Dark Souls II: Crown of the Ivory King Review
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Introduction
Crown of the Ivory King is the last of the Lost Crowns trilogy of downloadable content for Dark Souls II, and likely the last piece of downloadable content for the game period. As such, you'd expect it to be the game's grand finale, a celebration of everything good about Dark Souls II. From Software, however, apparently wasn't interested in a mere celebration, and rather opted to toy with the game's formula even more than in the previous installments of the trilogy. While calling Crown of the Ivory King experimental would be excessive, its mix of new and old makes for an interesting beast, and a fitting finale for the game's lifecycle.
Level Design
Aside from the fact that its portal isn't located after a primal bonfire, but rather in the Shrine of Winter, Crown of the Ivory King can be accessed in the exact same way as the other DLC for Dark Souls II: once the DLC is installed a key is automatically added to your inventory and lets you open the humongous door at the entrance of Frozen Eleum Loyce, the DLC's location. If you don't happen to own the DLC, you'll at least be able to access the DLC's challenge route as a summonable white phantom. Going off the previous DLCs' track record I didn't expect anything good out of it so even having mixed thoughts about this one turned out to be a positive surprise. While the co-op areas of the previous DLCs had some of the most mediocre level and encounter design the series ever offered and precious few ideas, Frozen Outskirts, the optional route of this DLC, is a mediocre execution on a novel idea that doesn't really have a precedent in the series.
The area is a very large expanse covered in snow, dotted with very few landmarks and periodically hit by blizzards that strongly impair visibility. In addition to that, while the blizzard is raging, patrolling creatures attack you and force you to move around, potentially losing your bearings in the process. Limited visibility is really hard to do correctly in videogames and From Software failed to hit the right balance here: the storms hit too often and last too long, and I soon started seeing them as an annoyance rather than a challenge. Additionally, the area's main enemies can't be spotted before the blizzards hit, adding another level of tedium, as it's not possible to plan a route to avoid them in advance. There's also the fact that the area is simply too long, especially when you consider it ends with a challenging boss fight and that there is nothing to do once you have memorized how to reach its end and scavenged all the loot present. If nothing else, I can praise From Software for trying something different and for the area's excellent atmosphere, but unfortunately that alone doesn't make up for the sheer lack of fun to be had in it.
The rest of the DLC's area also plays with visibility, but in a far tamer way. To give a bit of context, at the beginning of the DLC, after walking through a bridge that brings back memories of Demon's Souls' Boletarian Palace, you are greeted with an expansive area that branches out in multiple directions, though plenty of paths are blocked by ice due to an unnaturally strong raging blizzard. The same ice also encases chests and enemies, and creates barriers that can be used to split up a group of enemies or block their line of sight, while the blizzard interferes with your visibility and covers distant enemies armed with ranged attacks. In other words, breaking the blizzard makes the level fully explorable and removes the visibility problems, but at the cost of having to deal with more enemies and a few other hazards. Even more interestingly, once the blizzard is dispelled it's immediately possible to access the DLC's final area and fight the final boss, though at that point the battle is almost unfairly stacked against the player.
To actually get a shot at finishing the DLC you're supposed to search for knights lying in wait in Eleum Loyce's locales and recruit them to help you in battle. It's an interesting mechanic that leaves the amount of the challenge of the final battle partly in the hands of the player and gives him or her an additional incentive to explore a location that thankfully amply rewards exploration. After two DLC that both can be traced back to the design template of Sen's Fortress from the original Dark Souls, Crown of the Ivory King feels like a cross between stark castles like Undead Burg and Boletarian Palace and the frozen self-contained Painted World of Ariamis. Despite being indebted to those locations, though, the DLC has a personality of its own, thanks to the aforementioned special mechanics integrated into its design and also due to the variety of situations it presents. There are winding roads, snowy paths that need a keen eye to be spotted and even hidden ladders, linking together frozen plazas, garrisons and icy caves together.
