Dark Souls II Review
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Introduction
Dark Souls II is, if the II at the end of the title isn't enough of a giveaway, the sequel to From Software's 2011 action-RPG. And while IP technicalities make it so that they're separate series, there's no doubt that Dark Souls and its sequel themselves are the successors to the studio's PS3 exclusive Demon's Souls, the title that introduced most of the series' core mechanics, from its action-based stat-driven combat to the oft-discussed and undoubtedly fascinating multiplayer mechanics.
Considering how beloved both of its predecessors are, I don't doubt the Dark Souls II team felt pressured by fans' expectations while working on the game. What I can say for sure is that the title feels more conservative than its predecessors, if only ever so slightly, and seems more content to refine and tweak rather than make structural changes. That's not necessary a sin on From Software's part, provided they managed to keep the quality consistent with their previous outings. But did they?
Before delving into the review proper, I would also like to apologize for taking such a long time writing it. Yes, the game is large in size, but the truth is that I had a difficult time putting together a piece that felt coherent while being true to my thoughts and impressions. Hopefully the final result is worth the wait, but you'll be the judge of that.
What is Dark Souls II?
To put it simply, Dark Souls II is an action-RPG that puts you in the shoes of an Undead, a creature that doesn't die but revives near bonfires that act as checkpoints, and needs souls to avoid becoming a mindless zombie or "Hollow". The plot is extremely vague and obfuscated, and the similarly vague directions you're given serve as an excuse to see your character explore one environment after another, killing enemies, dealing with traps, and occasionally chatting with a friendly NPC along the way. Dark Souls II presents what is essentially an action version of the classic dungeon crawling gameplay loop, but stripped to the basics and mixed with foreign, often novel elements. With the exception of Majula, the game's main hub, which offers a brief respite and the chance to spend your souls (both the game's main currency and experience points) to level up and buy new equipment and items, the entire game world is essentially one big dungeon.
Combat in the Souls series is made of simple elements that come together coherently to form a deep but easy-to-learn system. Every weapon, shield or spell catalyst offers two primary actions. Weapons generally have two types of attacks, usually a weaker one and a more powerful one that leaves more openings to your enemies. All shields can be used to block, but some can also be used to "parry" an enemy, leaving it open to a devastating riposte, while others are too heavy to serve that function, but can crush with a slam attack. Most spell catalysts can be used either to cast a spell or to attack. And there's a lot more I'm not covering like ranged weapons, the ability to hold a weapon two-handed to get a new, tweaked moveset and more damage out of the attacks, or dual-wielding (a new addition to the series). Knowing all the quirks of your equipment, in addition to its stats, is one of the most important requirements to succeed in the game, but hardly the only one. Managing your Stamina is equally important, as it's an incredibly important resource, required to perform all but the simplest of feats. Spam attacks or roll too much, and you'll find yourself in an extremely vulnerable position, one that monsters or even enemy players will be quick to exploit. And if I had to identify a third piece of the puzzle, it'd be observation and memorization. So many players get discouraged by the game's difficulty but seem to be unwilling to learn from their mistakes. While the difficulty balance is certainly not perfect, the game is almost always fair in terms of challenge: traps and ambushes can be be spotted ahead of time, enemy patterns are telegraphed, all the elements you need to keep track of are available at a glance, and there are always at least a few options to deal with a threat for every build.
But yes, you'll die. Over and over, as the game is keen to tell you from the very beginning. Much has been said about the Souls' games "soul-crushing" difficulty, but the truth is that the barrier is mostly psychological. Death is, first and foremost, a learning tool, and an integral part of the game mechanics. Every time you die you leave a bloodstain that contains all the souls you were carrying on the spot where you died (or close to it, in case you died by falling or some similar circumstance where the bloodstain would be out of your reach). Touching the bloodstain will give you back all the souls you lost, but you only have one chance to do it: dying again erases it, and the souls are lost forever. But there are always more opportunities to gain more souls, and perhaps the knowledge on a boss' moveset or elemental weakness you obtained that way was worth the loss. Dying also turns your character from Human to Hollow, a change that concerns both appearances and mechanics. More and more deaths will make the character look progressively more zombie-like in appearance, and also progressively reduce Health until it's down to about 50% of its normal value. On top of that, Hollow form also removes the ability to summon friendly players or NPCs to help, making it an altogether worse way to play the game. Just like with any other of the game's challenges, Dark Souls II gives you a way out: use a Human Effigy and your character will revert back to Human form.
