Dark Souls II: Crown of the Ivory King Review
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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.
