Dark Souls 2 is probably the most I have ever wanted a review option between "Yes" and "No", as TL;DR Dark Souls 2 has the formula for a 7/10 Souls game but is bloated with a thousand-and-one 3/10 mechanics.

In Dark Souls 2, you'll once again set out into the forsaken lands as a Hollow (specifically, the "Bearer of the Curse"), a near-undead person destined to finally fix the curse set upon this kingdom. Dark Souls 2's story shares similar themes to the original, focusing on the corruption of power and how all monarchies are doomed to fall due to the greed of their rulers. The gameplay also shares the same formula of other Souls games, emphasizing punishing, high-difficulty action RPG combat with significant weapon, armor, and stat cutomization.

Dark Souls 2 has *some things* going for it. The story is surprisingly digestible even outside of the infamous lore-heavy item descriptions, making this a pretty coherent tale of falling monarchies from start to finish. The environments throughout the game are pretty diverse and often very beautiful (lots of "Gorgeous view!" messages to be found). Being able to teleport between bonfires from the get-go is a nice quality of life change from Dark Souls 1. There's a handful of bosses in this game that had fun but challenging fights, or at least cool mechanics to back them up.

But oh goodness, the drawbacks that Dark Souls 2 has, man they are rough. In summary, on top of a couple other things, Dark Souls 2 has a number of mechanics that pose what I call "artificial difficulty" on the player, or difficulty that doesn't actually assess additional skill from the player but instead simply stat-checks their ability to play at the same skill level. We can start with the most infamous, that being the Adaptability stat. For the unaware, putting points in Adaptability significantly increases your Agility stat, which in turn increases the amount of invincibility-frames (i-frames) in your dodge roll, with a couple soft caps on point investment. With no extra points invested in Adaptability, your roll will have between 5-7 less i-frames compared to the same roll in Dark Souls 1, a *massive* difference that drastically changes the amount of reaction time you're afforded when dodging attacks. Personally, I avoided this by immediately putting all my first skill points in Adaptability to get it to 26, which gave me a very slightly better roll than Dark Souls 1, but I only did this because I had done the research beforehand and knew I would have issues otherwise. Purposefully disrupting player's builds just for a quality-of-life adjustment is very frustrating to deal with. Max health is another stat that gets similarly punished for no real reason. As a Hollow, dying causes your max health to be reduced by 5%, and this reduction stacks on repeat deaths all the way up to 50% reduced max health. This reduction can only be undone by restoring your humanity, which requires burning a limited (and rare, albeit farmable) consumable item. There is a ring that limits this reduction to ~20% instead, but obviously this requires expending a ring slot instead of equipping a more valuable ring. This mechanic puts the player in a negative feedback loop: not only was I not good enough in that encounter, causing me to die, but now I'm also going to have a harder time on my next attempt because of this arbitrary penalty.

Enemy placement in this game is obnoxious to say the least, and this is a point where players will disagree if it actually got better or worse in the Scholar of the First Sin edition. You are so rarely presented with 1-on-1 fights in Dark Souls 2, which is frustrating but somewhat manageable. In Dark Souls 2 however, you can still be invaded as a Hollow by players and NPCs, and there are *dozens* of scripted NPC invader encounters, a lot of which are already in enemy-dense areas. Now not only are you dealing with heavy mobs of enemies, but also a relatively-intelligent tankier foe as well. The fact that there's multiple instances of an area being harder just because a designer stuck an invader with the Dragon's Tooth and Havel's Armor set in the way is just ridiculous. On further New Game cycles this problem just gets exacerbated as more and more new invaders are added to areas. Related, the boss runbacks in Dark Souls 2 frequently are just miserable with how long and enemy-dense they are, a problem that gets even worse in the DLC. Dark Souls 2 tries to rectify this by making it so that most enemies permanently die after I think 12 kills, but having to go through the process of killing every single enemy on the runback just to make it more tolerable is a long and exhausting process, which I rarely had to resort to thankfully. Fog walls only grant the player invincibility for the latter half of the animation, another case of artificial difficulty for no reason and another reason why the runbacks in Dark Souls 2 especially suck. Further, so many of the bosses just don't feel worth it once you do get to them. While there are like, five, genuinely interesting bosses to fight between the main game and DLC, there are dozens of other bosses that just feel like filler content getting in the way of your journey. Many bosses either have incredibly predictable or re-used movesets, and while they aren't as egregiously copy-pasted as some bosses in Dark Souls 1, the similarities are definitely apparent. I couldn't help but feel underwhelmed by what was supposed to be the challenging aspect of the game (the bosses) and frustrated by what was actually the challenging aspect (the runbacks).

On top of a couple other nitpicks, including but not limited to absolutely absurd world design (how did a lava fortress get this high in the sky?), obnoxious rare item farming for some achievements, and an insanely high number of illusory wall bonfires that are downright necessary to make traversing the map more manageable, Dark Souls 2 just trips so hard on itself as it runs to the finish line. As you play it you can feel the ingredients of a good Dark Souls game hiding in there, peeking through the cracks, but it's drowned out by so much obnoxiousness. I got 100% achievements, beat every boss at least once, tried so hard to find something extra to help tip the scales in favor of Positive. But alas, people were right, Dark Souls 2 does kinda suck.

I come back from time to time <3

8/10

better than ds1

♥♥♥♥ game

I recommend you play this so you can appreciate Dark Souls I & III.

Be careful of Dark Souls illusion ahead, therefore try other game.

SOOOOO MUUUUCHHHHH BETTER THAN DARK SOULS 1(WORST SOULS GAME) DS2 SOO MUCH BETTER!

J'ai joué à Dark Souls 1 et Elden Ring (le DLC inclus) où j'y est pris mon pied.

Je voulais donc m'attaquer à la suite de la licence Dark Souls par le deuxième volet.
C'est très simple: j'ai arrêté d'y jouer au bout de deux heures.

- Visuellement on peut dire que ça passe car on est habitué aux graphismes du 1er.
- Le gameplay: juste horrible. Il y a un nette problème avec l'utilisation et la régénération de la barre d'endurance.
- Pour la barre de vie elle est constamment à la moitié, on a juste "une seule fiole de soin (deux si on cherche bien au début du jeu)" mais cela reste insuffisant!
- Le système de coup critique que je trouve nettement moins bien que dans le premier.
- La lenteur de chaque action.
- Je ne parle même pas de l'orientation.

Le nombre de fois que je meurt pour des "broutilles" est juste hallucinant.

Je vais terminer là-dessus: étant dégoûté je suis passé sur Dark Souls 3: et en 15 minutes de jeu j'y es pris mon pied et retrouvé le style, le gameplay de Dark Souls 1: un vrai bonheur!

Désolé pour ceux qui apprécient ce jeu, ce n'est que mon humble avis, entre ce jeu et Dark Souls 1 et 3: il y a un fossé.

Franchement, le meilleur des Souls, n'en déplaise aux rageux.