Speaking of online functionalities, it's worth exploring the way Dark Souls II integrates single-player with mutliplayer options: while playing online, players are capable of leaving each other messages, usually to either offer tips or mislead (more often than not, a message inviting you to make a jump is a prank). These messages can be ranked up, momentarily healing the player who originally wrote them if online, and are especially useful to discover secrets like illusory walls, or prepare for an upcoming ambush. Players can also leave a Summon Sign to be summoned into a Human form character's world and help them go through an area or beat a boss, invade another player's world to kill them and earn some souls for the effort, and even participate in specific online activities tied to special groups called Covenants, which can be joined during the game. There are Covenants set up to protect weaker players from invasions and punish invaders, Covenants that make it easier and more fruitful to play co-op, and even Covenants that let you lure other players into your world to kill them in trap-filled dungeons.
Dark Souls II's online play feels greatly improved when compared to its predecessor: it's now impossible to accidentally lock yourself off a Covenant, and connecting to other worlds is much easier. The game is also now set up to encourage players to play in Human form, so there's a bigger pool to draw from for pretty much every activity, and a much wider variety of playstyles are showcased as a result. Finally, quite a few exploits, like the infamous "toggle escape" (a way to cheat yourself out of stunlocking by taking advantage of some engine quirks) have been fixed. Unfortunately the net code is still wobbly, and From Software's attempt to fix low-level ganking, Soul Memory, is a complete failure. The system tracks the amount of souls you've earned during your playthrough and matches you with players in the same "bracket", without taking Soul Level and equipment in account. This effectively eliminates any incentive to stop leveling for PvP, and considering the widespread availability of hacked save games, doesn't save low-level players the displeasure of being invaded by much stronger enemies. Dark Souls II is the product of a largely insulated development environment that seems to largely ignore current gaming development trends, and while it often works in its favor, in this case I'd say that perhaps taking a look at how other online-focused game handled similar problems would have helped.
Character Progression
Speaking of improvements over the original title, the stats breakdown in Dark Souls II feels overall more sensible than it was in Dark Souls, though not without a fair amount of weird quirks and puzzling choices, an unfortunate tradition for the Souls series. At every level up you are given one single point to spend on one of the game's main nine stats: Vigor (which determines HP), Endurance (which determines your total Stamina), Vitality (which determines your maximum equipment load), Attunement (which determines the number of your Attunement Slots and your Cast Speed), Strength (which improves damage on Strength-scaling weapons), Dexterity (which improves damage on Dexterity-scaling weapons), Adaptability (which improves your Agility, a derived attribute which improves the speed of some of your actions and adds invincibility frames to your dodge roll, and many of your resistances), Intelligence (which boosts your Magic Defense and Bonus and the power of all spells save Miracles) and Faith (which improves Lightning Defense and Bonus and the power of all spells save Sorceries).
In truth the relationship between main stats and derived attributes (mysteriously called "Performance" by the game) is slightly more complicated: pretty much all stats affect HP and at least one or two resistances in a minor way, some attack bonuses get determined by the average between two stats (Fire, for example) or the lowest (Dark), and quite a few other attributes are influenced by more than one stat. It's a better breakdown than the original's, if only because there's not one single useless stat like Resistance, but still far from perfect: Adaptability feels extremely useful for most builds until up to 20, when its contribution to your performance starts rapidly diminishing, while Vigor and Endurance have a fairly low impact this time around, and really aren't worth spending a lot of points on, especially since they rapidly start giving diminishing returns.
