nothing embodies this experience better than the 1-2 punch of the loopy arthouse perfume commercial intro followed almost directly by the mcdonalds ass "595839122 deaths served worldwide" advert in majula
on one hand we got a game with the foresight of a haruspex that envisions the ever-escalating arms race the series would find itself in and tries to preempt it with radical mechanical changes, and on the other we got a game that thinks Rat With a Mohawk is a really sick idea for a boss
this thing is the living end; the result of a wild disregard for anything fans consider sacred and a critical eye that found dark souls' core pillars wanting. given the chance to do a remix/remaster they chose to ignore all feedback, double down on all the bullshit, and name it SCHOLAR OF THE FIRST SIN like it's a terrence malick movie. the haters never had a prayer against this kind of power
oscillates between achingly beautiful and sandy petersen's work on doom II. presents characters as haunting as vendrick and lucatiel then goes and reskins dark souls' most emotionally resonant encounter as ripper roo. both modern fromsoft's most melancholic, human game, and the only one where you're forced to play as an absolute mutant
I'm at the point where I'm glad the lighting got downgraded before it came out. it should be fucked, it needs to feel sickly and eroded and wrong. iron keep has to be something you can't understand, and the transition from shaded woods to drangleic castle has to be as disorienting as possible. every time you question the earthen peak elevator I only grow stronger and more insufferable
this is the response to a call no one made. it's gotchas behind gotchas behind gotchas, noble failures, bandai namco PTDE marketing quotes, and fromsoft's most indulgently experimental design since demon's souls. it's the bondage gimp door, the gender swap coffin, npc invaders modeled after the most dickhead player behaviour possible, and the cumulative psychic damage of the frigid outskirts
it's fighting the rotten four times to skip half the game, becoming drangleic's next top model, and having NAMELESS CHAD kill you while you idle in iron keep. it's backstep iframes, powerstancing demon hammers, unbelievably good pvp, and yui tanimura's masterful turn as director of the dlc trilogy
talk all the shit you want:
a lie will remain a lie
on one hand we got a game with the foresight of a haruspex that envisions the ever-escalating arms race the series would find itself in and tries to preempt it with radical mechanical changes, and on the other we got a game that thinks Rat With a Mohawk is a really sick idea for a boss
this thing is the living end; the result of a wild disregard for anything fans consider sacred and a critical eye that found dark souls' core pillars wanting. given the chance to do a remix/remaster they chose to ignore all feedback, double down on all the bullshit, and name it SCHOLAR OF THE FIRST SIN like it's a terrence malick movie. the haters never had a prayer against this kind of power
oscillates between achingly beautiful and sandy petersen's work on doom II. presents characters as haunting as vendrick and lucatiel then goes and reskins dark souls' most emotionally resonant encounter as ripper roo. both modern fromsoft's most melancholic, human game, and the only one where you're forced to play as an absolute mutant
I'm at the point where I'm glad the lighting got downgraded before it came out. it should be fucked, it needs to feel sickly and eroded and wrong. iron keep has to be something you can't understand, and the transition from shaded woods to drangleic castle has to be as disorienting as possible. every time you question the earthen peak elevator I only grow stronger and more insufferable
this is the response to a call no one made. it's gotchas behind gotchas behind gotchas, noble failures, bandai namco PTDE marketing quotes, and fromsoft's most indulgently experimental design since demon's souls. it's the bondage gimp door, the gender swap coffin, npc invaders modeled after the most dickhead player behaviour possible, and the cumulative psychic damage of the frigid outskirts
it's fighting the rotten four times to skip half the game, becoming drangleic's next top model, and having NAMELESS CHAD kill you while you idle in iron keep. it's backstep iframes, powerstancing demon hammers, unbelievably good pvp, and yui tanimura's masterful turn as director of the dlc trilogy
talk all the shit you want:
a lie will remain a lie
23 Comments
I'm really glad I'm not the only one that never really had problems with the way DS2's world is interconnected, I prefer how DS1 handles it, but this more broken, almos abstract Drangleic feels ethereal, misplaced in a way that it feels so purposel, tho I still have my qualms with how the areas themselves are handled in most cases... tho I still need to revisit it to see how my actual thoughts on it hold up. Amazing write-up as always curse, wasn't expecting the comparasions to Doom II but that made me want to take a look at this one again even more
@beautifulbrute
the nameless chad (death) comes for us all eventually
@deemonandgames
thank you. I largely agree with you there: no issues with the world design, but the levels themselves are wildly inconsistent. the doom II comparison didn't hit me until I found myself sitting in one of the rooms with flatter textures and lighting and I thought about just how strange an aesthetic and geometric presence the game had much of the time as it bounces between undeniably gorgeous areas like majula or dragon aerie and places like harvest valley that hardly look like they're from the same game. much like the fractured world with its odd geographical quirks it felt strangely fitting to have those big bizarre shifts in tone and presentation (even if they're 100% unintentional in many cases)
the nameless chad (death) comes for us all eventually
@deemonandgames
