To recap the summary, for those who didn't even read it because you may or may not be a Dark Souls 2 fan who immediately began to froth at the mouth due to the title, Dark Souls 2 is easily the worst game in Fromsoft's recent history (or maybe all, idk I'm not a hipster whose played all of their old games like armored core or shadow tower yada yada). I'll be laying out some concrete examples of why DS2 is trash, and should only be treated as such.

Now I'm sure there are some DS2 fans who have already licked the Cheetos dust off their fingers to type "mad cuz bad" or the like (EDIT: called it, lmao) so let me assure you; I have played all of the DS games extensively, have gotten all the achievements for them multiple times on different systems, have dumpstered all the bosses in these games with ease, and would dumpster you 1v1 while I tell you of the intimate and supportive relation between me and your mother.

So with my indisputable credibility established let us get under way

So I made this guide a while back and ds2 fans are still sore about it, crazy right? I mean not they read it or anything, because they totally didn't, they're just mad for no reason : ). Anywho lotta bootyhurt ds2 fans means a lot of comments (most of them entirely pointless or redundant) and while some may find it fun to sift through ~30 pages of me further embarrassing ds2 fans I figured it would be thoughtful to give a quick rundown of some prevailing themes of the comment section for those who don't.

Q: Why can't you just let people enjoy things?
A: This is a PSA for those who for whatever reason are considering getting DS2/ have just dipped their toes into DS2. Much like how you would (hopefully) warn someone from doing black tar heroine instead of "just letting them enjoy it".

Q: But you're just bad at the game tho?
A:

Q: How come you didn't put more effort into this guide?
A: Why tf would I lol

Q:How come you put so much effort into this guide?
A: I really didn't lol

Q: Why did you make this guide?
A: Teehee hoohoo haha

Q:People still like this game tho?
A:

Now it's not secret at this point that Dark Souls 2 was the passion(?) project of some B team and Hidetaka Miyazaki had nothing to do with it, and boy does that show.

Miyazaki is on the record quite a few times discussing difficulty and how, believe it or not, Dark Souls 1 was not made with the intent to be difficult. Dark Souls was indeed meant to be a challenging game but that's a symptom of the main reason being Dark Souls was meant to be a satisfying game. There was never any blatant attempt to be unfair or to make you feel cheated, there was a clear challenge presented and you were pushed to beat it. Journalist however, being game journalist, missed this point entirely and started the "dARk sOuLS HaRD XddDDd" trend, later making "Dark Souls" synonymous with "not brain dead easy".

Enter Dark Souls 2

The game starts with some dumb hag telling you how you'll die over and over, you reach Majula and there's a statue telling you how many people have died, and you get even get a nifty achievement titled "Welcome to Dark Souls" for dying the first time.

This B team, much like the Journalist, completely missed the point of Dark Souls being satisfying and instead tried their best to make the game difficult so they could rub in your face how difficult it is, and this leads to a term that gets thrown around a lot when talking about Dark Souls, but in my (once again, credible and correct) opinion is only justified when talking about Dark Souls 2.

Difficulty is a hard thing to pin down, as it is largely subjective (take showers for instance, most people find the task mundane but the DS2 fan may disagree) but what does it mean when a non game journalist calls something "artificially difficult"? Well in layman terms it means cheap or unfair, but what is unfair exactly?
Lets look at Iron Keep, or more specifically the run to the Smelter Demon boss. If I can recall correctly between the bonfire and the fog gate there are no less than 10 Alonne knights that want nothing more than to share with you how Alonne they are because they are weebs with katanas and the emerald herald won't respond to their DMs. You ask me, the guy who's always right, that screams "lets place as many things here to inconvenience players because that would be hard and cool". Compare that to, say the 3 enemies between you and Drake and Josh in Anor Londo in DS1. Do you see the difference? I think the most damning piece of evidence though is that even the incompetent devs seems to agree with me as they introduced a system where enemies simply stop spawning after you kill them a certain amount of times (sucks to be you if you were farming them guy). So now instead of having a well crafted experience that you overcome through patience and learning you have a ♥♥♥♥-heap you can just shovel through with multiple attempts until there's simply nothing between you and the boss fog...lit.

This Iron Keep example is the most grievous one to be sure but it's something you'll notice throughout your run in DS2, there are enemies all over the place and they frequently come in huge groups at a time to overwhelm you. This is of course completely different from the majority of DS1 where with careful thought and progression you could usually fight enemies on a more even 1v1 or 1v2 engagement, exceptions to this would either be laughably easy enemies such as base hollows or those demon statue things.

Enough about overly generous enemy placement though, let's talk about the bosses themselves (or at least the ones that are somewhat memorable at least, we'll touch on that later). This B team, being the B team that they are, seemed incapable of making a well crafted boss (for the most part, again lets talk about that later) so instead throw in some gimmick in a cheap attempt to make them challenging/ unique. This ranges from things like other enemies in this boss room, having multiple copies of the boss copy and pasted (because hey, already did that with normal enemies) to having them apply some annoying debuff because no way in hell were they gonna kill you normally.