It's not mentioned as often as it should be, but stats are an important component of the Souls series, and Dark Souls II makes no exception: most weapons and spells have requirements and scale in damage and effect based on your stats, armors now scale in effectiveness based on your Physical Defense (a derived attribute), and you can get even locked out of a few merchants if your stats are too low for them to deem you worthy of their presence. Even better, Dark Souls II improves on the original by making more playstyles viable and adding options where necessary while also trimming what didn't quite work previously: elemental damage and even status effects now scale with stats; Divine damage was eliminated for being redundant (Lightning takes its place as the Faith-scaling damage type); a new type of spells, Hexes, scales based on your Dark bonus and uses Sorcery and Miracles catalysts depending on the spell, offering even more options to magic-themed characters; dual-wielding has been given a mechanical overhaul, as it's now possible to power-stance two weapons of a compatible type if you have 1.5x their requirements, unlocking a whole new moveset; and there's even a weapon upgrade path that scales based on your lowest stat, Mundane, that rewards jack-of-all-trades types.
Speaking of weapon upgrading, the Dark Souls II's team overhauled the system that was present in the two original titles by separating it into two systems, upgrading (which is now a single, linear progression path) and imbuing, which changes the properties of weapons, catalyst and shields. There are 9 upgrade paths, most of which are interesting to try out this time around, but they're still rather imbalanced. A few examples: this time Raw feels more useful (though it usually ends up being worse than Mundane for high-level builds on most weapons), but Enchanted, an upgrade path that adds physical damage based on your Intelligence, feels downright useless, and Bleed and Poison tend to feel subpar. Dwelling too much on the balance problems would feel unfair, given most playstyles feel fun and viable in PvE, but I can't afford glossing over them, so I'll cite a few others: Dexterity weapons definitely got the short end of the stick when compared to Strength ones (especially Clubs and Greatsword class weapons), ranged weapons can still be used to cheese a fair amount of otherwise challenging areas, and casters have an almost unfairly easier time with some bosses. Just to be clear, I don't advocate for every playstyle to get the same experience out of the game, but I don't think some situations should be quite as easy as they are for certain playstyles without a trade-off in another area. If nothing else, it's now possible to respec your character by using a rare item called "Soul Vessel", and while that arguably reduces the impact and importance of your level-up choices, it helps making sure you won't have to re-roll just because you found out halfway through the game that your build didn't lead to the fulfilling gameplay you expected.
Level and Encounter Design
Dark Souls II's world is larger but shares the same structure of Dark Souls, a single, connected world without loading screens, though its areas are far more visually distinct, harking back to Demon's Souls discrete worlds. Theoretically this sounds like a match made in heaven, as the game captures the qualities that made both its predecessors memorable while also being bigger than both, but the reality is not that clear-cut. On the positive side, the level design tends to be extremely good on average, and is also far more consistent than it ever was in Dark Souls (while I tend to be kinder on the latter half of that game than many are, I still wouldn't argue that Lost Izalith and Tomb of the Giants hold a candle to places like Undead Burg, Darkroot Garden or Sen's Fortress, not to mention Anor Londo). If anything, From Software clearly tried to impress with the end game areas, and it shows: with one unfortunate exception (the tedious Shrine of Amana, which has thankfully been nerfed with a recent patch), they're all great and distinct both from a visual and a game design standpoint, if sometimes a bit too short. Even when considering the whole game, it's really hard to cite a bad area, and I've taken a liking to quite a few of them: No Man's Wharf, with its unusual-for-the-series visual theme, looks deceptively short and packs quite a few surprises along the way; Forest of the Fallen Giants, used for much of the pre-release material, is also a strong example of classic Souls level design, with plenty of clever shortcuts and loops, and quite a few opportunity to explore off the side, in case you're willing to take risks; Black Gulch is a psychologically draining gauntlet specifically designed to punish players that can't keep calm and correctly assess the situation; and Earthen Peak and Iron Keep are just overall strong areas with just about the right mix of traps, environmental hazards and enemies, with the latter also including one of the best boss fights in the game.
