreed with most of what you said until you praised Lost Sinner battle. It was one of the most disappointing in the game in my opinion
ain't smelter demon optional?
No. The game is as horrible as I remember it being when I was a 15.
It's my favourite Souls
Dark souls 2 is my favorite souls game. You can’t change my mind. First souls game I played was 3 but I couldn’t beat the first boss and gave up on it lol
Discussing DS2 is such a tiring process because no matter how many points people make about its shortcoming, the DS2 defense force just says "well I prefered it that way" and shuts down the entire discussion.
No, the controls, ADP, increasing loss of HP and increased risk of invasions is not good game design. The fall damage is cheap and weapon durability is sadistic. You can have weapon durability, but that only works when you can pick your battles. DS2 strictly refuses you to pick battles, you need to fight at least the vast majority of enemies in most locations before you are allowed to proceed. They do that by the slow stamina regen, to prohibit sprinting through, really tight corridors and by making actions interruptable by damage.
Well now I fought my way to the boss, barely have any weapon durability left (repair powder is laughably rare), probably also no spells and lost some healing options. And now I am allowed to fight the boss which will always either be an absolute steamroll or stupidly frustrating.
Combine that with endless vendors of which very few relocate to Majula, most builds being forced into maxing out ADP first unless you already know the game in and out, despawning enemies so you cant even farm souls and gear without Bonfire Ascetics and of course an utterly confusing world.
You should compare DS2 to its predecessor (DS1) not the games after it (DS3 and ER) cause most of the things you're talking about exist in DS1.
Dark Souls 2 is like a Soulslike made by FromSoftware.
I beat ds2 felt like i owed it to myself , the dlc is another thing entirely though I’m on the 2 tigers , in the snow and almost had them but kinda get burned out on games quick
Ds2 does have some of the best dlc bosses for sure
Just farm the gank squads to death. That eliminates 50% of the problem.
"You can burn this like random steel pipe or something?" You're torching the windmill blades/sails, you can see them from the outside, and then again when you're close to them on the inside. It's using the windmills to draw poison up from the swamp, throughout earthen peak, and up into Mytha's room. This is the only lore explanation I've come across for this though.
Right after I beat DS1 for the first time and linked the flame, I was so excited to beat the next game I bought and downloaded DS2. I played it for maybe 20 minutes, felt something was off, and then went and bought DS3 instead that same night.
i liked that it made your health lower and lower with each death and made your character visually deteriorate along with it like the rotting corpse you are but thats about it for the games qualities, and even those only exist because i care more about the lore than my sanity
2 > 3
OH jolly, another uninformed hate essay on DS2 definitely not influenced by a circlejerk trend of bad faith YouTubers.
Anyways play DS2, It's much more fun than people are letting on.
I still cant believe people think Dark souls 2 was bad.
The game was great, i put 100+ hours into it the year Dark souls 3 was coming out i replayed 1 and 2 to get hyped for the new entry it was good. When elden ring came out i did 1,2 and 3 again still a good game.
This game is so disgraceful I'd rather spend my entire life building a time machine so I could go back in time and get on the plane that flew into the twin towers rather than play it again
"they could just make lift go down"? Eh? Iron Keep is physically on top of Earthen Peak. If you want to make "lift go down", you need whole Iron Keep location down as well, duh. Which would lead to million problems, because all locations are connected
A minor thing: The elevator actually isn't a mistake, they screwed up in modelling the landscape behind the windmill. You actually travel into the caldera of a volcano – something one could describe as an Earthen Peak – so going up is the correct direction. However, you never get the impression that the windmill leads to the volcano because they straight up forgot to extend the mountain in the background a bit. There's a mod that fixes it and suddenly everything makes sense.
there was a new expansion to DS2 released last year, it was the crown of the golden king, but you guys are not ready for this conversation
What Dark Souls defined or reinvented? It is basically variation of Blade of Darkness of 2001, and worse than Ninja Gaiden.
ds2 is abs pog of them all
Still more enjoyable than Elden Ring lol
this is the best souls game objectively, and 3 is the least best
People make disliking DS2 their entire personality. You never have to ask them if you hate it because they'll tell you at any chance they get