Dark Souls 2 – Review

“As I was passing through the dark and creepy forests in Things Betwixt, the prologue map in Dark Souls, I was expecting a lot more action, remembering how I escaped the dungeon a year ago, evading the clutches of the menacing Asylum Demon. This wasn’t behaving like the b**ch that Dark Souls is. As I head out straight through the cave opening, the first breed of human messages appear on the floor, I Can’t Take This, Boss Ahead, Sadness Ahead, Be wary of Monster and then Flee, and other messages. I was shocked for once. So there was indeed an Asylum Demon plot to it afterall. Undaunted, I kept walking towards my first death in Dark Souls 2, and to my surprise, it was the distant sun’s gleaming rays inviting me to a seemingly safe location known as the Majula. And with the trolling messages, I knew that my Dark Souls 2 had begun.”

There’s this thing about taking up a heavy challenge such as playing Dark Souls II, and then reviewing it – it’s “Worth Every Death”! My love for the Souls series didn’t start with Demon’s Souls; in fact it started right after I entered Sen’s Fort in Lordran. Everything before that was just a hype to me, of certain gamers boasting about how a game made them repent, day in day out. I took some time to tune myself to the sadistic punishment scheme of Dark Souls, lost a hundred souls in learning things, walking right past nooks and realising what an idiot I am. And then I returned to the arena, only never to leave the immersive and treacherous undead world of Dark Souls.

Praise the Story:

What connects Dark Souls 1 to 2 is the undead infested limbo that you’re thrown into and the reintroduction of some of the deadliest weapons created to slay demons and invaders alike. Both the Souls editions challenge you to stay strong, and come on top of every battle, while maintaining your human form. Dark Souls 1 introduces you as an imprisoned soul set off wandering the extent of the undead kingdom, while Dark Souls 2 pushes you off the cliff and makes you freefall into the pit of lost souls by becoming dead. You wake up in a dingy, dark land in Things Betwixt and make your way towards a forlorn cottage to create your character, as three elderly women await you and laugh at your fate. The three elderly women and the Emerald Herald (you meet in Chapter 2 in Majula) tell you about your fate, as an undead, in bits and pieces. You gain information that you need to travel through death and despair in order to reach a once-covetous kingdom – Drangleic, now ruled by a King who is in possession of many great souls. As the protagonist of Dark Souls 2 you are destined to slay the king and relieve yourself of the curse of the undead. From the moment you are controlling the character movements, there is a chill around, and it becomes even stronger as you progress through the story. Speaking of progress, here’s the second spell.

Amazing Gameplay Progression and Changes Ahead:

Dark Souls 2 stays true to the Souls style, as you get to choose your class along with the addition of face tattoos to look even more dreadful, this time around. But just like Dark Souls 1, your initial build doesn’t affect your latter gameplay, as you mould yourself continuously within the game to become something more. I started Dark Souls 2 as a Mage, but by the first half of the game I levelled up my dexterity and strength to an extent when I could swing my Full Moon Sickle just as easily as a Knight. My favoured class from Dark Souls 1 – Thief (because of its initial agility and quick stamina refill) was gone in Dark Souls 2, along with the Pyromancer. And so I had to take this gamble – become a Sorcerer, atune both sorcery, clerical and pyromancy spells, while at the same time spending much to learn how to draw blood with the sword, you can’t count out close encounters in Souls, can you?  However, the initial skills were way too lower than they used to be in Dark Souls, and I could hear the certain grin back at the From Software Studios.

Even though you start weak, Dark Souls 2 levels you up faster than Dark Souls 1, mainly because you fast travel from places instead of walking into your death while changing locations. Dark Souls 2, just like its predecessors, doesn’t hold you back or guide you through. In fact, you explore the limits of your power by travelling via Majula to different places, ultimately realising that you’re either going the right direction, or get your butt severely stomped by giants who don’t twitch a bit at your blade. The big difference between Majula and the Firelink Shrine is the fact that in Dark Souls 2, one area is the gateway to another, without having Majula at the centre of the madness unlike the Firelink Shrine in Dark Souls 1. And at times you will be totally clueless thinking that the area ended too soon, but hey, you just missed the secret door on your right, which opens three new maps consecutively. For newcomers to the Souls franchise, this can lead you to open your guides and Wiki links, but don’t, not just yet. The amount of imagination and mathematics that made Lordran of Dark Souls 1 so interconnected may be missing in Dark Souls 2, majorly because the game was conceived to be enjoyed via fast travelling now, as a huge change to the whole Souls simulation. It came as a surprise to me that Dark Souls 2 wasn’t kicking my IQ beyond limits anymore, with bonfires usually placed where your eyes would generally reach out. I still remember and curse the level designers for making me take a patience defining stroll in a yard full of poisonous mud, infested with treacherous mosquitoes, roaches and boulder throwing giants at Blighttown, (in Dark Souls 1) for just one godforsaken bonfire.

