Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin

Dark Souls II: The Scholar of the First Sin is a poor follow-up to its classic, genre-defining predecessor. It not only shows a complete lack of understanding of what made the first Dark Souls amass such a cult following in the first place, following its marketing instead of its design, but it also fails at pushing the series to a new direction focused on difficulty.

The game’s opening cutscene – which shows a man forget about his family, alienating anyone who wants to play as a female character – talks about an accursed land where people branded with the mark of the undead go to try to prevent their ultimate fate: to lose their memories, feelings, and sense of self, becoming a zombified being called simply “hollow”. The player’s avatar is one of the accursed undead and, when the game begins, they’re in an eerie, desolate, dark place, surrounded by mountains, with the light entering only through a crack between them. A name appears on the screen: “Things Betwixt”. In this place, you come to a strange oak house and talk to three old ladies: they are called Fire Keepers, but could very well have been named Moirai, for they talk of fate, of death and the absence of free will, with sardonic little giggles. “You’ll lose your souls,” one of them warns. “All of them. Over and over again.” In other words, you’re going to die. A bunch of times.

Dark Souls II seems obsessed with death to the point where it becomes detrimental to the experience. The first Dark Souls – and Demon’s Souls before it – was all about creating an oppressive atmosphere, immersing the player in a believable, but dangerous world. It gained fame, however, because of its above-average difficulty, as players were accustomed to games that empowered them at ridiculous levels. Here, the new directors, Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura, decided to put the main focus on difficulty, creating various opportunities to finish off the player’s character in every corner of every map.

The very first time you die in the game, you even unlock an achievement called  “This is Dark Souls”: killing the player has become the goal of the developers; difficulty has become the series ID. The very first Dark Souls, however, wasn’t about death, but adventure. It was about exploring this rich, interconnected, yet dangerous world, which was indeed full of traps and perils, but never had them on the forefront of its design. Its sequel, with the objective of finding more and more annoying ways of killing the player, ends up losing the very same sense of wonder that made the first one grab hold of players’ imaginations when it launched almost a decade ago.

The game’s first sin (I’m not sorry) is its “strength in numbers” mindset: to increase the difficulty of every encounter, the developers just increased the number of enemies the player has to dispatch at any given time. If a certain enemy type is complicated, but manageable when alone, the game soon throws three of them all at once in the same room and says, “Tough Luck.” When you go to the next room, there will be three of them again, but now with archers also firing at you from a distance. And in the next room, there will be more of everything and traps scattered around to hinder your movement.

Being a slow, methodic affair, the combat in the Souls series was always at its best when the player had to face just one tough enemy: blocking attacks with a shield gives a chance to watch the enemy’s attack pattern in a safe way, giving them time to learn when to dodge or go for an attack, a parry or a backstab. As dodging doesn’t give you invincibility frames, if you dodge to where the attack will land you will take damage: combat is slow, then, precisely to give the player time to visualize the place they have to dodge to. In single duels, it’s all about knowing your enemy.

Put two or more of them in the same arena, with similar attacks, all attacking at the same time, however, and things tend to fall apart: since blocking depletes your stamina bar and you become vulnerable when it’s totally depleted, a lot of enemies at the same time means that blocking is no longer a viable option – which makes melee builds less advantageous than others. It also means that the screen is more cluttered with attacks – and there can even be enemies off-screen to make your life more miserable – which makes the act of dodging safely more luck-based than before. What the player tends to do in these situations, then, is to lure the enemies into a tight corridor or pick them out one by one with ranged attacks. In other words, by making mob battles constant, the developers made these two strategies into the whole game: playing Dark Souls II, therefore, can become quite a slog.

Another huge problem of this increase in enemy numbers is that it makes the areas feel overcrowded: since combat happens all the time, the player has little to no room to breathe. The game’s areas, therefore, lose their sense of place and feel more like your typical game level than fully-realized locales, being packed with enemies that are there just to kill the player and not because they happened to inhabit or guard the place: enemy placement doesn’t follow a “does this make sense here” approach, but a “let’s ambush and kill the player again” mindset.

There will be a hidden enemy waiting to strike you down at almost every corner in the game – the other corners will have two enemies waiting, archers firing from a distance, a monster coming from behind, and two soldiers dropping from above all at the same time. First, this makes ambushes lose their purpose: if they happen often, the player will come to expect them often, and, by definition, there’s no ambush without the element of surprise. Secondly, they quickly become annoying, as the player soon realizes they have to resort to the same old strategies of baiting distant enemies one by one with a long-ranged weapon – which takes time – or luring them to a tight corridor where you can use a lance to finish them off without being attacked by all sides – which also takes time. And, again, this situation occurs throughout the whole game. The developers wanted to make the experience difficult, but they ended up making it just boring instead.

