Dark Souls II: Crown of the Sunken King Review
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Enemy and Boss design
While the enemy design doesn't show quite the same inventiveness From Software displayed with the level design, there are still enough interesting critters to call it an overall success. The main enemies in the DLC are the Sanctum soldiers, the last of the series' many takes on the dregling/hollow soldier template. Compared to the hollows you fight in the Forest of the Fallen Giants, the Sanctum soldiers tend to be more difficult to stun and hit harder, but also have much less tracking to all their attacks, making it much easier for a player to roll behind them and backstab them, a characteristic they share with all the humanoid enemies in the DLC. Aside from that, and the occasional poisonous aura, there is actually nothing special to the Sanctum soldiers, and while they don't really ruin the DLC, I could have done without them.
The other enemies luckily feel more inspired. Hex-using priestesses are often placed behind of lines of melee enemies or on strategic vantage points from which they can safely shoot at you. On top of that, they can also sometimes release a poisonous gas while dying. Later during the DLC, NPC-looking knights also make an appearance. Given they share their moveset with the players and have the typical "fat roll" of a character with a high equipment load, it would be easy to mistake them for another variant of the slow, easily dispatchable hollow soldiers. In truth, their attacks are fiendishly quick, and their slow rolls only give a small breather to players that would otherwise find it difficult to find holes in their defense. Luckily, when compared to the average Dark Souls II enemies they are rather easy to parry, giving players a reason to use a combat maneuver that often gets overlooked in the PvE segments of the game (and for good reason, I would add). There is also a new beast type that feels like a more agile, trickier take on the guardian drakes in Dragon's Aerie, and a couple of other enemies whose tricks I don't really want to spoil, but whose resistances and attacks will force most players to rethink their standard combat routine.
Speaking of resistances, it's worth noting that most enemies in the DLC have very high defenses against elements and magic, which makes completing the DLC with a pure caster with no melee backup a fairly harsh proposition. It's not impossible, and I can't say I'm excessively worried about this, considering the vanilla title would often offer very little challenge to those builds, but it's also true that it's a fairly lousy balancing practice. And unfortunately, this isn't the only lousy design decision in terms of enemies. There's a couple of NPC invasions in the DLC, and while they both offer fun and interesting fights, the one that's placed on the main path often crosses the line into the ludicrous. We're talking about a pyromancer that has infinite casts of all his spells, can break out of its animations to roll at any time, and has a supply of poise that doesn't match its light equipment. I won't lie, beating him was gratifying, and there's certainly a lot to love about the careful placement of the invasion, just before a water-filled area that raises your resistance to fire in exchange for sluggish movement and the chance to be spotted by the huge beasts roaming about, but seeing an NPC so obviously break the rules of the game ruins the idea of symmetry and the subtle storytelling behind the PvP mechanics integration. What makes it extra grating is that it's clear that From Software put some effort into improving their NPC invasions and summons, as they now have better AI and even perform gestures, just as players often do. Looking online, some people even mistook them for actual players, which I'm going to take as an encouraging sign.
While normal enemies are important, what Artorias of the Abyss' success taught me is that a lot of the series' fans are often more interested in the boss design, and on that front Crown of the Sunken King delivers three battles of mixed quality. The good news is that, aside from the lazy battle in the Cave of the Dead which I covered earlier in the review (which includes a variety of issues with tracking, animation cancelling and generally cheap difficulty), both the bosses present on the main path are rather fun battles, if not quite yet at the level of the best in the series (and it's difficult not to think of the series' only other DLC, Artorias of the Abyss, as it offered four polished, inventive and unrelenting fights). Neither of the bosses is particularly inventive art-wise (the choice to recycle a certain model in one of the battles left me particularly disappointed as it cheapened a cool moment of the main campaign), but they both present interesting, polished takes on concepts we've already seen explored in the series before. In particular, the final boss makes for a really fun battle (probably my favorite in the whole game now) that is foreshadowed since the beginning of the DLC. During the fight the player is forced to continuously move around and keep the huge but surprisingly nimble beast in sight at all times, adapting to its move at the pace it dictates. It's just disappointing that both battles are placed at the tail end of the DLC with no spacing between them. Pacing-wise it simply doesn't work, and slightly mars the structure of an otherwise very well-designed DLC.
