I finished the first dark soul and am eager to continue my journey through the remaining dark souls, but I heard that the second dark soul is flawed and that I should skip it in favor of the third dark soul. Is this true, or did those who got through it not understand it well?
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I enjoyed DS2. It's different, but I enjoyed it.
The thing you need to understand about Dark Souls 2 is that its development history is a complete fricking dumpster fire. All FromSoft games have cut content, but DS2 was built from cut content less than a year before its release. It's a miracle it's even a playable, "complete" game. So yes, it's flawed. Deeply flawed. But it has some good ideas buried in it.
DS2 is a fun and expansive journey but it's definitely flawed and a good chunk of the areas just aren't that special. Make sure you are playing online and read the messages because holy shit it's "horde ahead" the game.
>statues spitting poison
>statues spitting acid
>pools of poison
>pools of acid
>cursed urns
>foggy levels
>completely dark levels
It's like half of the game is Blighttown x10
Not a single swamp though, unlike DS3 where every other level is a swamp.
There’s like only one level in DS3 that’s a swamp
I think it's worth playing, personally. It's a cheesy game that's not quite as good as the rest of the series, but I don't think it's a bad game. Power stancing is fun.
DS2 is better than DS1 and DeS on a mechanical level, it's just less polished.
Just jump to ds3. You won't miss anything and you'll be able to enjoy an extremely polished game. No need to go through that ds2 slop cuz it might make u hate dark souls.
they're all pretty flawed it's just ds2 is way more jank and less thought out than the others.
it's still a pretty good game though and takes more risks than ds3
I felt for the same meme, finally played DaS2 last and it ended up being the best game in the series. Funny how that works huh?
It's funny how w/o Miyazaki to lead them, they went with various ideas from past KF games and why areas are soo different from each other.
I hadn't seen that pic but Vendrick's castle always gave me big KFIV vibes
Do not skip it. You can skip the dlc though
Black person, Iron Crown and Ivory Crown are the only parts of DS2 that are actually pretty decent.
Ok joseph anderson
It's janky as frick and has some interesting ideas but otherwise it's a mess. Ambushes and gank squads are the name of the game. But it does have majula, which is a cool as frick hub.
DS2 has less bullshit ambushes and gotcha deaths than DS1.
-Hellkite one shotting you on the bridge
-Capra Demon + 2 dogs stunlock fight in a phonebooth
-Forced Death on Seath first encounter
-Several collapsing floors in Blightown that just kill you
-Surprise arena collapse to Stray Demon that takes away 50% of your HP followed by an instant hammer smack if you don't spam roll to run to a corner
-Falling in Nito's Arena takes away almost 50% of your HP followed by him chain casting gravelord sword from under you
-Bed of Chaos arena collapsing form under you with zero telegraphing
you also forgot the gate drop ambush just before reaching the parish and in order to proceed you need to enter a room full of little zombies that flail around stunlocking you to death
but yeah, let's keep mentioning the gank squad at the end of the DLC that serves as a boss, and the falconers with fricked animations, that will teach them
>-Hellkite one shotting you on the bridge
only after 3 hits which is moronic yeah but the first sweep shouldn't get you
>-Capra Demon + 2 dogs stunlock fight in a phonebooth
true, pretty similar to ds2 too where it's just "kills you once then never again"
>-Forced Death on Seath first encounter
I've never heard people complain about this even when doing deathless runs
>-Several collapsing floors in Blightown that just kill you
The one's I remember dropped you down but you take some damage.
>-Surprise arena collapse to Stray Demon that takes away 50% of your HP followed by an instant hammer smack if you don't spam roll to run to a corner
True but it's the tutorial boss again you aren't dying (also just fricking run you don't need to spam roll)
>-Falling in Nito's Arena takes away almost 50% of your HP followed by him chain casting gravelord sword from under you
true
>-Bed of Chaos arena collapsing form under you with zero telegraphing
true
DS2 still has more though
name them
"Dark Souls 2" is considered by some to be unfair due to several reasons:
Different Director: Directed by Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura, the game deviated from Hidetaka Miyazaki's vision, leading to differences in design and mechanics that players found jarring.
Enemy Groups: Players face multiple enemies at once, making encounters overwhelming, especially in tight spaces.
Respawning Enemies: Enemies infinitely respawn until certain conditions are met, causing frustration and difficulty in backtracking.
Dodge Mechanics: The dodge roll has fewer invincibility frames than other games, making it less reliable for evading attacks.
Hitboxes and Tracking: Wonky hitboxes and enemy tracking lead to unfair deaths or attacks seemingly hitting inaccurately.