Why throw just this enemy here and make it a complex, challenging, rewarding encounter, if we can throw ten at a time, coming from everywhere with no reason whatsoever, pay no mind to gameplay balance or level design, and call it a day, or, even better, call it Dark Souls. The first Souls games had ambushes – but they were much rarer – and mobs – but they were usually of very weak enemies. In Dark Souls II you fight three of everything, and there are even “mob bosses”: a giant rat is too easy for Dark Souls II, which prefers to lock you inside a room with ten rats that infinitely respawn and cause bleed, alongside the actual boss and another stronger rat that can petrify you – and the room is filled with little rat statues that serve to block attacks from huge swords that would have otherwise being able to dispatch a lot of rats with a single strike. Three huge skeletons as a boss? No, let’s add normal skeleton warriors and one with a wheel that moves super-fast and can flank the player as well. Putting a boss with long-ranged attacks in an arena completely covered with poison is not enough, why don’t we make the poison heal the monster as well? This fight, in particular, can be made significantly easier if you drain the poison from the arena, but since Dark Souls II confuses “frustrating design” with “difficult design”, the thing you have to do to drain the poison is obtuse at best, having no clear cause and effect correlation at all, and – making matters worse – is not even signaled that it’s something you could even do in the first place.

All this is to hide the fact that bosses are usually not very inventive in their design, either straight up copying the first game or offering a bland monster instead. For most of the game, you’ll be basically fighting giant humanoid enemies with huge swords or lances. The lore behind them is not that great either. There’s this huge armored thing called the Pursuer, who just is a huge armored guy that likes to pursue you – funnily enough, there are common versions of the Pursuer that quickly give up following you when you move away. There are the Gargoyles, which are just… “statues that have somehow come to life.” In the first game, they were right before the bell you had to ring to help lift your curse: they were the guardians of the place. Here, they are just Gargoyles who are standing next to a random bell you don’t even have to ring – and if in the first Dark Souls the fight stood out because there were two gargoyles at the same time, here there are three and yet the player will just be thinking “At least there are not seven of them and archers.”

In one of the game’s most unique areas – it’s not a castle, a keep, a cave, a poisonous marsh, or a forest, at least – is a wharf with a pirate theme. In this wharf, after you summon a pirate ship and board it, you come across… not a pirate, but another huge humanoid enemy with huge swords. It manages to stand out a bit, however, because it has a hunchback, and the hunchback happens to be another huge humanoid thing but now with huge clubs. It’s not a pirate, but it makes an impression. You get its soul, and what you discover about him? Nothing. He’s just there and his purpose was to kill you. Of course, it was. “The Flexile Sentry is a merciless creature whose purpose is to punish the undead,” the description of its soul says. Later, it also becomes a common enemy that guards the entrance to another boss, because why not. Meanwhile, the Medusa-like boss was a woman with vanity problems, and there’s a demonic blob that likes to eat stuff that was once a man who liked too much to eat stuff. The story behind most bosses – especially in the early game – is either non-existent, bland, or falls into the “they are there to kill the undead” routine.

Later areas become not only overcrowded but also overstuffed. There will be tons of enemies lying around and also statues spitting poison at you from all sides. This is the kind of level design that makes the player go “This is not hard, this is stupid,” encouraging them to find a way to cheese enemies or just skip them, running past them as fast as it is undeadly possible. After all, if the game is not playing fair, why should you? So the player is encouraged to find a safe spot somewhere, normally an arbitrary point in the map where the enemies are not programmed to go, and then shoot them with arrows or spam magic until they’re dead – God forbid if your character hasn’t a single long-ranged attack. Since its difficulty comes mainly from the number of enemies, Dark Souls II is only difficult because it is painfully boring, tempting the player to finish things faster and, therefore, get sloppy – if they’re not looking for ways to break the fights somehow. There’s a battle with a big dragon, for example, in which the dragon one-shots you with its fire breath attack that you are rarely able to run away from fast enough – fair, intuitive hitboxes are not Dark Souls II’s strong suit – that is, until you find a random, arbitrary spot in the arena where it simply doesn’t hit you for some random, arbitrary reason. When you discover that by luck and chance, the fight becomes trivial.