B team was desperate to capture the energy of Pickachu and Snorlax in DS1 (because that was the boss the journalist obsessed over) so they thought "well lets just have more gank bosses" minus the charm or effort. James and The Giant Peach were a dynamic duo that perfectly complemented each other and provided an engaging, but fair challenge. The ruins sentinels in DS2 are carbon copies of each other (good luck finding out which one of the three is the one with low health loser) that thinks quality comes second place to quantity. They don't have unique move-sets that work off of each other, they all 3 just Beyblade. The Throne defender/watcher are a bit better at this, if still entirely uninteresting nobodies lore-wise, but even then they don't reach the perfect contrast of Pinky and the Brain but are rather just "dude with a bigger sword and dude with a smaller sword who does flippy flips".

Strangely enough however the devs weren't content with unfair enemy placement or boss designs so they deemed it necessary to implement a bunch of systems or change the way things worked, only to inconvenience you, the player.

Hehe, adapting...get it? It's a play of words on the awful idea that is the adaptability trait...haha, clever.

What is adaptability though? It's the "dump your souls into this trait to actually be able to play the game" trait. I can only assume that the B team, once again being the B team, saw people rolling in DS1 and thought to themselves "but how can we make this less enjoyable for the player?" Their answer of course was to introduce a trait that governed how many I-frames you get during a roll because hey, having a concrete number of I-frames just given to you is way too easy mode and Dark Souls 2 is hard. I'm not going to go looking for sources or anything, because I'm always right anyway, but in order to mimic rolling capabilities of DS1 (aka being good) you need to level this adaptability thing to about 20. Now the DS2 fan at this point is probably smirking thinking "ha, this fool thinks adaptability increases your I-frames when actually adaptability increases your agility which increases I-frames!"

Bro do yourself a favor and don't type that one out, I'm trying to be nice here. I wasn't even going to bring up the whole agility nonsense which also governs you being able to use items at a reasonable pace, because that's just some real ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. I mean you really don't want people knowing they have to dump their first 8-12 soul levels into a trait just so they can have basic game-play functions.

Anyway regardless of the section title adaptability isn't the only dumb system introduced with this game (who woulda thunk), let's peek at how the B team handled healing and hollowing in this game.

I accidentally mentioned agility effecting item uses (oops, sorry DS2 fans) but let's talk about those items, or really just the healing ones. So estus at the beginning of a run are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, no two ways about that seeing as you get just the one (or two if you have prior knowledge of the well in Majula) and you drink it at a snails pace so it can heal you at a snails pace. So what does that leave you with? Lifegems baby, a whole lot of them. Gone is the strategic use of your limited supply of healing, no more "should I use an estus now or wait for things to get more dicey?" when you have in theory a unlimited supply of healing to use in the downtime between fights. Of course this is also aided by the other 8-10 items that provide healing (such as bigger lifegems, charms, mushrooms, waters, divine blessings, and healing miracles/warmth pyromancy). All these healing options make invasions a nightmare if your host is on baby bitchboy mode and has no qualms using them, as an invader you do not get access to these healing options (save spells, most popular warmth due to lower requirements). Estus becomes the most annoying form of healing to deal with as the over-time healing nature of them now means that if the host back-peddles away a bit and chugs 2-3 estus in one go there's not much you can do about it, their healing will out preform any damage you throw their way.

Again not a hipster (EDIT: or "fan", as the hipsters prefer to be addressed) or a PlayStation bro so haven't played demon souls (EDIT: I now have, it blows) but my understanding is that game had a system of "soul and human" mode which basically boiled to you dying once and losing a chunk of your health until you go human again by killing a boss. With DS1 though they thought "wow, that system sure is dumb as ♥♥♥♥" and did away with the whole punishing the player dying thing. This promoted exploration or experimentation. Went to the graveyard at Firelink and got your ass beat? Ha, bet you won't be doing that ♥♥♥♥ again! No hard feelings tho, and now you know. Haha, lil idiot boy went down and got clapped by ghost in new londo! Maybe try this way by the aqueduct now?

Point being it was okay to make dummy moves in DS1 and grow from them (or rant about how unfair the game is instead ig), expected even.

Here comes DS2 with its nonsense again though. You died to an ogre in the tutorial area? That's gonna cost you a sliver of health bar. Underestimated how much fall damage you would take going down that pit of death in Majula? Pay up buddy. Went to Hiedes tower of flames first and stumbled across a dragon? You absolute buffoon, you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cretin, bumbling ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ idiot. ♥♥♥♥ you. This adds up until a very noticeable chunk of your health bar is gone because you should have just known better I guess, how dare you die in this game where we constantly flaunt how you are going to die.

"B-But ring of binding, m-muh human effigies!" the DS2 fan responds, but lemme ask you something. Why not just not have this system with some band-aids to cover it up in the first place?

Bad systems...covered up by a ring? This reminds me of something, a certain...memory

You already know I'm talking about soul memory lol, that thing that needlessly ruined pvp/ co-op play which they tried to cover up with the agape ring. That thing that says "we should make sure the guy trying to do an archer build (they exist) who constantly has to buy arrows pairs with the guy who dumped all his souls into leveling up and getting a +5 boss weapon!" or "that guy who died while running around with 20k souls can forget about anything he was going do with em, but we'll still consider those lost forever souls for matchmaking!"

