Dark Souls 2: YOU DIED HARDER

the dlcs were better than the main game. still kinda like this one but i feel like i can steamroll through it at this point even with the re-mixed areas of the remaster. the new high framerate is really nice, wish bloodborne had it

it's clear that from software's b-team did most of the work on this but i'd still take a second-rate souls game over virtually anything else. i need to go back and work my way through the dlc once i've finished with bloodborne.

best part of sotfs update so far is the pool of blood mechanic. works the same as a bloodstain however when multiple people have died in the same spot it becomes a 'pool of blood' that when clicked activates all the bloodstains simultaneously. so you get multiple phantoms missing a cliff jump or this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxMw5L4R-aY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQyF7I8Fanc

lol, that's evocative

I'm stuck at the three Sentinels in the Lost Bastille. Haven't beaten the Pursuer either, cos he is REALLY tough and I read he's harder than the Sentinels.

Doesn't feel entirely fair to be fighting three guys at once. I mean you had the Anor Londo duo in Dark Souls but it was a nice big space and the two of them had different moves. I can take down the first Sentinel without a scratch, but the next two is a tough battle. Should I go do something else? The DSII world is way more confusing than the first game so I have no idea where to go next aside from this.

i think you can summon an NPC for that fight (and i'm pretty sure i summoned human help).

you want to take the first guy out on the platform as quick as possible. Definitely do summon an NPC or two; let one of them pull one of the last two enemies away and then focus on the other on the ground.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xrPkE-LWqY
Later in the game, you run two of these at once so you kinda need to learn how to play these guys.

LOL i have to talk to the cat to leave a covenant and then the NPC will be there.

Hmmm that's not it I'm not in any covenants. I found the cell but the summon isn't there.

are you human?

i recall bringing players down and needing to get them over by the prior save point.

Oh yeah I won! The key is to keep both of them in view and taunt them into jumping at you, then dodge and attack whoever's nearest. Also throwing a bunch of firebombs down on them before they jump up to that platform.

Ok now Dark Souls 2 is starting to piss me off. It isn't playing by the rules anymore! The last bonfire I was at _started_ with me getting shot at by crossbow. That never happened in Dark Souls 1. Now I am fighting the same 2-gargoyle boss from Dark Souls 1, only it is FIVE gargoyles. WTF?

heh, i know where you're at. if you stay still, you won't be shot. the instant you start to move, you're fair game.

This game is losing me. The magic is gone from the first one. Level design is through the floor. It's unfair in lots of ways the first one wasn't.

Ok just gave it another shot and made it to the boss w all the skeletons and skeleton wheels. Everyone goes on about how hard the first game is but at least it is fair. This one feels more like going through a room blindly in the dark. I appreciate the more open-ended approach but it also results in some confusing and unrealistic level design. I can think of The Catacombs in Dark Souls and it is pretty clear what area that entails: winding underground burial tunnels where the deeper you go, the more darkness surrounds you. Or the Darkroot Garden: misty forests with tree creatures and sleeping stone giants, with spare ruins and bridges marking places where humans once made their mark. Thinking back to the levels in Dark Souls 2, they all sort of blur together, they may end up going outside or featuring a cave or a ruins or a forest area or sometimes all of the above. Some areas stand out by looking vastly different but most of this is muddy, dark, and very similar-looking. The enemies are more generic, seeming less like a real monster ecology and more like generic bad guys to sprinkle throughout a video game. In the face of the non-linear level design the shortcuts seem to be there mainly for tradition. In the Huntman's Copse I made my way through skeleton caves and came upon a gate that I could not pass. Luckily there were several other exits and I wandered around, snaking behind a waterfall, eventually stumbling upon the other side of the gate, and a switch to open it. Not only did the shortcut open up a passageway that I had only just discovered 2-3 minutes before, but it shaved off a whole 10 seconds of time from my trip. Ugh.

Still, the combat is a lot of fun. Haven't figured out the new parry system yet, but in the first game that took me dozens of hours before I began learning it in earnest. Crowd control can be super annoying but it is a new approach and most of the good things about this game are the new things is tries. I'm sure the more I play this the more I will like it, but the level design in the first game was almost always thoughtful and inspiring.

problem is you're following up with sequel directly after mainlining the first one. not saying the criticisms aren't valid. are you playing the scholar of the first sin upgraded version? they did make subtle improvements of areas, not design-wise but the enemy placement changes make the game seem more thought out

Made it to Drangelic Castle, which looks really nice w the rain, maybe one of the best-looking Souls areas, like the exit from the Asylum in Dark Souls. These F&$%^KING stone soldiers that all come alive and fight you alongside an earlier BOSS BATTLE is bullshit. This game is way cheaper w difficulty than Dark Souls 1.

I am having trouble because there are too many of them and they are all designed to be fought one-on-one, most of them having shields that will block your attacks and thus necessitating melee dodge rolling. Which wouldn't be a problem if the level design wasn't just small boxes stuck together. URGH.

