$100,000. $100,000. That is how much you can expect to pay if you don't want to spend countless hours grinding to get your character maxed out. $100,000. That is insane. There is no justification for that. None. Don't give me the garbage excuse that devs deserve to be paid for their work. Not a penny of that is going to devs. It is all going to bonuses and vacations for the C-suite as they tout their bottom line to investors. If you're willing to put up with this kind of crap, then you are what's wrong with modern gaming.

The Blizzard we all loved growing up is long dead.

I played ds2 originally in 2017, so a lot of my memories from it were very blurry and incomplete. From my original playthrough i can honestly attest to not enjoying a single second of it. However, the general consensus seems to have changed, and suddenly this is the best game ever made. I decided to replay it with an open mind to see if theres something i potentially missed.

No, i was right. This game feels bad. Character creation is extremely limiting with basic things like hair, and im pretty sure they gender-locked certain options so if i wanted short hair i just had to roll with the anime Ellen Degeneres look.

Dark souls 2 has a very bland sense of style, ive always thought that every single thing from this game felt extremely generic. What if hollows just looked like basic zombies? What if the fire keeper looked like she got her outfit straight from Party City? The giants are the most iconic thing from this game, and they still were almost just bland, basic trolls you could see anywhere. The design is bad, there is no solid or unique sense of a look. The only thing i can say is that the environments look nice and have color, which is something actual dark souls lacks.

Alright, so i thought, this isnt a good dark souls game. But maybe it could be fun as its own thing.

No. The gameplay still feels utterly wretched. Its been a long time since ive controlled something so awful. Everything about it just feels wrong... the design philosophy of this game just feels like "hey, this aint your MOM'S dark souls!!!! You only get ONE flask!!"

I could play dark souls with one flask, but not this one. Why does it take so, so long to drink. What are life gems, why would you not just give me more flasks. Why are there so many random items that are just variants of an already existing item. Why does my character move like shes walking through mud. Everything takes so long, nothing feels smooth to do. In fact, the only things that feel nice are the things that arent really important, like climbing a latter and jumping. Combat feels equally as bad. Everything feels like its a joke at the players expense, for example why can i break chests if it just destroys whatevers in it? What purpose does that have other than to deny me a reward? Why does dying reduce my health pool when ive already been punished for failing? Nothing here feels natural or good to play, or worth my time.

I didnt even get to the first boss this time around, i got to a room that killed me immediately with javelins upon entering and i turned off the game. I refunded it for dark souls 1, and to be honest i really just do not get why people like this game so much other than the fact that they know its bad and they just want to say the opposite. Dark souls 2 does not feel good at all to play.


Shoutout to smelly joe...

This game is the one that I played the most in my life. I do not know the exact number of hours, but I'm sure I spend more than 5k hours.

I played this game while I was in my adolescence and to be honest, I was addicted. Played this game every day, for more than 3 hours, for 6-7 years. The progress was really slow if you were a F2P player, but it was satisfying at the same time. There was a great community and the pvp was nice, I specially liked the low level pvp, where you could abuse the new players.

The current state of the game is bad, almost dead, it's not as good as it was back before release 155, and I do not recommend it to play it now. I'm not playing it since 2020.