Speaking of boss design, the game also tends to be, on average, stronger than its predecessor, but with fewer truly memorable encounters. There are a lot of bosses, and pretty much all of them are well-designed, whether it's because of quirky, unexpected attacks, or because of interesting arenas or unique mechanics, but none of them reach the heights of Ornstein and Smough, a Dark Souls pair of bosses that is explicitly evoked twice during the game. That's not to say that there aren't quite a few fun and challenging fights: Executioner's Chariot is the Souls series' first successful puzzle boss fight, leaps and bounds above the tediousness of Dragon God and Bed of Chaos; Lost Sinner is fun and hectic and only gets more brutal in New Game+; the Pursuer is the perfect wake-up call for a starting player; Smelter Demon's deceivingly simple attack patterns hide a truly challenging fight; and I cited just a few. The mistake From Software made with bosses this time around, in my humble opinion, is simply to put too many of them in the game, instead of focusing on the best and polishing them to a sheen. That said, it has to be noted that a large amount of these bosses are optional to some degree, so a non-completionist player probably wouldn't get the same kind of indigestion I did at the end of their playthrough.
The game also loves to throw curveballs at the player, like enemies spawning near bonfires, ambushes and hordes of low-level enemies, and while it always gives you the tools to deal with them, it presents these situations with perhaps excessive regularity, to the point where it feels slightly cheap. Likewise, the bonfire placement can feel a little difficult to understand at times, with bonfires placed in optional dead-end areas, and occasionally spaced with a syncopated rhythm, with longer stretches followed by two or more bonfires that are relatively closely clustered. Again, the issue I have is less with the usage of this technique, which helps make level design less monotonous, and more with its occasional abuse. Dark Souls II also has a tendency to construct areas as video game levels rather than living spaces, which isn't a flaw per se, but is certainly a different approach from the original. Ultimately, it's easy to handwave most of the idiosyncrasies of the game spaces thanks to its vague, high fantasy lore, but there's no doubt a philosophy shift occurred behind the scenes. Some of the area progression also tends to be on a linear side: you tend to pick one direction from the main hub and press on until you beat the final boss, then loop back by using a Primal Bonfire.
Which brings me to my next point: the overall world design, the way areas are pierced together in other words, doesn't feel nearly as accomplished as in the original title. The world seemingly only expands horizontally, and there are very few shortcuts that connect areas that weren't meant to be part of a certain carefully authored progression. The developers seemed almost reluctant to design the game around a continuous world, and the structure that Dark Souls introduced feels emptied as a result, now only a way to reduce loading screens and little more than that. Emblematic of this is the way fast travel is handled: in the original Dark Souls, fast travel was only available after you had completed more than half of the game, and was still limited to a few key locations, while in Dark Souls II it's available right from the beginning and lets you warp to and from any bonfire, eliminating the need to place clever shortcuts to important locations. The presence of a single, interconnected world was one of the most obvious differences between Dark Souls and its predecessor, but the latter's approach feels more appropriate for Dark Souls II, and would have allowed the team to build an equally diverse world without clumsily patching together its locations (which are wonderfully constructed when taken alone), something that Dark Souls II does fairly often. And if I were to nitpick further, I'd also note that I'm not a fan of how Dark Souls II handles scale. The single locations are excellent at conveying it, but the game also implies the player's travels span over a continent without doing anything to sell the illusion. I've always admired the way the Souls games managed to convey the scale of their towering structures and their worlds without making them tedious to navigate, so this was a personal sore point.
