Let's Talk... Dark Souls 2

For those for aren't familiar with the strange systems and mechanics of the Dark Souls games, the basics are essentially as follows: killing enemies and bosses grants you with souls, which act as the game’s currency. These souls can be spent on a variety of things: levelling up a handful of useful stats that offer a variety of different benefits, upgrading weapons and armour to increase their effectiveness or enchant them with certain magical bonuses, or buying items that will aid in your endeavour. Every time you die you drop all of the souls you currently have right where you died, and must return to collect them in your next life or they will disappear forever. And I mean forever. That’s basically the core of all you really need to know about a game that, despite its reputation for being inaccessible and extremely difficult, is actually a surprisingly approachable game. All it requires is a little patience and the acceptance of the fact that you will lose souls, and a lot of them.

Majula, the game's hub, where you'll be returning to very frequently to level up, repair items and see just how many times players have died worldwide

The core gameplay mechanics that Demon’s Souls and the original Dark Souls set up remain relatively unchanged intact. The small learning curve is still very much there for new players, but veterans of the previous games should have no problem jumping back in. Souls still work in the same way, stats are generally the same, and the obtuse dedication to animations being punishingly difficult to cancel and almost always the main reason for your death. Although Dark Souls has a reputation for being an extremely difficult game, it really isn't. The games have never been downright hard, but simply extremely punishing, and although that may makes the game hard in its own rights, the game really isn't all that hard once you accept that you have zero margins for almost any error. Thanks to its improved presentation and UI elements, better streamlining of tutorials and explanations, and general decline in overall difficulty from the previous games, Dark Souls 2 is probably the most accessible the game has been for a while. However, that’s a large part of what made it feel like a diminished experience when compared to the extremely unique and entirely memorable experience that was the original Dark Souls.

A hugely convenient fast travel system is available as soon as you've lit your first bonfire, which, although a huge time saver, inadvertently makes the world feel a lot less like the continuous and sprawling world that the original Dark Souls created. The ability to quickly zip from one place to another from any bonfire makes returning to locations in search of items, bosses or simply to farm out some much-needed souls significantly easier. However, this time-saving mechanic has the confusing effect of making the game feel a lot less focused from a narrative perspective (since you're going from one very different area to another fighting boss after boss with no apparent narrative connection between them) whilst simultaneously making it feel more focused from a gameplay perspective (since there's more boss fights and less finding boss fights). Dark Souls 2 basically feels a lot more like an elongated endless boss run, which somehow manages to both diminishes a lot of what Dark Souls 1 felt like whilst also cutting out a lot of the middle-man and just getting to the meat of what Dark Souls is really about: banging your head against boss after boss until eventually it breaks through. 

Multiplayer summons and being "invaded" by other players remains a very big part of Dark Souls 2 

This creates the inadvertent effect of a lot of the areas feeling very disconnected from one another narratively (in that each environment is so radically different from the last, and it seems infeasible that you would go from between such areas in such quick succession), this comes with the added side effect of allowing the environments to have a really nice degree of variety to them. Instead of a lot of the very samey castles and fairly stale environments (for the most part) of Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 2 offers some impressive variety from its dense forested area to an apocalyptic ruin with ruined structures that stand above a large stretch of water. Excellent variety which is typically followed up with some gorgeous art to match, meaning that even when the game’s technical prowess can’t quite get there, the fantastic art is usually there to keep it looking interesting enough.

Although this may sound like Dark Souls 2 has done a great job of streamlining the core of the Dark Soul’s experience, in reality it’s actually done the opposite. Despite the many interesting and immensely challenging boss battles being the core of what people loved about the original Dark Souls, it was the little things that really made it special. The sudden realisation that the entire world is connected by these little passages and doorways, the weird, mini-boss-like elite enemies that were almost as difficult as some of the bosses, the exasperated sigh of relief when you finally stumbled across that bonfire you’d so desperately been hoping for. That was so key to what made Dark Souls such a unique and memorable experience, and, for the most part, Dark Souls 2 feels like it lost a lot of that mystery and unpredictability in a somewhat disappointing attempt to recreate such an amazingly unique game. The inherent and consistent focus on quantity over quality is one of Dark Souls 2’s biggest downfalls. More areas, more bosses, more weapons, more loot. Dark Souls 2 has around 32 boss fights in total, around a dozen more than Dark Souls 1. However, all that having more boss fights does, in reality, is make the majority of the bosses bland and fairly generic (the majority of the game’s boss fights are just tougher-than-usual dudes with a large weapon, a handful of plain attack patterns and a lot of health). Furthermore, the extreme over-saturation of boss fights also ruins the excitement and unpredictability of finally reaching a boss fight, mainly because there are just so many of them, but also because most of them are incredibly trivial (which was extremely disappointing considering the crux of the Dark Souls experience is that it’s meant to be extremely difficult). I should probably clear up one thing, however: for all my complaining about the extreme ease of the game, Dark Souls 2 is not an easy game, especially not by typical RPG standards, my problem is simply that compared to the gruelling fights that filled Dark Souls 1, this game feels substantially easier.