And speaking of linking, one characteristic Eleum Loyce shares with its predecessors is its penchant for looping into itself. The level offers plenty of shortcuts, and while most amount to doors that can only open from one side, a few are more creative. In particular, the way a certain broken bridge can be fixed manages to tie together the DLC's visual themes, to show a certain devious sense of humor, and also has a minor gameplay application that goes beyond simply opening a shortcut. A similar off-kilter and unsettling sense of humor is showcased by the way you access the DLC's co-op route, which is equally funny and macabre once the implications fully sink in (a pity, again, that the actual area doesn't capitalize on it). Finally, I also believe it's worth mentioning that the area feels larger than the ones featured in the other DLCs. While it doesn't necessarily take much longer to explore, the sense of scale and size the development team has managed to convey is quite welcome, and reminded me of the best vistas of the original Dark Souls.
Encounter and Boss Design
Crown of the Ivory King offers a mix of some more and less conventional enemies that closely mirrors the other two DLCs, and also uses a lot of the same tricks in terms of encounter design. What's more interesting in the DLC approach to monster design and placement, though, is the way it also bucks some of the other trends the previous two DLCs and the main game had set. For example, most humanoid enemies come equipped with ranged attacks this time around, even if they already had melee attacks in their repertoire, making retreats a trickier proposition. There are also some enemies with interesting mechanics attached to them, like giant golems that come alive if you kill other enemies near them, spiky rodents that fill a similar role as the "bonewheels" of the original Dark Souls, and even enemies that purposefully fish for a backstab. In other words, the DLC is more than capable of offering welcome surprises even to someone like me who is already well aware of the design of these games, though nothing an attentive player can't overcome. In a more disappointing turn, though, a few optional areas' enemies reuse assets from the main game in an incredibly blatant way. I wouldn't mind if it was done tastefully, like with the invader NPCs who are just as creative and hilarious in this DLC as they were in the other two, if also slightly annoying for not adhering to the game's established rules, but this is stretching it.
As for the actual bosses of the DLC, it's an interesting mix. The two on the main path both have special mechanics that encourage a player to explore before attempting to tackle them, one of which I already covered briefly earlier, while the other I'll leave for our readers to discover, though there's no artificial barrier preventing a player from beating them early. While the first boss of the DLC provides a complete challenge with various types of melee and magical attacks that test the player's capability to read the telegraphing signs and formulate strategies to react accordingly, and is only slightly marred by some hitboxes that struck me as too large and imprecise, the final boss feels comparatively disappointing, especially when one considers the atmospheric lead up that immediately precedes it. I can understand that the boss was designed to take into account that a player might fight it in unfavorable conditions, but I still felt like the attacks were too slow and easy to punish to challenge me, especially after I learned the patterns of the much harder bosses of the Crown of the Old Iron King DLC.
As usual, there is also a boss at the end of the co-op route, and this time too it's made of reused assets, though they come from the DLC rather than from the main game. While the visual familiarity is disappointing, the way the challenge is increased here is as simple as it's effective, and there are a couple of small touches that keep this encounter from feeling like a simple copy-paste. That said, I question the notion of putting such a hard encounter after an area like the Frozen Outskirts that, as I explained earlier, requires a non-trivial time and energy investment to be completed. It's true that it's an optional encounter, but I always thought that the Souls games are at best when they consider the difficulty of an area in a holistic way, taking measures to prevent a level and a boss from feeling tedious, whether that's by letting you open a shortcut that lets you access the encounter more easily, or by placing a relatively simple boss at the end of a complex and arduous level (one of the most obvious examples I can think of is the second archstone in the Valley of Defilement in Demon's Souls where, after one of the hardest level in the game, you're presented with a relatively simple boss to decompress). To reiterate, it's a good encounter by itself, but its placement feels ill-thought-out, and contributes to my feeling that the DLC's boss offering, while fairly good, isn't quite as on point as in the previous DLC.
Gear and Spells
Just like the other additional content for Dark Souls II, Crown of the Ivory King too provides an assortment of new items and spells to play with. There are a few pieces of armor that come with special effects (including the return of a fan favorite from the original game that was puzzingly absent in the main game), and a few weapons with really interesting special properties, including a stylish but fragile sword that deals strike damage, a new fist weapon whose moveset wouldn't be out of place in a fighting game (depending on your tastes this might be too much, but it's hardly the first time a weapon has had a garish, improbable moveset in the series), and a rapier capable of shooting magic projectiles that's actually quite practical to use. There are also three new spells, a sorcery, a miracle, and a hex, but none of them seems hugely inspired or fresh.