The bosses in Dark Souls 2 are easier than the ones in 1 and a bit lacking in originality. Once I've figured out a few patterns I can take a boss in 1 or 2 tries w most of my health.

It sounds like the production was really chaotic, multiple versions of the game being combined hurriedly, visual elements like the new lighting system falling through, etc. But it's not a bad game, and it sounds like many people like it, so good on From for pulling out all the stops to make it as polished as it is.

It's generally a fair game and still up there on the level with 1. It just has its problem areas. With Miyazaki coming back for the 3rd it is also kind of cool to have a weird entry in the trilogy, like Super Mario Bros. 2 or something.

RE: Drangelic Castle. I know I know I just need to get gud.

you wanna section them off in each room and deal with them carefully one at a time. it's doable.

otm thanks i guess it isn't so cheap after all esp that room w the stairs going around the corner its a good place to trap one or two, the big ones usually get bored and walk away

you're talking about the room with all the Ruin Sentinels, right? that one's crazy, and i didn't realize at first that killing the soldiers was the trigger for opening the doors and unleashing the sentinels. could have handled them one-on-one, but i don't think i ever cleared that room (just did suicide runs to get the items).

i did a lot of farming in that room.

Yeah it's a nice room. Also did a lot of farming w the mastodons, they were a fun enemy to fight.

Kinda sad that the big castle-w-lightning-flashin-across-the-floor scene was only for one hallway leading to the boss. I thought it was going to be a whole big area. Looks really cool in still shots but kinda underwhelming implementation.

Looking Glass Knight was a fun bosses. Most of the bosses are fun and easier than those in Dark Souls. Farmed a little bit, saved up for some Gold Pine Resin, and went on a LONG sidequest back through the foggy forest to find the needed merchant. He was a skull on a pile of dead bodies(?). I love it. After that LGK fell in two attempts.

Currently in the Shrine of Amana. Big jump in difficulty. I hate those magic homing arrows, and the fact that you can't move fast in the water. And the invisible drop offs. And the seemingly random places where you will be moving through and suddenly your armor is broken, or your rings, or something equally upsetting.

It's a beautiful area though! You can tell they tried to put better levels towards the end of the game. At one point I was in a cave and thought there was some music playing in another window. It was crazy noise coming out of a giant mushroom, I think.

you can see the drop offs better w/ a torch

At Aldias Keep I was building up a lot of souls, like 60k, from running up the stairs and killing that large caged basilisk then pulling the dragon statue and taking out the orcs in the long dark hallway with the inhabited paintings. The orcs got me a lot by grabbing and eating me, but it was easy to run in and grab souls before they attacked. Then the large one at the start stopped appearing, cutting down the amount of souls per run by 3000.

I cleared the dark hallway and went down into an acidic pit that destroyed my rings then my armor. I was going to remove my equipment but there were some monsters and I didn't want them to kill me when I was in the menu. They didn't attack me. So I did the stupidest thing, I attacked them, and they all turned and promptly destroyed me, leaving 60,000+ souls in a pit of acid.

Respawned at the bonfire and ran to the entrance of the building. Went to go fill up my coffee. When I got back a swarm of cursed animals destroyed me and my chance to get those souls.

You don't turn your back on these games.

I beat the game tonight and the final boss went down in one attempt. My +10 Halberd and dodging skills made short work of whatever that one monster was.

By the end some of those giant enemies got really annoying. The ones in the Dragon Shrine, the giant ones w infinite stamina. They suck.

Picked up Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin on the cheap from Steam last week. Graphically it looks way more impressive, and I appreciate a lot of changes to enemy placement. At least I was, until I ended up in the basement of Sinner's Rise and what was once a giant pain-in-the-butt monster has now been swapped out for a much faster model that has 4 ARMS each with swords and can attack from the front and the rear.

Made it to the DLC areas in SOTFS. They are really really good! I knew they were hyped to be better than the vanilla game but that is definitely the case.

Now only if I can kill this giant sabertooth tiger...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kr7KDCsIws

i've tried like all of these games inc most recently bloodborne and idk why but there's something about them that just doesn't click with me. i really think it's something about the way it handles - it feels so cumbersome + lumbering. it's def not the difficulty bc there are lots of difficult games that i greatly enjoy. but they tend to feel more kinetic and rapid maybe instead of methodical? anyone have any insight into this bc i'd love to love them but idk they're so dreary and the gameplay is just not fun to me :( :( :(

DS3 and Bloodborne are the fastest, movement and gameplay-wise, but they're not for everybody I guess. Although maybe you're trying to use a slow weapon/build with a fast playstyle? Have you tried using small weapons and light armor?

1) starting with Dark Souls 2 is the worst idea. either start with 1 for the incredible world design or 3 for the modern gameplay (and incredible world design). DS2 is the cheapest, most frustrating entry.

