Guest Blog|Dark Souls 2 review *Spoilers*

***** SPOILER ALERT *****

This review will be discussing plot points which may be considered spoilers. Consider yourselves warned.

I stood in line for about an hour waiting patiently for my copy, like a pilgrim in line to see a relic.  I had pre-ordered Dark Souls 2 Black Armor Edition way back in September, and it was finally release day.  The first guy to get his big box o’ goodness had no troubles, but I flinched when ALL the clerks had to head to the back to find my copy.  After a minute that seemed like an eternity, they all irreverently resumed their positions after finding my copy of the game.  I left the store like all the other gamers that night, with a huge box in a bag that somewhere inside held a world contained on a 180mm by 1.2mm disc.  It was a world I was anxious to explore.  I got home and opened my prize. There she was, right on top after opening the flap.  I ripped off the cellophane and popped the disc into my PS3.   The title screen, the same as the first game, allayed my fears of drastic change.  In the end, this was false hope.

Heide’s Tower of Flame

I made my way through the first couple of areas:  Things Betwixt and Mejula.  I checked the worldwide death count online.  It was a paltry 4127. (For reference, now the death count is well over 250 million.) As I played I was excited for everything new.  At the same time, I reacquainted myself with familiar game aspects, as it was apparent early on that a lot of the graphics for items were ported in from the previous game.  Heide’s Tower of Flame, a new location with a gorgeous panorama of gothic style buildings sunken into an ocean, all accented by a gigantic tower with fires burning at every floor, looked like it had so much potential, yet almost nothing happened in the tower itself.   An old boss from Dark Souls, the Old Dragonslayer Ornstein, appeared at the Cathedral of Blue, which surprised me.  Then a quick run across the level to an easy victory over the Dragonrider boss at the end of the Tower of Flame area lead me to an elevator that took me down to a wharf front.  I was confused.  A whole tower dedicated to a guy named Heide, but we never go into the tower?  Well, this is a Souls game after all and not all things are up front and obvious.

I pushed forward to No Man’s Wharf, the Pirates of the Caribbean section of DS2. “Uh, what? When did From Software go Disneyworld?” I thought.  I powered through this section as well, hopeful, yet shaken.  This area didn’t make any sense to the theme of the game as I had seen so far.  I eventually made it to Drangleic Castle.  After lighting the first bonfire by the King’s Passage, I had to force myself to accept a few things that I had been denying up to this point.

I have been lurking on Youtube watching a few walkthroughs by ENB and A German Spy among others.  (MartyrsBrigade99 voiced his concerns as early on as the network test.)  I generally found the same reaction from everyone.  The entire community seems to agree, without actually saying, that From, the game’s developer, gave us a solid game that is good from beginning to end, but fell short.  Mathewmatosis also gave a scathing critique that is very difficult to disagree with.  There are so many small things that indicate a misunderstanding of what Demons Souls and Dark Souls are to us, the fans.   Unfortunately, it seems that Dark Souls 2 fell prey to typical folly of selling units instead of making a piece of art that stands on its own.

My problem with Dark Souls 2 doesn’t lie with the spotty game mechanics: strange hit boxes, character movement that isn’t as tight as Dark Souls, the graphical quality not up to the early hype, the utterly ridiculous tracking on an enemy attack, the list goes on.  Hit boxes can be fixed.  Players will adjust to character movement.  The game is so large that they had to sacrifice graphics just to allow the PS3, my console of choice, to play the game, so that is understandable.

Enemy tracking was put in place to make backstabs more difficult to pull off, in order to make the game more difficult overall. It looks ridiculous, and is an example of the small things that kept cropping up and nagging at my brain.  The load screens were crazy long.  Then there’s a multi-second lag on menu loading.  I’ve witnessed up to six seconds for my menus to load.  That’s enough to pull anyone out of a story.

The level design was definitely off in this game.  The most disjointed level segue is between the areas of Earthen Peak and The Iron Keep.  Also, the bonfires seem to be way too close together.  Demons Souls and Dark Souls, both directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, were not frivolous with mechanics, items, or dialogue.  Every task had purpose and meaning.  No other game that I can recall does this.

Panoramic shot of Mejula

The way the story was told in the two previous games was with the backgrounds, item placement on corpses, bosses or enemies, equipment, and dialogue.  The games were constructed so that you could infer information from where you gained an item, how you gained an item, who you gained that item from and what triggered any events.  NPCs had story arcs that started and ended during a play-through.  All of this contributed to the immersion that these games provided.  For me, Dark Souls 2, under the new direction of Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura, just feels like it is riding on the coat tails of its predecessor and that cheapens the experience.

The attempts to make the game more accessible fly in the face of all the rest of the effort to maintain what makes a Souls game.  The Soul Vessel is a glaring example.  It’s a fairly useful item that allows a character’s attributed skill points to be redistributed in case the player decides to change his or her mind about how the character build is going.  Not the worst thing in the world yet it shaves a layer of thought out of a play-through.

Having said that, there is still plenty to love with this game.  The variety of weapons and armor is astounding.  This could lead to a lot of very fun Co-op and Player vs Player interactions as players find the quirks in equipment and the ways to exploit them.  The magic is a little too powerful, but that isn’t a new thing for a Souls game.  It’s a heck of a lot of fun to use and I like that spell uses can be replenished with an item this go-round.  I also really like that crows have become a bubble-gum-machine.  Putting a smooth and silky stone into a nest gives the player a randomly generated item in return.  It should also be noted that From Software slid in some very cool challenge runs that come with a reward.  If the player can make it through the entire game without dying, the reward is a ring that hides the left-hand weapon.  If the player can make it without resting at any bonfires, the reward is a ring that hides the right-hand weapon.  Assuming that it will be the PvP community that will keep this game alive in the next few years, that was a very cool thing to build in to the game.  Lastly, they threw in some Easter eggs.  Somebody found a Heineken beer bottle label in the sludge in the Grave of Saints.  It’s these things that keep me coming back.

In the end, Dark Souls 2 is a great game and worth the money spent to purchase it and worth the time spent playing.  You will get a solid experience and plenty of hours of entertainment.  It has plenty of flaws, but those little details can be fixed with patches as the game matures.  In the end, new players will find a very accessible Souls game and the old ones can still look forward to a lot of what drew them in the previous two release

-by Kurt Klein, Cheefbast