I have no issues with DaS2, but this helped me understand my tilting against the windmill of The Last Guardian.
(I have a physiological revulsion to control jank and fluidity is my highest priority, but I don’t think I can communicate that or make someone who doesn’t experience it care.)
See, the thing is that off-putting-ness is highly subjective. Vague off-putting-ness even more so.
And yet, the notion that Dks2 is “bad” (or, in some circles “the worst of the series”, “mediocre”, etc) is pretty widespread and I have to wonder how much of that comes from the power of suggestion of the pervasive “B-Team” comments, how much comes from examining it in contrast to an idealized Dark Souls 1, and how much is genuine “No, I can’t stand this or things like this” which would be pretty baffling to me.
I personally find Dks2 perfectly playable. Maybe it grew on me pretty fast? I was pretty skeptical of its ugly look pre-release, while in this forum people were spinning how it looked like “A PS2 game” as a positive thing. Post-release, opinions seem to have flipped.
I am not denying the game has flaws. I mean, it’s true that they backtracked on the torch mechanics. I simultaneously don’t think the game would be substantially better if you were forced to use a torch to traverse certain parts of the game…
I do like the ladder man
I’ve been playing Dark Souls 2 for the first time, and maybe a dream I had last night can explain my feelings about it.
I had a dream that I was in the world of the Souls games. I was in some mouldering gothic castle and I came upon… a public restroom! Inside, it looked just like your average restroom you’d see in a mall or other business establishment, except full of sights that blended the horrors of Dark Souls with the horrors of real life bathrooms. One toilet was full of mold and fungus. One urinal was full of throbbing organs and tissues. Another urinal had a huge turd floating in it, and the last one had a ridiculously large wad of chewed gum stuck in it.
That’s Dark Souls 2, baby!
In other words,
Dark Souls 2 is… a wad of gum in the urinal of the mind’s eye
(I’ve actually been having a lot of fun with it though)
The criticism of Dark 2 that is impossible for me to get around is that it’s boring.
The levels are boring. The way levels connect are boring. The bosses are boring. Sure, there are interesting things there. But most of the interesting things are interesting in relation to DS1 or 3 or DeS or BB. It definitely expands the realm of what FROM has been doing with this stuff, but it never stands on it’s own. I think this has to do w the B team’s schedule and lack of polish. I’m happy they went weird > polish. But, like, the story is half done. Some sequences are straight up bad. The beginning is too even handed. So many bosses are super boring.
The combat is almost good tho.
how can you call yourself the resident “i like dark souls 2” person here right before shitting on it a bunch (i kid, maybe you like it even more than me lol). all of those things are awesome*. this game comes to closest (of the souls series, that is; Shadow Tower is still the best game they’ve ever made by a wide margin) to capturing what I’m looking for in a From software game, previously only captured by other inappropriately labeled (well, maybe appropriately labeled but i wish more people appreciated them as they are as opposed to in direct relation to their forebearers?) “black sheep” like King’s Field III and Shadow Tower. not only is DaS2 great, it’s by far my favorite of the series and the more I’ve played it the more I’ve found it to be singularly incredible. none of the things people point to as “bad” resonate with me. the whole journey is near-perfect (imperfectly perfect, no less) to me. my biggest quibbles are the bonus bosses in the DLCs, those are pretty stupid and immersion-breaking
*the area design is good, the enemies don’t feel samey to me, the knight-bosses are fantastic, nothing feels like it missed the point (or if it did, it missed the point in incredible and unique ways), there are tons of neat ideas and digressions, etc)
B 
team is a dog whistle
I mean, every good sports movie ever made is about trying to train up a B-team to be good at sports in a hurry and under pressure, so I don’t think it’s an expressly negative concept
For what?
this is what i get for posting while half asleep and migrainey
i’ll talk later as i’m going to have a busy day but i think people need to chill a little
dark souls 2 will tear us apart again
Brogamerdom?
No, wait, NeoGaf-gamerdom
Remember that story about how the two Dev teams that made Deus Ex were called Team A and Team 1 because nobody wanted to be in the B team? They sure thought it had a negative connotation
A Souls of Their Own
Yeah i apologize if i have been too demanding in this conversation, i know we’re all adults with busy lives
Half-asleep migrainey takes are valid too ok
I thought a dog whistle is a code word, like “local control” = “local ability to segregate.” What’s the hidden meaning behind B-team? It plainly means the Treyarch to the “A-team’s” Infinity Ward. It’s a dig, yeah.
i am pretty chill, but also i get a tiny bit frustrated with the best defenses of DaS2 being couched in concessions to the usual gripes about the game. those things are not actually bad to everyone - i’m not here thinking “this is a very flawed game that is still interesting” - i’m thinking, “holy shit i wish any other game could make me feel like this and be so appealing to play and think about.” pretty much only time i enjoy videogames these days is when i’m speedrunning them (though i have enjoyed casual ocarina of time, surprisingly), so dark souls 2 means a lot to me.
wellllll I think you might be saying more than you realize here?
being into speedrunning (near as I can tell) means you’re really really into taking a deep/narrow view & taking for granted that things are the way they are & trying to work into those grooves as hard as you can & probably more likely to discard a game’s gestalt (saying nothing of its polish) as it’s not interesting to you. so of course you’d be into dark souls two!
i appreciate your avatar+post combo greatly
i wouldn’t say that enjoying speedrunning defines how i appreciate games. it’s a new trend for me. i only started in august of last year!
the vast majority of my life i haven’t been speedrunning. i have never run DaS2 and am not really itching to do so. i played DaS2 entirely before i ran anything. my playstyle in DaS2 doesn’t reflect how a speedrunner would approach the game, either.
the thing is, speedrunning grips me because of very specific nuances in the games themselves, whereas it is the very gestalt of DaS2 that i’m attracted to in the first place. the actual sum of what DaS2 does to me is the important part, not the deep/narrow views.
edit: i would say that DaS2 stands even taller because it’s the only game in recent memory that had any of that effect on me - it stands in stark contrast to what i get out of speedrunning tbh
yeah every time I think about changing it I make a dick joke or I use a german word in a mildly condescending way
anyway I still think there might be something there in terms of your interest in speedrunning and how it may overlap with this very fragmentary messy thing but I’m not up to probing further atm and I appreciate you pushing back