Combat and Mechanical Nitpicks
At the cost of angering the orthodox defenders of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, I have to admit that Dark Souls II has my favorite iteration of the series' trademark combat. It's slower, more methodical, slightly more stat-based and both the human characters and monsters tend to have more obvious wind-up to their moves, which admittedly makes them easier to dodge, but also reduces the emphasis on reaction and moves it to planning and executing. That said, there are a few fatal flaws that make it difficult to call it an overall improvement. First of all, hitboxes tend to be less polished and, for lack of a better word, "looser" this time around. It always takes a while to get used to the larger bosses' dodge timings because all too often they have a wider and longer reach than they seemingly should, and unfortunately this is also problem for plenty of minor enemies, though not to that degree. Secondly, a few techniques that were fairly easy to pull off in previous games have been made both less useful and much more difficult to execute, with the parrying windows in particular being really strict for no apparent reason, especially considering a lot of enemies have surprisingly fast recovery times.
Aside from combat feeling different from the predecessors, Dark Souls II also brings quite a few mechanical tweaks that change the overall feel of the game. Healing is still handled primarily with Estus Flasks, sort of healing potions that recharge when resting at a bonfire or after death, but the game is designed so you better learn their value. While Dark Souls would offer you 5 charges right off the bat, in Dark Souls II you start with only one, and have to find Estus Shards to get extra charges, for a maximum of 12 in total. Luckily the game supplies you with consumables to make up for it: Lifegems slowly recharge your health but can be used while moving, while other more limited items like Monastery Charms also have secondary effects and heal more quickly. Truth be told, this kind of interplay matters much more during a first playthrough, as by the end of the game a player has usually enough Estus charges to rely solely on the Flasks. After all, especially in New Game+ and beyond, enemy attacks get more and more lethal, and the challenge switches from handling your resources effectively to finding the right timing to heal in between attacks.
Speaking of New Game+, Dark Souls II features the best implementation of this mechanic in the entire series, with remixed enemy encounters (even a few bosses get some new tricks up their sleeves), new loot drops and even some important lore hints. Should you not want to delve into New Game+, it's also possible to keep playing after defeating the final boss, and even challenge some bosses again in their stronger forms with the use of a new item, the Bonfire Ascetic, which respawns enemies and strengthens them. Ascetics are also needed to effectively farm in the game, because most enemies stop respawning after being killed enough times, and a few unique sets are only dropped in pieces from unique NPC red phantoms, a befuddling and annoying design decision. The durability of unique drops and every other item in the game is also handled differently: equipment is now automatically repaired to full durability at bonfires and only needs to be repaired by a blacksmith in case it breaks down completely, turning what was originally mostly a soul tax into an interesting gameplay element, given many powerful weapons have low durability or lose quite a lot of it if you use their special attacks.
I can't realistically list all of the gameplay changes, but I'll cite just a few more: it's now possible to wear four rings at one time, but they all have weight and contribute to your overall equipment load, potentially making the difference between a fast and a slow roll; it's possible to equip three items in each hand rather than two, and 10 items in total on your quick-slot item belt, although I wouldn't recommend doing the latter given circling between items is still clunky; torches can be used to solve a few environmental puzzles and illuminate the rare dark areas, though they're best used sparingly considering they occupy your character's left hand; spell casts can be regenerated by the use of special herb items, similarly to how you'd regenerate Mana in Demon's Souls. Overall, the game feels legitimately different from the original, but it's a much subtler shift than the one that occurred between Demon's Souls and Dark Souls.
Lore, Art and Music
Dark Souls II's plot mirrors its gameplay by being deceptively straightforward and hiding a great amount of thought and interesting ideas, but ultimately doesn't provide the same certainty of outcomes that the game so loudly celebrates with its infamous on-screen messages (always keen to state the obvious, whether that is your death or your victory). The starting cutscene and the ample amounts of in-game dialogue in Majula might lead a player to believe that answers are only a few bosses away, but in truth even the ending is enigmatic, and the background of the world remains shrouded in mystery, moreso even than in the original title, a title to which Dark Souls II pays clear homage and with which establishes clearer ties than I would have expected. Fans are already having fun trying to pierce together the snippets of lore delivered via item descriptions, dialogue and environmental art into a coherent whole, probably fully aware of the fact that it's ultimately a futile exercise, in part because of the ownership that can be claimed over the game's story that way. Looking besides the "plot", one would also find tragic characters (this time more understated and less eccentric than in previous titles) and extremely interesting thematic strands and motifs. For what it's worth, I've grown especially interested in the way sinking and re-emerging seem prevalent artistic theme, deeply embedded into the level design, and the way the game's cycle motif ties both into the game's story and its nature of sequel to a cult title.