But all these easy stuff came with a price to pay. If you hate the basilisks from Dark Souls 1 for deducting your total vigour to a mere 50% with their curse, then you are going to hate the next bit. Death was always the villain in Souls, but the penalty for dying in Dark Souls 2 is not even funny. In Souls 2, every time you die, you turn a little more hollow. As each death reduces your total vigour, till you hit the 50% health mark and complete your session by being a total hollow. The next change probably shatters all hopes of early levelling up for fellow Dark Souls lovers – enemies are gone from areas once they reach their 15^th death. Soul farming now becomes a matter of choice, and like every natural resource, you will need to choose lot more wisely than you did in Dark Souls 1 when it comes to farming. (More sounds of grins and laughter at From Software Studio) The wisest decision would be to stay a hollow and fight the enemies in a given territory till they wipe out, of course spending the souls for upgrades in between, and then consuming a little human effigy (Restores Humanity in Dark Souls 2), summoning a phantom and heading for the boss of the area. In my countless hours of Dark Souls 2, what I’ve seen is that the lesser demons basically train you for the bigger boss in the area with similar moves and combat style. Be it with the one handed swordsman giant replicating the moves of the Dragonrider, or the two handed giant replicating the moves of the Dragonslayer in Heide’s Tower of Flame.

Gorgeous Gameplay Mechanics

Dark Souls 1 partly educates you about the core mechanics of what you are going to experience in Dark Souls 2. In these 2 years, From Software has definitely brought livelier combat mechanics into play. Dark Souls 1 punishes you for being greedy, while Dark Souls 2 punishes you for being brave. You cannot deploy the same combat strategy against all enemies, as there’s bound to be a time when the enemy shows you a brand new skill, thereby and therein hacking your very self to a not-so-beautiful death. Dark Souls 2 wants you to watch, notice and wait for your turn to come. If Dark Souls 1 was about defeating enemies one on one, Dark Souls 2 pits you in situations wherein 5 enemies rush towards you and corner you completely till you can’t roll out of the situation, you will face the Silver Knights at the Lost Bastille one day. Most of your deaths in Dark Souls doesn’t come with falling off the ledge, instead Souls 2 introduces some really creepy ambushing enemies. Some may play dead lying on the grass, while others wait in shallow waters till you run past them like a Sunday gamer. If you are a long rang expert, and want to lock on to targets even before they come near, Dark Souls 2 will be unforgiving. Enemies do not get locked unless they are really close, and if you mash your lock button too much, the camera might make you face the opposite way, thereby taking hits straight away. Whether this is intentional or a bug is yet to be unravelled. Some of the hack and whack actions of the weapons have been altered a bit to show the real pros and cons of ranged versus quick slash versus heavy weapons, at least the Halberd doesn’t feel the same way it used to in Souls 1.

What might instantly kill you in Dark Souls 2 is your desire to quickly chug a wholesome from your Estus Flask, while still in fighting stance. Enemies are cleverer than ever and they instantly dash towards you if you take the damn thing out in fight. For a quick recovery, you have life gems that you can break in seconds and resume fighting. Life gems slowly refill your vigour, thereby giving you enough time to cover up for your mess. Like a hardcore RPG, most of your time will be spent thinking how to approach a certain kind of enemy, or whether the dork is weak to magic or poison, or even better, how to bring the environment into advantage. At Huntsman’s Copse, the huge trees were my friends in need whenever I was escaping the reaches of the fatties and archers. While most of you may easily detect it with your first death, the stamina refills at normal rate if you let go of your shield (thereby standing unprotected). If you keep your shield up while you’re down with fatigue, you will need to tolerate the snail’s speed stamina recovery.