thank you. I largely agree with you there: no issues with the world design, but the levels themselves are wildly inconsistent. the doom II comparison didn't hit me until I found myself sitting in one of the rooms with flatter textures and lighting and I thought about just how strange an aesthetic and geometric presence the game had much of the time as it bounces between undeniably gorgeous areas like majula or dragon aerie and places like harvest valley that hardly look like they're from the same game. much like the fractured world with its odd geographical quirks it felt strangely fitting to have those big bizarre shifts in tone and presentation (even if they're 100% unintentional in many cases)
even when i was in my true ds2 hater arc (sotfs iron keep left a permanent scar on my psyche) i never really got the complaints about stuff like the earthern peak -> iron keep connection. like sure i'm dumb as bricks and honestly didnt even take notice until the internet didnt shut up about it but i think its kinda fun how fucked up and nonsense it is. especially with how much ds2's story focuses on memory and particularly forgetting i feel like it's probably intentional as a way of saying that nobody remembers what drangleic was actually like (and if it wasn't intentional then a really good coincidence lol)
still not that big on ds2 but as a demons souls enthusiast i get the vibe
still not that big on ds2 but as a demons souls enthusiast i get the vibe
@faea
I didn't notice either until it became the sort of flagship issue with the world design. it definitely is fun, and I think along with the tunnel to drangleic castle with its immediate shift to oily black night out of nowhere it's one of the better examples of what you're talking about
totally get why someone wouldn't be super into ds2. it's a mess, but it's exactly my kind of mess
I didn't notice either until it became the sort of flagship issue with the world design. it definitely is fun, and I think along with the tunnel to drangleic castle with its immediate shift to oily black night out of nowhere it's one of the better examples of what you're talking about
totally get why someone wouldn't be super into ds2. it's a mess, but it's exactly my kind of mess
im bouncing up and down like spongebob in the boots. we are on the same fucking wavelength.
I'd like to personally congratulate you for penning the first good review on Backloggd.com
i read the petersen comparison and my eyes turned into slots and rolled 7's
PS3 servers killed off in a few days :'(
@steelybel
hell yeah. it's the only wavelength worth being on
@henryvines
someone had to do it
@xantha_page
end of an era. that's a total bummer
hell yeah. it's the only wavelength worth being on
@henryvines
someone had to do it
@xantha_page
end of an era. that's a total bummer
I spent an incalculable amount of time with the Santier's Spear just fucking around in duels, spinning around like a maniac. Maybe my favorite Souls game.
Anyway I do prefer Scholar primarily for its better lighting and packaging all the DLC in, but it is very funny to me that in trying to be more lore accurate with enemy placements it ends up making the early game harder and the rest of the game almost trivial in comparison to the original, which is better balanced. Or at least I think -- as best I can after jostling my brain spinning not stop with my spear! i'm going to throwu p
You're already one of my favourite writers on this website but this review might be your zenith.
no mention of the bangin covenants, one of Fromsofts greatest ideas left to wallow on the cutting room floor
@weatherby
santier's spear is a good one, up there with like red iron twinblade and puzzling stone sword as definitive DS2 weapons in my mind. at this point I've lost a lot of my memory of the two versions' distinctions outside of the big outliers (heide's, iron keep, aerie) cos I've played both too many times, but I always (perhaps incorrectly) remember scholar as the tougher of the two. this time I played on ng+ for the first time in a long time tho so it muddled up the distinctions even more with than usual
@miramiraotw
thank you, you're one of my favourites too so I'm very pleased to hear that. I wasn't sure I'd ever do a ds2 review because it always felt particularly difficult to capture in words, but I'm happy with how this one turned out
@_YALP
major fuck up on my part. I had it included right down to the last edits and must've missed it when I was moving things around. I spent like hundreds of hours in belfry luna tho so believe me when I say I ride hard for the covenants here and (along with invasions) have a good amount of frustration with how they've been treated in the games since
santier's spear is a good one, up there with like red iron twinblade and puzzling stone sword as definitive DS2 weapons in my mind. at this point I've lost a lot of my memory of the two versions' distinctions outside of the big outliers (heide's, iron keep, aerie) cos I've played both too many times, but I always (perhaps incorrectly) remember scholar as the tougher of the two. this time I played on ng+ for the first time in a long time tho so it muddled up the distinctions even more with than usual
@miramiraotw
thank you, you're one of my favourites too so I'm very pleased to hear that. I wasn't sure I'd ever do a ds2 review because it always felt particularly difficult to capture in words, but I'm happy with how this one turned out
@_YALP
major fuck up on my part. I had it included right down to the last edits and must've missed it when I was moving things around. I spent like hundreds of hours in belfry luna tho so believe me when I say I ride hard for the covenants here and (along with invasions) have a good amount of frustration with how they've been treated in the games since
@curse There's definitely a reduction in stronger/aggressive enemies in later locations, although the game is not completely bereft of challenging encounters, so it never drops off as harshly for me as post-patch DS1. DS2 is my favorite out of the Dark Souls trilogy, but I think each version has something the other lacks.