The HUD and on-screen information remains pretty much unchanged

Another side effect of having so many boss fights is that you accrue a hefty amount of souls a lot quicker than you did in the first game. This time round bosses give you a lot more souls per kill, which quickly add up as you zip from one area to the next killing boss after boss (there are some diminishing returns that make souls eventually lose a lot of their worth, however, once level-ups begin to cost upwards of 15k souls). This is also added to by one of the game’s new, and very interesting, mechanics that come from items called Bonfire Ascetics. These items allow you to “intensify” the flame of any bonfire, thus increasing the difficulty of enemies, respawning bosses and items, and essentially making the area re-doable after you’ve cleared out many of the enemies and bosses. Naturally, these more difficult enemies and bosses drop significantly better items, loot and “boss souls” which can be turned into better-than-average weapons and armour. It’s a really interesting mechanic that sets up a lot of risk-reward scenarios that revolve around using these reasonably rare items (early on, at least) for a shot at some better items and more souls, but with the knowledge that the effect cannot be reversed.

The obnoxiously cryptic nature of how information is delivered to the player is very much a part of Dark Soul's unique charm; the sheer lack of useful information (i.e. item descriptions that actually explain how much stat X is increased by, instead of simply saying “increases stat X”) can get a little frustrating. Discovering what weapons, items, spells etc. can or cannot do can be quite a lot of fun in itself, but some things are just unnecessarily mysterious (severely lacking explanations for pretty rudimentary spells, for example, just feels a little over the top). The non "hand-holdy" nature of Dark Souls 2's approach may serve as a refreshing reprieve for those who have grown tired of the crude and somewhat condescending way in which many (typically Western) role-playing games treat new players, and a lot of people love Dark Souls for that very reason. However, when a lot of the game’s core mechanics are hardly explained, that's just bad game design and not something that should be so heavily praised. By all means keep the description of some really rare, obscure item a secret and allow me to find out for myself, but when the player has to go to walkthrough to understand how to summon in NPCs and other players (a fairly core mechanic, and the crux of the multiplayer), there's a problem.

An example of one of the game's earlier bosses, the Flexile Sentry

One of the biggest and most obvious improvements Dark Souls 2 brings is its huge improvements in both visual fidelity and overall frame rate performance. No longer will a certain enemies' ability cause the frame rate to drop into single digits, and, thankfully, the game looks considerably better than the, frankly, broken PC port of the original Dark Souls. Vastly improved lighting and particle effects make for a much better-looking game, whilst the nice lighting adds a little much-needed atmosphere to the series, with bonfires creating ominously looming shadows whilst simultaneously looking oddly eerie themselves. Furthermore, Dark Souls 2 brings some small improvements to its UI and menus, but they still need some work to even reach the standards for menu interfaces in most modern RPGs (which really aren't even that high themselves, in fairness). Although certainly an improvement to the clunky and awkward menus and UI of Dark Souls, navigating through your inventory and sorting items could be a lot more streamlined in its execution, especially with the sheer volume of items you quite quickly accrue whilst playing. As for PC-specific controls, playing with a mouse + keyboard is no longer the death wish it was in Dark Souls and is certainly possible, but is by no means a preferable alternative to simply using a gamepad. This time round the PC is easily the best version to pick up, if you can of course.

Ultimately, Dark Souls 2 is, for all my grievances, still a great game. It’s just that when compared to the incredibly unique game that the first Dark Souls was, this feels like a cheapened and diminished experience. If you played and enjoyed the first Dark Souls, then you’ll most likely still have a good time here, and, in a lot of ways, it’s a better game than Dark Souls (from a technical and mechanical perspective). The game looks, plays and runs a lot better than its predecessors, and there’s still a lot of satisfaction to be gained from slaying boss after boss (however easy a lot of them may be). If you were hoping for a harder and even more punishing Dark Souls, then unfortunately this isn’t it, but you should be more than happy if you’re looking to get in on some more accessible Dark Souls action.