The offering of goodies is strong, then, but I have to mention that a few of them are only given to you by an NPC after grinding some annoyingly rare drops from an enemy type of the DLC. I managed to only obtain 11 of them while using item discovery boosting gear, but to obtain the highest reward it's necessary to have 50 of them. While these items do carry on from one NG cycle to the next, it's still an insane requirement, the kind of time sink that should be relegated to shovelware MMOs, and I really have no idea what the team was thinking here.
Lore, Soundtrack and Art Style
If the original Dark Souls was arguably first and foremost about the dichotomy between light and darkness, Crown of the Ivory King finds its thematic and artistic foundation in another kind of dichotomy or, as the original Dark Souls' intro put it, disparity: the one between heat and cold. What was once a grand kingdom built by a brave king has been made frigid and lifeless, and its great knights now sit crestfallen without anyone to serve or a population to defend. Dark Souls' Lordran and Demon's Souls' Boletarian Palace looked decadent and somewhat grotesque, almost as if life had ground to a halt due to a plague. Eleum Loyce's chilling stillness is more reminiscent of a ghost town, on the other hand: the area is empty and shows no trace of life at all, even though the place was clearly built to be inhabited. In a way that's probably at least partially unintentional: the way most interiors are stark and unadorned makes me suspect the developers simply didn't have the time to go through them for a detail-oriented art pass. Nevertheless, while it might have been unintentional, it still fits the overall tone of the DLC and reinforces the image of a city devoid of life and warmth.
The simple color palette, mostly blues, whites and browns, and the Gothic architecture help in lending the image a coherent quality, one that gets broken to great effect with the visuals of the final encounter of the DLC, the heat to the rest of the DLC's cold. I don't want to get unbearably pretentious, so I'll just note that the purity and simplicity of the narrative feel well at home in its snow white Gothic burg. Crown of the Ivory King is, like the other DLCs, almost completely devoid of talking NPCs, with the silence only broken occasionally by sound effects and a couple of well-written atmospheric pieces of music. I say almost, though, because there is one notable exception. A warden guards the place and addresses you directly, serving as a guide and narrator of sorts. While the developers stayed shy of filling the gaps and still left some room for interpretation on part of the players, there is a crystal clear story here that is told in no uncertain terms by one of its actors. It's a story arc that's already played out by the time the game begins, and while it could be argued that that's true of the stories of most Dark Souls' areas, it's made particularly clear here. This melancholic air is particularly apt, as I imagine for many this DLC will be their final Dark Souls II adventure.
There is, of course, also a finale of sorts for the very thin story arc that ties the three DLC together. Accessible only after the three crowns have been found and brought back, it's an anticlimax that doesn't feel like it quite fits the themes of the story and is rather meaningless in terms of gameplay. What it provides is additional closure and an acknowledgement of the effort and money invested by a dedicated subset of players, which I suppose is both the reason it ultimately matters, and also why it can't be anything more than what it is.
Concluding Thoughts
Crown of the Ivory King has a number of flaws that make me wary of calling it the best of the three DLCs released for Dark Souls II, but it certainly feels like the largest and most interesting of them. More importantly, it provides a satisfying conclusion to the Lost Crowns trilogy, which overall ranks among the best DLC I've ever played. There have been, of course, lost opportunities along the way that are worth mentioning: many of the multiplayer problems the game launched with are still present almost 7 months later, the story additions didn't help illuminate the most confusing parts of the main game, and the so-called challenge routes ended up being a good idea executed terribly. Ultimately, though, the problems are overshadowed by what the DLCs did right: they offered the three best areas of the game, subtly toyed with the game's formula, and offered a variety of new challenges that felt fair and satisfying to overcome. From Software has yet to announce whether Bloodborne will get any downloadable content post-release, but based on their track record I certainly wouldn't mind if it did. They have proven to be capable of crafting the right kind of DLC: sizable, compelling and fun.