There are some good fights and level design to be found in Dark Souls II, especially in the DLC, (Fume Knight and Sinh are standouts bosses in the whole game whereas the area in the Sunken King DLC has some neat ideas) but the DLC also has optional areas that represent the apex of everything that is wrong with Dark Souls II, being overcrowded, overstuffed and mandatory to reach the boss.

Dark Souls II feels like the developers for some unfathomable reason thought that the Capra Demon fight, the Bed of Chaos and the last third of the first game, with its ridiculously dark areas, haphazardly enemy placement and more focus on platforming, were the best part of that game. So, they decided to put a lot of enemies in small arenas, make everything dark and packed with gangs of enemies, put more focus on platforming (oh god) and call it a day.

Another huge problem in Dark Souls II is that the geography of its world – the kingdom of Drangleic – feels off when it’s not completely absurd. Right at the beginning, in the game’s hub area called Majula, for example, you can spot some towers in the middle of the sea, a bit far away from where you stand. It takes, however, just a small tunnel for the player to get from Majula to the towers. If the player just went through a portal instead, like in Demon’s Souls, it would have been much better, because the way it is it just feels like there’s something wrong with the level design: you can clearly see that said tunnel shouldn’t have been able to get you to the towers. And the geography just gets worse and worse the further you progress in the game, making it very hard for the player to immerse themselves into that world. The most egregious example is a place called The Iron Keep, which is surrounded by lava, and yet manages to be located on top of a windmill.

Really. You’re in this place:

And then you get on an elevator and arrive here:

It’s nonsensical. This doesn’t give the Dark Souls II’ setting a dreamlike feel; it’s just bad design, after all, “dreams” isn’t even a motif in the game.

The general level design is far from great, after all. There are some neat ideas, but they are few are far between, such as a contraption in No-Man’s Wharf that lights up the whole place, making some really scary creatures hide in buildings instead of adding up to the number of things you have to deal with at the same time: as the contraption stands in of the most difficult areas of the level, it offers a great reward for the player that manages to beat the enemies there. Most levels in the game, however, are just packed with useless stuff, filled with secret passages that lead to dead-ends and messages in the ground, written by other players, saying, and I quote, “Hurrah for pointless!”

And there are even some areas that block your path with a small obstacle that should have been simple to overcome if your character was only programmed to do so –  a recurrent problem that further reinforces the artificiality of everything. The worst offender, of course, is the broken stone pillars in Shaded Forest that force you to go on a hunt to kill the most powerful beings in that world simply because you can’t climb over them. “Seek souls. Larger, more powerful souls,” a woman at Majula annoyingly repeats every time you want to level up, “to circumvent a small pile of rubble,” she sadly doesn’t say.

Really. You must acquire powerful souls because this is blocking the path to Drangleic Castle:

Some items are also counterintuitive. The “Bastille Key” doesn’t open doors in the area called The Lost Bastille, but in one called Sinner’s Rise. It’s true that you get to Sinner’s Rise from the Lost Bastille, as if it was an extension of it, but in Dark Souls II you also get to the Iron Keep from a bloody windmill, so the sense of cohesion is just not there to help guide the player to logical conclusions.

A character in the opening cutscene warns about the perils of your journey through Drangleic, saying that “one day, you will stand before its decrepit gate. Without really knowing why.” The further you progress in Dark Souls II, the more this sounds less like a commentary on the undead’s plight and their loss of memories, and more like a warning about the game’s design: the player will be really killing enemies and exploring areas without knowing why – why they are persisting in the game when they could do anything else, like replaying the first Dark Souls.

Finally, the game’s story feels almost like an afterthought. It tries to pull a Bioshock Infinite with its “there’s always a fire to be kindled, the undead curse, and a lighthouse” thing, but it’s just redundant. Once again, you will be in a cursed, ruined kingdom. Once again, you will find characters that are slowly going hollow, losing their memories and identity. Once again, they will laugh sardonically at the end of their sentences. Near the end, the story gets a bit more complex, but most of the game reuses the same narrative threads and tries to get away with it by putting “things repeat in an endless cycle” as a central theme – and the locales and bosses you meet rarely have an interesting background story to make up for that repetition.

Dark Souls II: The Scholar of the First Sin is not just an unworthy sequel to the first Dark Souls, it’s also a mediocre game in its own right. By putting difficulty at the forefront of its design, but without really knowing how, it ends up just offering a tiresome, frustrating experience.

November 16, 2020.