Another rhetorical question, what is "world design"? Well it's how the world of game and it's inhabitants are (get this) designed from a visual and storytelling perspective and how the separate levels of this world are connected to make the bigger picture. I kinda already talked a bit about level design (Iron Keep enemy spam) which varies from meh to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ so I want to talk about this bigger picture, and the many elevators that connect it.

The DS2 fan is probably hexing me with a voodoo doll or something because of how many times I've brought it up but think back to the superior DS1 world and how perfectly and seamlessly all the levels flowed in to each other. Visually speaking there were always those little hints that said "hey, member that other place?" such as being able to see the awful Lost Izalith from the Tomb of Giants as well as the trees that hold up the entire world in Ash Lake. Now take DS2 and what you have in Majula is being able to see Heides Tower of Flame MILES away that you subsequently reach after walking a bit through a sewer...huh. The DS2 fan at this point scrambles to say "m-muh time and space is warped in DS2" as if time and space ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ haven't been a constant theme since DS1 which still had solid world design. I wonder though if a part of said time and space ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is also the explanation for the elevators that seem to connect any two levels when the devs just gave up on making a natural connection that made sense. Other than the already memed to ♥♥♥♥ Earthen Peak and Iron Keep elevator how do you go from a sinking ruin (Heides Tower of Flames) that's already half in the water, take an elevator further down to walk through some tunnels and appear in a giant cave that acts as a dock (No Mans Wharf)? Idk, time and space ♥♥♥♥ because I can't write a good reason for that ig.

Now for the inhabitants of this world, or more specifically the bosses because I promised to talk about them more. Now I won't talk about how almost every single non dlc boss is entirely uninteresting or dumb to fight because everybody (I don't think there's a single DS2 fan deluded enough to tell you otherwise) knows this. Instead I want to talk about the design of them. So you have the Pursuer (If he can still be considered a boss with how often you fight him in a playthru outside of a boss encounter) which while probably the most interesting lore wise boils down to big guy with sword. You also have Dragonrider (If he can still be considered a boss with how often you fight him in a playthru outside of two boss encounters) who is big guy with a halberd. You have whatever Flexile Sentry is (If he can still be considered a boss with how often you fight him in a playthru outside of a boss encounter) who is big...lizard guy with swords. You noticing a bit of a theme here? Of course you also have things like Nito but with dead bodies instead of skeletons or Nito but a woman or Ornstein but grey or Sif without a sword/ toxic rats instead or two "bosses" that are just mobs of generic enemies.

What a creativity bankrupt game lol.

The DS2 fan is a emotional and easily agitated creature so I'd like to take this opportunity to try and mention some of the good DS2 does admittedly bring to the table before they post my IP address in the comments. These are usually small quality of life improvements and nothing overly major but when you're as desperate for quality like the DS2 fan anything is worth mentioning.

Bonfire warping from the get go. While the dumb health cut off system of hollowing discourages exploring on the other hand not waiting till half way through the game to be able to warp from one bonfire to the other is a major improvement to the first and deserves mention. Fellas I'd be caught leveling dex before you see me going down to ash lake in DS1 before having the lordvessel. Of course you'll mainly use this feature to warp back to Majula to level up, because Fromsoft seems to think the only way to make a waifu is to have that waifu be your only way of leveling up.

PVP (in some regards) saw massive improvement. Save the dlc area in DS1 that I honestly saw no one ever use it lacked a proper arena for the big boys to play in, and DS2 has two of these arenas (for a total of 6 maps) tied to two pvp covenants. Game-play in PVP is a lot better with backstabs seeing far less abuse and there is a fair amount of build variety. Normal invasions themselves though are on the backslide tho due to previously mentioned healing items and the lack of full orbs (have fun farming those salamanders guy).

Fashion souls. Don't know exact numbers off of the top of my head but DS2 seems to have FAR more armor options than DS1 and mixing and matching these pieces for your own distinct look is quite enjoyable (pictured below is my superior fashion). I've seen plenty of variation while playing pvp, like Havel armor with engraved gauntles, Havel with smelter head and engraved gauntles, Havel legs with smelter head jester body and engraved gauntlets, entirely naked with engraved gauntlets and...oh.


NPC invaders saw massive improvement. You'll mainly see this in the dlc areas of the game (because most things good in DS2 can be found in the dlc areas) but B team went a long way to making these npc invaders interesting. Hell if it wasn't for the names you may even be fooled into thinking it's an actual person on the other end pulling these shenanigans off. This of course helps you feel like you're interacting with people in an otherwise completely dead game.

If there are some other goods that the DS2 fan was waiting to see then I hate to disappoint you because that's it. No, powerstancing is not a saving grace that bumps this game out of the trash bin, it's a mediocre and easily ignored system and does not completely change how you play the game like other DS2 fans have led you to believe. Hate to be the one who breaks the news to you champ.

Play dark souls 1 or 3 instead.