Given Dark Souls II dropped both the original's light/dark dichotomy and its interconnected world structure, it allowed itself to be far more varied in locations, and now ranges from Gothic castles sinking into the lava, to underground pirates' dens, to thick, overgrown forts. In other words, the game makes full use of classic fantasy iconography while also presenting its own twists. Unfortunately, the environmental art isn't always as consistent as it could be: when the game is at its best it looks far better than either of its predecessors, but spotting tiled textures, flat lighting or similar oversights is easier than it should be, and there's at least one location that looks like it never got a much-needed art pass before release. And yes, the elephant in the room here is that, even at its best, the game never looks like it did during its first pre-release outings. I don't know about the whys and hows, which might well be legitimate, but a bit more honesty in marketing and communication would have been appreciated on part of both Namco Bandai and From Software. Luckily, the armor sets and weapons present the same kind of consistency and variety we've grown to expect of the series, with most of them looking practical without being bogged by historical accuracy, and all of them sharing a certain design sensibility that allows even the most absurd ones (like, for example, a statue wielded like a sword thanks to a tacked-on hilt) to feel like they belong in the world. Equally deserving of praise are the enemy designs and models, as they stand up to the high standards the series has established.
If I had to point out something that generally doesn't live up to the original's standards it would be the game music. Only a few themes are genuinely memorable, and quite a few of them end up feeling same-y, despite only being used for bosses. Perhaps I'd be more favorable if the OST didn't include one of my least favorite themes in the series, the one used for the Ruin Sentinels and Smelter Demon battles. Memorable, yes, though perhaps not in the way that was intended by the composer. Given I'm covering the game's sound department, I might as well say that sound effects tend to be slightly grungy and lo-fi, but despite that do a great job setting the mood. Perhaps it's just a symptom of the Stockholm syndrome that developed during the countless hours I spent with Demon's and Dark Souls but I now consider them to be part of the series' identity.
PC or Console?
Before writing my conclusions, I'll break from the act of reviewing to offer a bit of advice: if you can choose between all the versions of the game, I'd suggest grabbing the PC one. While I can't provide first-hand feedback, all early reports point to an extremely competent port this time around, and the PlayStation 3 version I played had quite a few minor-but-annoying technical hiccups, including a somewhat erratic framerate, long loading times and dialogue and menus that would occasionally take a while to pop up. By no means was it unplayable, but I'd be willing to bet the PC version will offer an overall superior experience, and a nicer-looking one to boot.
Conclusions
I have extremely conflicted feelings on Dark Souls II. On one hand I'm disappointed it's different from Dark Souls, given I greatly loved that title, but on the other hand I'm also disappointed it's not different enough, and while I feel it's more fun than the original, I also feel it's a slightly lesser experience. It's also ironic that the game director Hidetaka Miyazaki (and much of the staff, if the credits are to be believed) was replaced to bring new, fresh ideas, considering the game feels like a bridge between Dark and Demon's Souls, with less of an identity of its own. I can't, however, blame Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura for not messing with the formula too much, considering how well-received the original was, and how much more aggressively Namco seems to have marketed the title.
And, let's be honest, who else offers this kind of experience? Dark Souls II stands tall on the shoulder of giants, but that shouldn't invalidate its accomplishments, and shouldn't stop me from saying it's an excellent game. Not to mention that, without Dark Souls II, Xbox 360 and PC players would only have one Souls title to play with, and that would be a bit of a shame, wouldn't it?
