Games & Culture: 9/9/21 Homework

by Thomas Pulsifer

Game Review: Dark Souls II

Continuing on with my series of FromSoftware reviews, I’ll next be covering the infamous sequel to Dark Souls, Dark Souls II. It’s no secret that this game is the least well-received Soulsborne game developed by FromSoftware. Ask any Dark Souls fan which game they think is the worst in the series, and you’re sure to hear Dark Souls II. Many people attribute this drop in quality to the fact that the director of the series up until this point, Hidetaka Miyazaki, was focusing on a different project. I knew about this reputation going into my first playthrough of the game, so I was prepared for the worst. However, while the game doesn’t reach the same heights as the previous two Souls games, I still ended up feeling pleasantly surprised.

Compared to the previous entries, what makes Dark Souls II stand out most is it’s abundance of enemies. And when I say abundance, I actually mean overabundance. There are simply too many enemies in this game. The combat of the Souls series is designed for 1-on-1 battles, with some cleverly-designed exceptions. Dark Souls II, meanwhile, will throw multiple enemies at you at a time. It feels as though this design choice was made to inflate difficulty, but doing so just leads to the difficulty feeling artificial rather than challenging, but fair.

That leads us into what I feel is the biggest fundamental issue regarding this game: It’s approach to difficulty. In the previous Souls games, the difficulty was never the focus. Director Miyazaki simply felt that a challenge would provide players with not only more immersion, but also a greater feeling of accomplishment. Meanwhile, in Dark Souls II, there was clearly much more focus put into making the game hard for the sake of being hard. It’s obvious this was done mostly for the sake of marketing, since the notorious difficulty is often why people purchase a Souls game. Unfortunately, this leads to Dark Souls II feeling less challenging and more obnoxious.

Despite these issues, I would still say that Dark Souls II is a game worth playing. Many of the bosses in this game are some of the most memorable bosses in the series. The best changes are the smaller features added, such as the ability to warp between bonfires at any point in the game, a faster levelling system, an improved Estus upgrade system, and more. Though it may be the worst Souls game, Dark Souls II is by no means a bad game, and I would encourage anyone dissuaded by this game’s bad reputation to give it a shot.

Score: 6.9 overabundant enemies out of 10