New Items and Spells
Compared to Artorias of the Abyss, the only DLC for Dark Souls (included in all PC copies of the title), Crown of the Sunken King only adds one miracle, one sorcery, and two hexes. While both the new miracle (Denial, a spell that closely resemble Second Chance from Demon's Souls and can save a dying character, though only once) and the new hexes (Promised Walk of Peace, which mirrors the similarly named miracle from the original game, and Dark Greatsword, which does about what you'd expect from the name) are nice additions to the repertoire of spell casters, the only new sorcery included in the DLC (Focus Souls, a beam-type attack that does about what you'd expect it to do) feels superfluous and uninspired. Aficionados of pyromancy are also left wanting, though I can imagine this will be rectified in the next DLC, which seems to take place in the lava-themed Iron Keep.
Itemization-wise, From Software seemed to concentrate on quirky, special properties and trade-offs over quantity. There are swords with puzzling movesets, rings that give bonuses based on how low your maximum equipment load is, weapons that poison both the enemy and yourself, and this is just to cite a few. I'm not convinced all the offerings are appealing (and it's likely From Software will further tinker with stats in the next patches), but it's nice to see loot that offers genuine trade-offs and opens new options for unique character builds. The developers also added some more consumables, but the vanilla game already probably had more of those than it needed, so I can't honestly say I care much for these additions.
Lore and Art
The Crown of the Sunken King environments offer a mixed bag of well-executed architecture and bland, empty interiors coated in a low-contrast muddy color scheme that can grow tiring fairly quickly, and are only occasionally punctuated by pink and white hues. There's certainly something to be admired in the sheer size and scale of Shulva, but while the emptiness and murky color scheme can be justified to a certain extent, I can't help but feel that From Software's art team simply went overboard with them, and failed to bring their quirky sensibility to the environments. A few areas make an exception to this rule, though: the vista at the beginning of the DLC manages to counterbalance the muteness of the environments with careful composition, and both of the boss arenas on the main path are visually really well-accomplished, though I have to admit one of them reminded me a bit too much of the cave in which you fight the Skeleton Lords in Huntsman's Copse. Most importantly, both arenas complement the bosses' appearances, personality and patterns in an accomplished way, standing out in an otherwise fairly visually drab DLC, and that's despite not making use of a huge amount of new assets.
While Crown of the Sunken King doesn't offer much in terms of art, it does offer a fairly enjoyable simple self-contained story about hubris, fanaticism and foolishness, and how they can bring a civilization to an untimely end, told through the series' well-oiled mix of environmental storytelling and item descriptions. Interestingly, From Software decided to almost completely reject dialogue and cutscenes for Shulva. There are no NPCs throughout the whole area, aside from mute summons and invaders, and the only few lines of dialogue belong to one of the three bosses, none of which get cutscene introductions. That's not to say that the bosses don't get introductions, as I especially liked the simple but effective way the final boss prepares itself for the fight, and I personally wouldn't mind to see From Software going further down this road for their next projects. I have to admit, I suspect part of the reason cutscenes were avoided was the lower budget of the DLC compared to the main game, but if that was the case then I really feel adversity helped bring the best out of the designers at the Japanese studio.
Truth be told, there is at least a chatty person in the DLC, a key player in the main plot whose memory is now accessible from one of the vanilla areas of the game. It's an interesting and well-executed scene that will probably be built upon further for the next two pieces of the DLC, but also one that frankly doesn't really do much to enlighten the vague plot of the title, and will probably leave more than a few players scratching their heads. If nothing else, it further convinced me that From Software really knocked it out of the park with their voice casting this time around.
Conclusions
While perhaps not as content-packed and well-integrated as Dark Souls' Artorias of the Abyss, Crown of the Sunken King offers a more understated but almost equally compelling addition to the action-RPG sequel, thanks to some strong level design that recaptures the elaborateness that was sometimes lost in the main title and offers a new twist on it, and some very fun enemies and bosses. Here's hoping that the next two DLC are just as good, if not even better.
