Dark Souls II is probably the most frustrating game I’ve ever played. I love it to death and am in the process of draining it of content, trying to suck every ounce of game time I can out of it, but there is so much of it that makes me hugely mad. Stuff that makes me yell out loud (which is something that I don’t ever do when playing games), stuff that makes me curse From Software and the so called ‘B-Team,’ and stuff that I look at and can’t believe made it past the cutting room floor.
Before I get into specifics though, I should tell you my experiences with the series. On account of me never owning a Playstation 3, I never got to play Demon’s Souls. I’ve heard a lot about it being a fantastic game and I believe anyone who says that, but I personally have never had the chance to play it. I have played Dark Souls 1 however. That game is fucking hard. Like, compared to Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls II is (at least to me) a complete cake walk. I’ve beaten 2 twice now, the first time using a sword and shield and the second time using just a single sword. I felt like the shield was the standard difficulty of the game and that one sword would make it harder, but I think I was wrong. As long as you can time dodges pretty well, not relying on a shield is totally easier but also somehow way more rewarding. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I have only gotten to what I predict is about the 15-20% completion level in the original. I’ve beaten lower blight town on two playthroughs, the first of which I then journeyed to the ruins of New Londo in (and got turned into paste), and the second of which I ventured into the Depths (and got turned into a different, yet equally dead paste). Things haven’t really been going well. That’s really all my background though. I played Dark Souls 1 and got so royally fucked that I had to give up but still wanted to enjoy the game. When Scholar of the First Sin released I was all like, ‘Hell yeah! I did so well in the first game, this can only go well for me,’ so after a while, I picked it up. And so, the pain began.
My first probably three or four attempts didn’t go so hot. At first I tried to do it alone. No dice. I tried with a YouTube guide to follow and got further, but still didn’t even collect all the great souls. About a month and a half ago I decided to tank the pain and picked up where my furthest character had left off instead of starting a new game which is what I usually do. After days if not weeks of hardship, I finally did it. I beat Dark Souls II. To many, especially those who have beaten Dark Souls 1, this probably doesn’t sound that impressive, but you’ve got to remember, I’d never beaten a souls game, or even gotten particularly far into one for that matter. I was pretty damn proud of myself.
So why did I start this post by talking about how polarising I thought the games were? Because the two games present some of the greatest game design I’ve ever seen, as well as some of the worst. When you engage in one-on-one fights with humanoid enemies, the combat shines. The timing, the weight, the difficulty all felt perfect when I was in a fair fight. The problem that I have with an unfortunate amount of Dark Souls II, and I understand many people share, is that the game feels like fighting one well designed enemy is for pussies and that real men fight four or five enemies (or in the case of one particular area, something like 20 goddamn spiders) at once. Whenever this happens, the game sinks into a spiral of poor execution. Fighting more than one enemy exposes almost every fault in the game. I don’t really know how to seamlessly flow into them, so here’s a list. The targeting camera is so horrendously terrible that sometimes you feel like just not using it, but doing that makes the combat ridiculous because it’s clear that a lot of the attacks were designed to work in tandem with the feature. On the subject of attacks, some of them are just ridiculously shit. Great weapons are handicapped hugely by stupid and limiting attacks. The mace refuses to have a simple straight downwards attack outside of the near impossible to start jump attacks, thrusting weapons like the ice rapier have this admittedly hilarious habit of constantly missing if the first attack fails to connect, leaving my my camera locked onto a target whilst my character jauntily pokes at sweet fuck all, circling the enemy because there course correction is atrocious (I totally understand how hard to understand that all was but you’re going to have to take my word on it). One of the most infuriating things is the fact that enemies sometimes just seem to have no stamina bar. A lot of enemies will perform some massive five or six attack combo, roll away so that you can’t do any damage to them, then start there combo again without so much as a pause for breath. Why? How the fucking fuck do you fucking look at that and think, ‘yep, this is what we want in our combat.’ This point also aptly ties into my first point about the multiple enemies being way to common. What’s worse than one enemy performing amateur surgery on your chest until it looks like the grand canyon after an earthquake? five enemies doing it at once. This is why I found it easier to not use a shield. There is no way, outside of using a greatshield, to block all of those attacks before running out of stamina, so it was just more reasonable to roll away. It’s not like rolling away is only sometimes better, anyway. I’d argue that it’s the other way around. There are far, far fewer moments in the game where a shield is more useful that a roll. The final thing that I really need to vent about is fighting non-humanoids. I totally understand why people slammed Dark Souls II for making the majority of fights you against a varying number of human (ish) enemies, but almost every time I have to fight some sort of animal or monster, I get mad. The game just doesn’t work as well against non-humanoids, especially when they’re massive bosses. I think that ranged characters would suffer far less from this, but when you have to get close to a boss and whack it’s shins until it dies, it helps if I can see the rest of the fucking thing so I know when to block or dodge. Against humanoid bosses, this almost always works, as the camera focuses around their chest area and their legs are close enough together that I don’t keep walking through the gap. When you fight something like say, for example, a dragon, the camera has to focus on their legs for close attacks or attacks will keep missing. This creates the problem that you can’t tell what in God’s name the boss is doing. An example of this is the final fight in the Crown of the Sunken King DLC, that has you fighting a poison breathing (as if that wasn’t bad enough) dragon. To attack it successfully, you basically have to be locked onto it’s leg or you can’t see where you’re attacks are going, but you know that they’re doing jack all. What happens when all you can see is their leg? That’s right, you can’t see anything else, so you spend the fight trying to interoperate attack that is about to thoroughly flatten you from the pixel of hand that briefly flashed across the screen, hoping like all hell that the hit boxes aren’t about to roll the dice on whether it hit’s you or not. Seriously though, fuck the hit boxes.
Phew. That’s enough negativity for today. Time for some good stuff. What does Dark Souls II do really well? As I said, the one on one combat is great against a sword wielding guy. The atmosphere is phenomenal, striking a near perfect balance between down trodden and interesting. This balance is something that so many games can’t quite get. Take for example the ‘Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.’ The world is so busy being this bleak and depressing environment filled with more fantasy clichés than Lord of the Rings booth at Comicon, that it totally forgets to create any novel and intriguing environments. Everything is so rooted in standard dark fantasy that I can get sucked in, but never remember my stay. Dark Souls II is really good at not falling into this trap. Whilst there could be a little more creativity like there was in it’s predecessor, it’s miles above almost anything else. What about the lore though, hey? how great is it. The item descriptions paint a rich tapestry of mystery and believability about almost everything. The non-story dialogue all gives subtle hints as to what happened to make Dranleic so gloomy, and the hidden characters and areas all further the world. There’s so much to do in the game. It’s standard fare for RPG’s to allow you to pick from a bunch of classes and grow how you want to, but Dark Souls II is one of the first games I’ve played to make me want to try every type of play because they’re all so different. Each type of gameplay, whether it be using ranged weapons or magic or a sword and shield or a single blade, each style feels new and varied from the last.
This point is something that I don’t really know how to bring up, or even really how to put into words, but Dark Souls II really nails the right feel you know? It just works. No matter how frustrating it is, how mad I get, or how many times I crush my controller, I always go back for more, because it feels so right when it’s not being shit. The moments when the elements come together and the problems stop being so intrusive are legitimately some of the best I have ever experienced. Nothing comes close.
I know that I complained a lot about the game in this post, but that’s who I am. I complain a lot. I hate the fact that I do it. I wish that I could look at the series and see perfect games, but I can’t. Sometimes I can’t even see a near perfect game. Most of the time I see them as very good or even great games. Possibly the most frustrating thing about Dark Souls II in retrospect is that, buried under the clunky lock on camera, frustrating monsters and ‘gank’ enemy placement, really might be the perfect game. A game that challenges me in all the right ways, that forces me to think around problems and learn from my mistakes. As of now, the Souls series just does that most of the time. The problem with making a tough but fair game is that whenever the fairness isn’t absolutely rock solid, everything crumbles. Getting unfairly punished by a boss in this series is one of the most infuriating things that will ever happen to you.
I love these games, even though I think that they’re only ‘very good’and not perfect. From Software, Dark Souls III might be you’re final entry into that series, but don’t think for a moment that we don’t know that you’re already working on the next game of your ‘soulsbourne’ series, whatever it might be. Continue doing what you are currently doing, smack the shit out of the ‘b-team’ for trying to pass the Royal Rat Authority off as a boss and praise the sun. Have a good day.
P.S. for anyone who hasn’t, go watch Mattewmatosis’ videos on YouTube, especially the Souls ones. He knows what he’s talking about.
Y, Though? 