Dark Souls 2: Death and Crippling Rebirth
The wait is over my fellow Darkies! Oh wait...
Anyway Dark Souls 2 has been out for a couple of weeks and no doubt you've heard people all abuzz and blissfully chattering about how good it feels to die again. Yes death is quite a liberating experience. Especially when you have to experience it hundreds and hundreds of times to the point that last I checked the World Death Counter, which tracks the global count of online deaths, for PS3 was somewhere in the 20 million mark. It's a jolly old genocide and everyone's loving it.
But death isn't the only thing that Dark Souls 2 is bringing, no. From Software does not take sequels lightly and they sure as hell didn't intend to half ass their biggest title yet. There's enough mechanics to shake a hollow leg at and they're all thrown at you in the first 20 minutes. Unless you take longer than 20 minutes to die then who knows. Dying in Dark Souls 1 was pretty inconsequential (wait we're still talking about death? yes shut up, death is everything). You'd die, lose your souls and your "liquid humanity" and go hollow which basically just translated to those 30 minutes you spent customizing your character were suddenly made pointless. But, there was always the chance to get your souls and humanity back by reaching your death spot without dying again. Simple right? Dark Souls 2 says thats not brutal enough. We need to have a mechanic that continually punishes you for dying. So now when you die you go increasingly hollow with each death. This translates to your health being permanently reduced more and more with each death to a maximum of 50% health reduction. Oh and your character gets uglier and uglier the more you hollow. Also the souls retrieval is back. It's cool though just pop a human effigy (which are semi-rare) and you get all your health bar back and get your pretty little human mask back.
From Software is a tough lover. They want you to learn from death and learn from not dying. The more you play a Souls game the more you, as a player, gain experience. There's no ultimate strategy, no best weapon, no god mode armor. Learn to block, learn to dodge, learn to run, learn to fight and you'll learn to win.
It might sound a little elitist but you'll hear the phrase "get good" when you complain about Dark Souls difficulty but it's actually the most sound advice you'll receive. Don't give up. Get good.
They also apparently realized people really love PvP and Co-op so they've implemented multiple different covenants specifically for this. In fact nearly all the covenants revolve around PvP and Co-op. Unfortunately the implementation is still rather clunky and leads to disconnections, lag, and waiting long times to actually be connected to someone. The PvP scene is rather competitive despite this so you're in for a blast.
There's so much to talk about in this sequel that it's actually staggering. So much of it is good that it would be much quicker to tell you whats wrong.
Souls games are notorious for letting you figure things out, however they made Dark Souls 2 almost TOO open ended in that you can access many areas early or have areas that lead to dead ends that you'll waste a lot of time on before realizing it's not the way you need to go to progress. It lacks that flow and gentle nudging that Dark Souls had. One point of the game had me going mad over an elevator that wouldn't work and it turned out that I needed to kill a certain enemy while keeping others alive for a magic rune to activate and turn a switch which moved the elevator on the other side of the map. This wasn't an optional thing. This was part of the main quest. I'm all for hiding things in strange areas or having crazy methods of doing things but not main plot progression.
Boss fights are also noticeably less interesting this time around. Very few truly stand out which is odd since they throw so many at you. There has to be at least 30 bosses in the game but none have the same impact as the monstrosities and nightmare fuel in Dark Souls. This isn't to say they're not fun battles. They're every bit as fun and challenging but the character designs are rather lackluster.
There isn't a whole lot to complain about and the praise massively outweighs it anyway. It's an incredible game with tight controls, huge scope, never gets boring, fantastic lore, and pure ambition from the ground up. It's a monument to true hardcore gaming. The year may be early but it is easily a Game of the Year contender already. Though they can screw themselves for nerfing the Great Scythe.
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