Soul Memory: Matchmaking tied to collected souls can result in unfair interactions and leveling imbalances in multiplayer.
Limited Healing: The Estus Flask's limited uses and incomplete healing feel restrictive compared to other games.
Level Design: The less interconnected world design diminishes the reward of exploration.
Ultimately, fairness perception varies; while some dislike these aspects, others appreciate the challenge.
>Limited Healing: The Estus Flask's limited uses and incomplete healing feel restrictive compared to other games.
Not an issue at all with the inclusion of life gems. Limiting estus was just so there's more bullshit to loot and warp home to upgrade. DS3 didn't have life gems, which gave way more value to healing miracles, rings and equipment.
>Hitboxes and Tracking: Wonky hitboxes and enemy tracking lead to unfair deaths or attacks seemingly hitting inaccurately.
Also poor attack animations where you take damage almost immediately, which is incredibly bad for gameplay reasons.
>Enemy Groups: Players face multiple enemies at once, making encounters overwhelming, especially in tight spaces.
Except tight places funnels enemies to you 1-2 at a time.
Also, DS2 rolling in any direction while locked on allows you to dodge between enemies with precision and backstab them, someting not possible in DS1 without unlocked play.
>Dodge Mechanics: The dodge roll has fewer invincibility frames than other games, making it less reliable for evading attacks.
DS2 starts out with lower base iframes but the roll recovery is insanely fast, only 1 frame slower than DS1's fastroll even at 70% weight, with weight only affecting distance, not speed.
Meanwhile DS1 midroll is almost as slow as DS2 fatroll.
With 15 levels into ADP as a starting Knight, you have a better roll that DS1's fastroll.
And don't forget that DS2's level up costs are nearly 1/2 of what they are in DS1, so you can get 15 levels by killing any of the starting bosses.
Limited Healing: The Estus Flask's limited uses and incomplete healing feel restrictive compared to other games.
DS3 and even ER used the same estus shard system/golden seed system.
DS2's issue wasn't lifegems themselves, but the fact that ALL items had 99/99 inventory limits.
Because even Sekiro has lifegems (healing pellets) but limits them to 3 in you pocket at any time so they're not a problem.
>Enemy Groups: Players face multiple enemies at once, making encounters overwhelming, especially in tight spaces.
so just like every souls game
>Respawning Enemies: Enemies infinitely respawn until certain conditions are met, causing frustration and difficulty in backtracking.
just like every souls game
>Dodge Mechanics: The dodge roll has fewer invincibility frames than other games, making it less reliable for evading attacks.
it's not, it's tied to a stat, which is worse and the most moronic thing they could ever do, there isn't a single man in the world defending this shit mechanic, even among das2 fanatics
>Soul Memory: Matchmaking tied to collected souls can result in unfair interactions and leveling imbalances in multiplayer.
the only mad people are twinks who wanted to farm newbies, frick them
>Limited Healing: The Estus Flask's limited uses and incomplete healing feel restrictive compared to other games.
the limited estus flask is brand recognition since das1, what the frick are you on
>Level Design: The less interconnected world design diminishes the reward of exploration.
I don't want to argue, let's say "yeah okay"
most of these complains can be used against every soul game, I don't blame you, that's what mot of people think
it's even funnier in retrospect because Elden Ring is clearly a tanimura game, most complaints in das2 are seen as qualities in ER
>it's tied to a stat
I'm gonna say that it was also tied to a stat in DS1 and unless you looked up fextralife like a normie it was unlikely you knew the breakpoints.
Like for example the midroll has 2 tiers despite one animation. And you will never guess how many tiers fast roll has as logical conclusion.
Here's another bullshit fact about the Seath encounter.
You can go back there and die again and again thinking it's some gimmick fight you just haven't figured out.
And it's only natural, the game always incentivies you to "go back grab your souls", so many players went back and kept trying vs an impossible boss.
This is why in future games these scripted deaths were done as cutscenes and were not repeatable.
>You can go back there and die again and again thinking it's some gimmick fight you just haven't figured out.
To be fair, it's the only boss where you're send to a new area after dying, with a whole new sequence of events that leads you elsewhere, and an npc tells you about the immortality.
How is that bullshit, though
>that boss who nullified all my damage and one shot me? Sent me to a completely new bonfire inside of a prison cell? I guess I'll go fight him again!
Can't blame devs for people being moronic,
Can't blame me for thinking it's a shitty gimmick fight like DeS' bosses where you need to do X to make the boss hittable or whatever.
