The game is great and I loved almost every second of it. It was challenging, engaging, interesting and above all, fun. But as I sat in front of my PC last night watching the credits go buy I cant help but feel a little "meh" about the whole experience. I know that sounds really weird and contradictory but I'll try to do the best I can to explain myself.
From a game play perspective, DS2 is fantastic. It takes elements from the first Dark Souls that weren't all that good or just a bit annoying and makes them better while adding a few things of its own and that's great. The world is also pretty huge and filled with plenty of lore so from a story standpoint it holds up but, and maybe this is just me, the game did absolutely NOTHING to immerse me in it's world. At no point did I feel like I was on a grand adventure, I just felt like I was going through the motions.
Demon's Souls tells you straight up that the world is fucked because of some fog and it is up to you as a brave adventurer to go and un-fuck it. That felt like a grand adventure and the icing on the cake was getting to learn all the radical shit about Boletaria.
Dark Souls did a great job of making me feel like I was on a grand adventure by laying on the insurmountable goals thick and fast. One minute I'm just some prick with a sword or whatever and I have to ring some bells. So I pull that off and I'm told that maybe I'm the Chosen Undead or something but probably not but just in case I should go and get a big pot from a castle. So I undergo all sorts of terrible trials to get this big pot and the fucking thing turns out to be empty so I have to travel the land far and wide finding DEITIES to kill so I can steal their souls and put them in my pot. Then once I've done THAT I have to go and fight what is essentially the father of all creation or some shit and kill him and once that was all said and done I get to decide the fate of all man.
THAT'S FUCKING RADICAL!
Dark Souls 2 on the other hand didn't really have much of anything and it's core plot felt a bit lazy. In that game I'm just some cursed dude who's drawn to the land of Drangleic for......reasons. When I get there some bitch tells me to go see the king but to do that I have to go and get 4 very powerful souls. ALRITE! SOUNDS GOOD! But once I've done that what comes next? Well a lot of fucking nothing really. I explore a castle, kill some bosses, open some doors and when all is said and done I don't feel like I achieved anything.
The final boss of the game is the most challenging boss in a Souls game to date from a game play perspective but I don't really know what the fuck I was fighting there. The design of the thing made it look like Gravelord Nito's sister or some shit. [Spoilers] Then when I killed her all I did was have a sit down in a chair and the game fucking ended [End Spoilers]
My reaction to beating Dark Souls 2 was "is that it?", and that's not the kind of reaction I should be having to a game that is supposedly about grand adventure! Anyway, that was the biggest letdown with the game but it was full of other problems too.
Dark Souls 2 is way, WAY easier than any other Souls game. The only parts where the game gets challenging is where poison comes in. There are so many fucking poison segments in this game that it feels like they just forgot how to design good enemies so instead gave everything a poison attack or just make the floor poison or something to make things harder.
But even then the challenge isn't really a big deal because the Ring of Life Protection is repairable and the cost to repair it is super cheap so once you get just one of these rings then you basically never have to worry about losing souls ever again. Death means -3000 souls while before dying meant that if you weren't careful you could potentially lose fucking everything.
Also the game makes a big deal of you losing a little bit of health every time you die, which is a big thing at the start of the game but after a while human effigies drop like candy and even if you are the worlds most unlucky person you can just buy them so that whole feature of the game just becomes completely pointless.
Despite all my complaints though I still really like Dark Souls 2, just not as much as the other Souls games. But that says a lot about the quality of Souls as a series when a bad entry of the series is STILL really fun to play. So even after reading about feelings of slight disappointment with this game, you should still totally go buy it
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