Backstabs and Parries have come a long way and has been changed a lot, with the current Dark Souls game. The timespan for a backstab has been limited, after redresses were met out optimising PVP experience. With Dark Souls 2, if you repeatedly circle an enemy and aim for its back, chances are that missing a backstab might prove dear to you. Similarly, a better wielding shield doesn’t necessarily mean a confirmed parry this time around. All this will later come back to you and haunt you as you dare.

I Can’t Take This Enemy A.I. and Boss Fights

Some of the enemies are real pain in the asses, including the skeletons that get respawned by their summoners. Most of the biggest enemies are the easiest to kill, because their slow speed gives you enough time to recover. While it is the handful of agile enemies that you should be wary of, including the bandits group in Huntsman’s Copse and the Petrifiers at Aldias Keep.

Boss Battles in Dark Souls 2 are not well rehearsed in terms of progression, as you realise that you simply cannot take down this boss (Pursuer anyone?), or find another boss to be a complete embarrassment (Flexible Sentry). At times I found the whole buildup to the boss mist to be more cumbersome than the real fight. But I can totally let go of the flaw, counting Dark Souls 2 as much open to gamer’s decisions game. However, a game that has defined the current gaming scenario by posing serious challenges in the path of the gamers, Dark Souls 2 brings forth a brilliant boss level innovation by merging CPU battles with PVP summoning. If you are not aware of what I’m leading you to, you may want to face the Mirror Knight yourself. He is easily one of the toughest bosses I’ve ever faced, not because he’s huge or he strikes me with lightning every now and then. But because as soon as I’m winning, he summons a random online player (or NPCs if your session is offline) via his giant mirror cum shield and makes the battle even worse for my poor soul. Dodging him, while slaying his counterpart has to go down as my most memorable feat till date, something I can play and talk of over and over again. The creator talks of how he gets inspired from non-gaming elements when he is conceptualising gameplay additions or characters. As in this case, the Mirror Knight was something that he read about in a comic book, and it instantly grabbed his attention to be featured in his next Dark Souls.

Be wary of Challenges, in short, Visions of Aesthetic Level Designing

Even though I missed unravelling the fact that the undead world of Dark Souls 2 was in fact a radius interconnecting areas with each other (like it was in Dark Souls 1), some of the environments and sequences really dropped my jaw. Not only the maps are challenging but they are creepy as hell, even carrying some of the newly introduced torches scared me off at No Man’s Wharf. While most of the Dark Souls hardcore fans would chant boos because the in-game graphics didn’t even match what the E3 gameplay video promised, I would say that a little graphical immersion is not bad, provided that the level designing takes care of the majority. In Dark Souls 2, level designing emerges as its strong point. Each level will offer you its gifts or deformities. You will need to identify whether a slop or a cliff best suits your combat style, and come out with flawless victory. Running behind trees and running up and down the narrow lanes in the Undead Purgatory while avoiding the Executioner’s Chariot is one way of looking at it. Narrative in Dark Souls 2 follows the same exploration technique like in Souls 1, and there will be choices to make by the end of your journey, including the Brotherhood of Blood’s rivalry with the Blue Sentinels.

Dark Souls 2 may lack a God Of War style visual output, but it makes up for most of its immersion by offering a world that has a blend of so many ethnicities and natural settings. From Mughal style Purgatories and Underground Passes, to a Harvest Valley with poison gas infested farm yards and a sinister windmill being its background. On a serious note, games should take a note from the concept art and level designing of the Souls series. While the gameplay punishes you, the serene, lifeless ambience just before you hit a bonfire will heal your wounds in all its glory. And Dark Souls 2 too manages to come out on top while balancing happiness with pain, like its predecessors, even though the contrast is not as deep as an Anor Londo versus a Blighttown or New Londo.

Hurrah for Summary

Dark Souls 2 may have been a long due for all the Souls fans, and even with its mixed reception, it might still be a matter of continuous debate, majorly because of its gameplay changes. But as the saying goes, “Once a Souls fan, always a Souls fan”, Dark Souls 2 will continuously push you off your limits, take you off guard, and teach you things that normally this breed of mainstream entertainment wont. It is challenging like hell, but like a misunderstood adult, Dark Souls 2 is a legend that will be written in the stars like its predecessors. Extra butter for using my favourite Jethro Tull song as their final trailer theme.