Name a Demon's Souls boss that does that, you won't
Fool’s Idol
But you can hit the boss
You can hit seath too.
With arrows.
Also wasn’t looking at the thread thought this was about the actual fight and his obvious invincibility crystal
Yeah but you can't deal damage to Seath, he just heals it and will very obviously never die
Doesn't that make fools idol more bullshit then?
>beat boss
>"Just kidding i am immortal hehehe"
>wasted your time doing an entire fight because you missed some guy up a flight of stairs
granted its pretty hard to miss that guy.
How is that bullshit, though
I mean compared to seath. It's literally wasting your time to tell you the boss isn't dead, go find some random guy and kill him then come back and do it again. At least with seath, if you realize you're supposed to lose there, you can equip a ring of sacrifice and not lose anything, or with his real fight the answer is just right there it's the glowing crystal. Both bosses are like the 2nd easiest in their game so it's not like it really matters.
Yeah, but that's cool
You walked back into what was an obvious trap instead of exploring the place and moving on into the next area. Common sense alone should suffice but Logan also tells it outright that Seath can't be harmed.
It does suck to lose your souls the first time tho, though dying is hardly a big deal in ds1.
you can walk back out the fog door for some reason so it's not too bad. however, this is like the only time you can do that ever. tbf if i was in this situation i would prepare a homeward bone just in case
>arena collapse to Stray Demon
What? You mean the boss variant on the Bridge, right? That doesn't collapse.
lmao
he doesn't know
imagine not knowing after over a decade
I was thinking of Taurus Demon, I'm moronic.
No, the optional boss if you go back to the tutorial.
He's right under the where you fought the Asylum Demon.
>Hellkite drake
You mean the drake that you see land on a bridge at the beginning of the level? The level with a conspicuously large and empty bridge covered in scorch marks? That drake?
>Seath
Scripted death, not a got'cha moment.
>Blighttown
Lies, the only collapsing floors drop you down to a lower level, not to your death. The rickety bridges are also very obviously a trap.
>Stray Demon
This is just getting pathetic
>Nito
True
>Bed of Chaos
The collapsing floor is foreshadowed by the collapsing floor directly below the Bed of Chaos' boss arena entrance, which is also being broken apart by its roots. You should also be playing cautiously against a boss with no apparent means of defense. It's not like they're going to just let you walk around the edge of the room 3 more times while the thing flails in the corner and impotently firestorms.
DS2 is worth it for the fantastic DLCs.
They bump the game from a 7 to a 9.
>DS2 is worth it for the fantastic DLCs
>frigid outskirts
>"Fantastic"
LMAO
Always this meme where people bash on the optional areas designed for _co-op_
The optional areas are maybe 10% of the actual DLC size.
The fact that you have to missrepresent this to make your argument shows how desperate you are.
Just don't do it lol
literally has the worst boss in the souls series at the end of it anyway. It's one of those "co-op areas" so basically doing it solo is just a horrible experience and honestly I doubt having a pal with you would make it much better.
>Sir Alonne
>coolest bosses most fitting for a duel
>unique ending if you beat him without getting hit
>to get there you must go through the most frustrating gauntlet of poorly designed encounters
>first here's multiple invaders at once, because why not
It's shocking how badly they ruined it. One of my favorite bosses, won't fight him again because it's such a boring pain in the ass to get there.
it resulted in the frigid outskirts archer video so worth
>Frigid Outskirts
>Filtered
Name a more iconic duo.
>3 whole DLCs
>pick out a single area of one of them that is bad
>"LMAO it's all shit"
Low quality post
Horsewiener Outskirts is 100% optional
>playing through dark souls series in 2023 for the first time
Who cares, you're moronic and nobody cares what you do b***h
I'd just skip it.
The difficulty is very cheap and just fricking annoying. And if you play SotfS it's even worse.
Probably the most memorization-focused souls game. I'm convinced every enemy spawn has unique frame data.
Based on your post it's easy to assume you're an easily influenced drone if you think you should skip despite proudly calling playing video games a "journey" so no matter what you do, you'll just parrot the popular opinion.
just skip das2, go play das3 and elden ring, you obviously don't want to experiment, meaning you won't enjoy das2
ds2 is easily the worst game in the series but you should experience it for yourself once. if you hate it then drop it, there's always ds3, bloodborne, and elden ring.
ds2:sotfs = re6
You can play DS2 PvP in 2023 and it still holds up, basically being a slowed down DS3.
Not someting you can say for DS1/DSR a game where PvP is just 90% backstabs and 10% darkbead 1shots.