2) moves are slow because they are deliberate. everything you do has weight, there is a commitment to your actions, not unlike the first Castlevania, where the slow yet powerful whip & jump stopped you from slashy slashy your way through the game. you can't play Castlevania like it is Ninja Gaiden.

Dreary is part-n-parcel with this series tho. Love it or leave it!

the feeling of dread and isolation is one of the most special things about this series. they evoke it through the game mechanics themselves, not just the art design. this is where DS2 fails (you can actually perma-kill enemies & the world is unconnected - it is fundamentally different from the other games) but the other games succeed so well. it is in not having a world map, insta saves, or fast travel. it is in how you learn the world and experience it. being at the isolated bottom of Blighttown and being so far from the start of the game, so far from the safety of home. if you traverse to Blighttown via the usual route then you experience a similar panic at The Depths when getting cursed and having your HP now cut in half. yet the game provides a number of methods for the player to overcomes this challenge, it is not unfair about it. fwiw Demon's Souls (the true origin of the series) already featured this cruel misfortune, a penalty it incurs at any death.

in DS2 you are not limited to a scant few healing items (up-gradable via boss challenge ala DS1) but can buy and stockpile hundreds of healing & buff items (tbf Demon's Souls had this too but was much more stingier about it). DS2 has warp-able bonfires from the start of the game because the levels are not holistically planned out in that way (and the other way around). you never get a sense that everything is connected because it isn't.

DS1 is about discovering a world which has a coherent architecture and an integrity to it on both gameplay & story levels. DS2 is about playing more and more levels, more and more variations on the Dark Souls gameplay. which is not a bad thing, and people are free to prefer it. personally i like the first more.

Something I don't know the answer to but would love to learn before (if) the first game finally comes to Switch: if you are, say, cursed by a giant rat or farting frog or whatever, and your HP is halved, do you know how to fix that? Do you know to head back to Stumpville and find the magic orange vine, or is it totally blind trial and error?

good question

For (another) example, I've seen a little bit of youtube gameplay, and someone might say "this enemy is easy to dispatch if you apply the magic flame to the giant sword you could have picked up from the merchant at the bottom of the well," which (in this made up example) would require you to have not only found the merchant, but bought the giant sword, found the magic flame and known to apply it to the sword to fight this specific enemy. How would you know to do that?

trial and error, look it up, or just play the game without trying to min-max every encounter. i haven't played these games still but i've never gotten the impression that they're about that.

It's just that I've seen a couple of examples of (per the above) getting cursed or poisoned and basically being stuck like that until you do (xyz). That seems no fun.

It lightens up in the later games, but there is a for real unforgiving, sadistic, arcane (how does any of this work?!) quality to Dark Souls 1 that won’t appeal to everyone but is absolutely what makes it special.

I was cursed (permanent half health until cured) in the deepest depths against a boss and just could not do it. A zillion tries. Researched online/talked to some friends and found out about the cure. Brutally worked my way back to the top. Got it. Explored some other areas, powered up, and cut my way back down and did it.

Some of this was legitimately painful and dread inducing but the fucking satisfaction you get when you accomplish it has been nothing like I’ve ever felt in video games before or since.

There were legitimately times I couldn’t face that game unless I was drunk.

Curse in DS1 is really the only thing that persists like this, and you meet an NPC early on who can fix it (or sell you can item that can). The only trick might be getting back to him.

I definitely had a similar experience getting cursed in the Depths and having to trek back to get un-cursed, but hey, it taught me you can run by all the enemies if necessary!

getting cursed early on and feeling like this stupid fucking game is actively trying to get you to ragequit is one of the fundamental masochistic pleasures of dark souls imo

curing the Curse is done via the NPC in the church, which is one of the main destinations you are given upon arriving. talk to all NPCs you see and if they are merchants browse their wares. you don't really make it to the curse place without getting to this church. the basement key is actually on some stairs on the way to the church. the game world is layed out in a logistic order, if you are progressing as normally, you will come across the cure long before the curse itself.

as for "this enemy is easy if you apply magic flame to giant sword" imo this is never really the case. if you don't know how to fight and enemy you will get wrecked no matter what item you use. furthermore the time you spend chasing down X "OP weapon" is much better spent fighting the boss, learning how to dodge their attacks.

Well, yeah. There are people who can beat this game in their undies with no weapons ... just like their characters! (Har.) What I don't get is how people figure shit out. Is it just OCD trial and error ad infinitum? For example, if there is a NPC merchant selling a curse cure, do you know that? How? Will he tell you? Is it called "Curse-be-Gone" or something, or is it vague, like Frogsbane or something like that? If you are cursed, how do you know to go back to the merchant? Again, trial and error? How in the world would someone know that?

there are large and extremely well documented wikis for all of this stuff

https://darksouls.wiki.fextralife.com/Dark+Souls+Wiki
http://darksouls.wikia.com/wiki/Dark_Souls_Wiki

NPC merchant selling the cure for curse needs only to be talked to. a list comes up w all his items and each item has descriptive text that tells the lore and the game function, telling you exactly what it does.