one of my fondest memories in college was watching youtube videos while sniping the knights in the iron keep for hours so they would despawn and i could fight the smelter demon in peace. might be the best "background noise" game of all time.
@weatherby
I tend to agree. both in that it's my favourite of the trilogy and that neither version is really definitive. vanilla probably edges out scholar for me just because you can access the dlc earlier and from what I remember there's less branch of yore gating, but scholar's still typically my go-to cos of the online having more than a dozen maniacs playing and all the forlorn/npc invader stuff which I thought was done quite well. at the end of the day I'm in the most boring camp tho which is "both are very good"
I tend to agree. both in that it's my favourite of the trilogy and that neither version is really definitive. vanilla probably edges out scholar for me just because you can access the dlc earlier and from what I remember there's less branch of yore gating, but scholar's still typically my go-to cos of the online having more than a dozen maniacs playing and all the forlorn/npc invader stuff which I thought was done quite well. at the end of the day I'm in the most boring camp tho which is "both are very good"
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one thing i really appreciate about dark souls 2 is that in many ways it feels like from software at their most aesthetically honest.
you can trace through their other work and find aesthetic moments that are so clearly lovingly earnest (anor londo's cityscape, tower of latria, bloodborne's mangled landscapes) but you can often feel a sense of obligation in "okay, we need some city streets and a forest really early. they'll be expecting a swamp, so gotta throw one of those in." DS2 doesn't fully avoid this (the game still throws you into Main Castle a little after halftime) but I welcome Drangleic's pirate coves and rickety mounds. It's a much more scattered and decentralized game world- much less a gothic epic and much more a scattering of Grimm fairy tales. fuck you. you are going to kill vikings and cryptids on the set of the disneyworld pirates of the carribean ride and you're gonna like it.
you can trace through their other work and find aesthetic moments that are so clearly lovingly earnest (anor londo's cityscape, tower of latria, bloodborne's mangled landscapes) but you can often feel a sense of obligation in "okay, we need some city streets and a forest really early. they'll be expecting a swamp, so gotta throw one of those in." DS2 doesn't fully avoid this (the game still throws you into Main Castle a little after halftime) but I welcome Drangleic's pirate coves and rickety mounds. It's a much more scattered and decentralized game world- much less a gothic epic and much more a scattering of Grimm fairy tales. fuck you. you are going to kill vikings and cryptids on the set of the disneyworld pirates of the carribean ride and you're gonna like it.
finding vendrick is still probably the greatest story beat in a fromsoft game (and video games don't really need great stories as much as they need great story beats). sadly my overall opinion on ds2 has been permanently poisoned by fromsoft and bandai namco asking me to buy the game again less than one year after I had already paid full price for it
@ebrl
I can respect that. I was a bit late to it all so the whole thing was dulled on me at the time, but I can't imagine it was a popular decision
@swiggle
really love how you've phrased all this, and I agree; earnest is the perfect way to describe it. very reminiscent of goofy d&d campaigns between friends or like bizarre warcraft III custom maps. lots of whimsy in the application of even its gloomiest elements and a strong counterpoint to the staid self-consciousness that permeates stuff like ds3 at times
I can respect that. I was a bit late to it all so the whole thing was dulled on me at the time, but I can't imagine it was a popular decision
@swiggle
really love how you've phrased all this, and I agree; earnest is the perfect way to describe it. very reminiscent of goofy d&d campaigns between friends or like bizarre warcraft III custom maps. lots of whimsy in the application of even its gloomiest elements and a strong counterpoint to the staid self-consciousness that permeates stuff like ds3 at times
BEAUTIFULBRUTE
1 month ago