DS2 is a fine action game. If you're looking for a proper adventure feel in an interesting world in both level design and lore, you're gonna be disappointed.
DS2 and 3 are great, but the first one is something special.
it's their best game. don't even bother with DS3 or Elden Shart.
>it's an undead hits the bell and you have to fight 20 casters episode episode
>it's a Desert Sorceresses manages to cast before you land your final blow episode
>it's a player invades despite you having no humanity episode
>it's a Forlorn episode
The only saving grace it had was the absolute kino pvp when it was active, no souls games after that reached its level
I say skip it
DS3 has better PvP/invasions overall, but it did use DS2's rulesets as a base with 2 hit stuns on R1-R1 combos and delayed grab backstabs.
DS2 lack of heals in invasions (except slow miracles) favored boring spear+dark orb spam or big oneshot UGS builds because you need to kill ppl in a 2v1 or 3v1 ASAP and risky play just leads to you in near death mode.
DS3's half estus for phantoms system and getting refills for killing blues and sunbros is fantastic for insane comebacks and long as frick 10+ min invasions where you bait the 3v1 gank into half the PvE mobs, with both sides constantly going from 100% HP to 10%HP and back and forth several times.
>long as frick 10+ min invasions where you bait the 3v1 gank into half the PvE mobs
Did this in ER the other day RL125 throughout half of Raya Lucaria fricking Niall duo and their friend 15 minute invasion winning the long ones feels good as frick
The dlc alone makes it objectively better than ds1. Vanilla was pretty lackluster in many regards but sotfs fixed a lot of the issues.
Some of the mechanics were pretty cool. Shame that Bonfire Ascetics and sconces didn't carry over to DS3.
It’s the only souls game with the most soul
imagine listening to Ganker
it's a more worthwhile play than DS3
Consider it either an alternative universe or something far away in the future after ds3.
Game was made by one team, unfinished, plot was hastily remade by the other people (initial game intentions had beed already lost at this step), even more hastily finished (with lots of visual parts downgraded heavily because of consoles), and released with lots of bugs already not being the game that it was supposed to be. And Scholar had changed it even further - you can catch glimpses of what is was supposed to be like initially, at the beginning of the development, but glimpses only. So consider it a non-canon spinoff and play Scholar, as intended original have never been finished anyway.
Gameplaywise it is farther from ds1 than ds3 too, but it have it's charm.
People look to DS1 with rose tinted glasses. As good and influential as it was is also the most flawed in the trilogy.
A good third of the game is comprised of the worst areas FromSoft has ever delivered. It's also the only game to blindside the player into almost certain death. Multiple times. Plus the only scripted mandatory death in the franchise despite building a reputation for fairness lol. And yes, failure being no more important than what you make of it and part of the experience is one of the game's driving philosophies yet ds1 purists will complain to no end about how "unfair" the other games can be.
Overall it's weird how everyone acknowledges the flaws in 1 but completely ignores them when rating it, only to overblow every little issue they have with 2 and even 3.
>Overall it's weird how everyone acknowledges the flaws in 1 but completely ignores them when rating it
Because this things add surprise element to the exploration part of the game, which enchances said exploration. DS1 is not a bossfight simulator.
DS1 has the least exploration of all the souls games. People get mesmerized by the (admittedly neat) interconnected world design to the fact that 80% of the game is a series off long corridors.
And yet the same people who coom every time a newbie dies to hellkite drake go on to whine endlessly about ganks in ds2.
DS1 have the most exploration because you continue to explore entire world, not only locations themselves. And because environment, which only starts to happen in ds2 on ng+ in several specific places. In DS1 world can frick you up in many places with different things. In DS2 it can only happen with enemies or with thematic for the entire location things like spewing statues or curse urns, which is kept being used in the same place way past it is being welcomed - you already know, that here will be spewing statues all the way long after you meet the first three - it is no longer a surprise.
If you died fighting seath after the first supposed-to-lose fight you are bad at video games and probably suffer from some kind of cognitive impairment.
>fromshaft circlejerk and denial: the thread
Don't skip it. It does a lot wrong but it does a fair amount right as well. It's a solid enough game if you can overlook some glaring issues.
At this point I think the reason why 1 became the sacred cow of the franchise is mostly nostalgia. It's the easiest souls game with the easiest bosses and least complex and demanding combat. And the most popular for casuals. You can also faceroll through the whole game in a couple of hours at most so speedrunning trannies put it in a pedestal as well.
Its the last true souls game. DS3 and the later titles might as well be boss rush simulators
DS3 lategame levels are the biggest by far, shit like Grand Archives even dwarf ER main dungeons.