dark souls ii is good because it has the most king’s field/shadow tower vibes of all the souls stuff
ie dissociative, strange and ineffable, and ultimately unimportant, meaningless, and irrelevant (in a good way~!)
9 Likes
maybe i just don’t have the patience to play the game the way it wants to be played. it’s a trap to try to pick off enemies one by one and even with high ADP you’re no ninja. the levels give you enough space to circle around while guarding and chip away, and the Ruin Sentinels boss fight is probably supposed to teach this. you just end up staring at bare stone most of the time and fighting a thousand of the same dude and i’d end up wishing each area were over before i was halfway through it.
4 Likes
ADP/Agility is like the worst mechanic in a Souls game just for how consequential vs how poorly explained it is, most of their other confusing/bad mechanics can be ignored. When you know what the breakpoints are (i keep them on a slip of paper tucked into the game case) it becomes trivial itself. A small change that would have gone a long way wouldve been make the Agility stat more like Attunement slots, Agility+0, +1, +2 etc. at each breakpoint. That would just tell you directly how many extra invincibility frames you had on top of your base frames (since you get +1 per breakpoint)
it kinda mirrors my feelings about the game as a whole: didnt get it at first, hated it, grew to click with it, absolutely loved it now its my 2nd favorite in the series. Except that last part, I will never love ADP and still think Dark Souls 1 had the best weight class/dodge mechanics
I can grasp a logic to it now though. Character wise, you’re a weak and fragile zombie at first, so chances are your reflexes won’t exactly be catlike either. For the player it enforces caution and spacing at the beginning of the game, using your dodge to escape away from danger instead of rolling through it. like Heide’s Tower of Flame makes the most sense if you think of it as a dodge roll tutorial zone: open platforms connected by narrow walkways, and enemies with wide reaching, powerful, slow attacks. It’s teaching you to dodge but carefully, and not throw yourself into the sea. couple with DS2 having the harshest stamina costs in the series and it’s really teaching a certain pace of tactical retreating + looking for openings not just between attacks, but on different ground
But if youre coming in as a veteran of the previous Souls games, used to mixing it up with Allant and Artorias, it just feels shitty and at best prescriptive. and it hurt the games rep too, i think 90% of the perception that it’s utter jank with bad hitboxes came from early lack of understanding ADP. when youre at a comfortable level of Agility it feels fine! usually!
sorry lol ive had thoughts about this one weird game mechanic for years
12 Likes
i’d give Bloodborne a bit more credit though. Old Yharnam with the gatling fire and exploding urns, precipitously ascending and descending the Workshop tower, the brainsuckers who can immobilise you from a distance before they grab you. dogs and marksmen make a pretty deadly combination. the trap forest got me good a fair few times as well as the intensely deep and vertical snake part where i died in some new unfamiliar pocket half a dozen times. there’s also the Pthumerian snatchers hiding in dark corners who are very hard to evade if you stumble into confrontation with one.
Hunter’s Nightmare stands out to me as the most NES-like design of the series with enemies’ ability to act as roadblocks. the old hunters are extremely aggressive with an enormous attack radius, and coupled with narrow paths crammed with obstacles and traps (and those disgusting bloodlicker enemies from Cainhurst), they can give you a significant headache if you try to breeze through the place.
10 Likes
60 hours into my new playthrough and forget about all these super hard new bosses, i can’t even beat fuckin Mohg
3 Likes
I’m having ok fun with this but I still maintain that the best Dark Souls is the first half of Dark Souls 1. That is a perfect experience. They should have ended the game there and refused to do any sequels or successors.
One big complaint I have with Elden Ring is that I just don’t find the overworld or fiddly dungeons particularly compelling. The former is weirdly empty and also totally bypassable and the latter feels like filler, because it is filler.
The new DLC feels even more weirdly empty. The number of times where I’ve rode my horse some place and it just is a dead and with nothing is really surprising.
10 Likes
dark souls is irresistibly slick but too spartan. i like that they’ve become more colourful and ostentatious
4 Likes
playing scholar of the first sin this game is hilarious lol. they took the weirdest game and doubled the enemy count and made it more intent on killing you a bunch maybe more of these games should get like a twisted sicko remix version. kind of feels like the sadist counterpart to miyazaki’s masochist bent
6 Likes
it’s also really funny in hindsight just how much more it feels like a king’s field game
like I know people made that comparison at the time, it’s not a new insight, but I think everyone was still primed to compare it to dark souls back in 2014, when it’s really really king’s field-y
8 Likes
my favourite bit of odd jank in dark souls 2 is in vanilla Iron Keep: the jumpable gap in the pathway in front of Smelter Demon’s door. it feels like an interruption of flow on a similar wavelength to Elden Ring’s “Consume Flask to Resummon Steed” prompt.
also it’s hilarious how the whole “B team”/“A team” distinction was formed based on DS2/Bloodborne’s simultaneous development, when Elden Ring feels like a continuation of both games’ art directions.
2 Likes
Mohg’s dead, on my first attempt after switching to Ghiza’s wheel.
First boss i encountered in the DLC is just some dude and he annihilated me
1 Like
5 Likes
disregard all of my complaints about the dlc’s difficulty because apparently it mattered that i played it in NG+3
16 Likes
i’ve been playing shadow of the erdtree again on NG with a tank build (heavy armor, greatshields, halberds, crossbows, daggers, straight swords) and it’s embarrassingly easily. it would be cool if regular enemies could be NG+3 strength with the bosses on NG. dying in two or three hits to common soldiers made the level design more impactful - spacing and positioning were much more important when i couldn’t shrug off their attacks.
some recent multiplayer interactions:
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summoned as a blue phantom to limgrave. i open the map and the host is on top of the tomb near the first step grace, where it would be impossible for an invader or a phantom to reach him, going for passive rune farming. i mill around with a red phantom; we are refusing to reward this rent-seeking behavior. the red drops me 40 duplicated runes of marika and i desummon myself. i cash in the runes at the roundtable hold and level up from like 105 - 140
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summoned to help a host with commander niall. the other phantom and i both happen to have greatshields, pulley crossbows, and stacks of bleed and rot bolts, and we take down the boss in a safe and professional manner
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summoned as a blue into the field at the beginning of the dlc to a solo host fighting a phantom. the phantom is wielding a weapon i don’t even remember and doesn’t keep us pressured but he does manage to pull the host to the horned ascetic with the obnoxious moveset. there’s another invader but they’re just holding a torch in the middle distance. after the fight, i notice that they’re named “drip inspector” - their m.o. is to walk up to you, kick you into a good viewing position with the weapon art on their torch, and look you over with the binoculars - this guy earned a “you’re beautiful” and a marika’s rune, of course:
(screenshot washed out due to HDR)
drip inspector later summoned me to fight the golden hippo but they didn’t survive phase 2
9 Likes
having reached but not cleared Haligtree and Farum Azula on my NG character the DLC has been making mincemeat out of me. maybe it’s just been a while since i remembered to upgrade my equipment but i’ve been exploring the map first and collecting fragments and am still unable to make a scratch in the bosses whose doors i’m at
1 Like
honestly the way you inexplicably inch slightly forward when you turn around on the spot in dark souls 2 might be the twitchy videogame action that sticks with me most in the series, and it feels like a programming oversight
(tbf i think my favourite feeling in super mario bros 3 – which is the way momentum is conferred by moving platforms that suddenly change direction – might also be a programming oversight)
2 Likes
the dlc is balanced around fully upgraded weapons, i’d say progress through farum azula and at least beat the godskin duo and make it to the bonfire before maliketh so you can buy upgrade materials to get everything you might use on the bosses up to +9 or +24
4 Likes
I need to fuck around online more.
I recently decided to summon help for bosses instead of using ashes and its been a lot of fun seeing people’s builds. I feel like I am finally growing faster than the game is putting out challenge. Im starting to peek over the ridge of competency after 270 hours (previous hour estimates were off).
Right now Im fucking off and avoiding mesmer after he laid me out pretty hard. (previous mesmer report was based on my mistaking his first acolyte for the man himself lol)
Im just having more and more fun with the game.
Edit:
Watched videos of the last boss I beat (master of a particular manor) and I am not doing badly. It seems like a lot of people really do not know how to use jumps or time rolls to stay in on an enemy. While I often execute badly I am at least using sound tactics.
I really wish there was a way to switch weapons without losing 2-hand stance.
5 Likes
I agree with the widely cited complaint that character progression being tied to scadutree fragments instead of like, actually building your character stats is the weakest part of this DLC
that said given how level scaling/caps kind of have to work in this game combined with the open world / nonlinear nature I’m not sure how they could have done it differently short of completely redoing stat / level scaling curves which I’m sure everyone would have hated
I also think I came into the DLC overleveled so I didn’t get quite as satisfying of a difficulty curve in the legacy dungeons. but this is maybe also because I chose an arcane build for this run and this DLC seems particularly generous to that stat.
but none of this really seemed to matter. the vibes in this DLC are immaculate, the art direction is consistently sublime, and it honestly was kind of refreshing to be able to coast through most of that without having to fret over losing huge swaths of runes or micromanaging stat allocation.
I feel even more strongly about this being dark souls 2 like. it has impressively dense level design with key passageways to major areas being comically easy to miss, and despite this density many major areas feel cruelly empty, devoid of even the paltry smithing stone filler items that the landscape is mostly strewn with. often all you’re really left with is the atmosphere, which is just consistently terrific throughout. I love the abyssal woods especially for this reason.
I also loved the manse, which reminds me heavily of a quake map, and not just because quake also has a level called the manse. I wish it was larger which is how I feel about most of the legacy dungeons but I think the entire abyssal woods are meant to be considered part of that legacy dungeon as well and it sits a little better with me when I think about all this in the context of the pre-release interviews where miyazaki talked about how the overworld design was meant to feel more legacy dungeon-like. this DLC does a pretty good job of blurring those lines even if I’d have preferred a little more tightness throughout.
also I love using the perfume bottles on horseback.
12 Likes