Diminutive Diatribes: First Look at Dark Souls 2

Okay, so...don't usually do this, but I have a busy week, in particular Saturday, so I won't have time for my regular creator spotlight or article.  So, I thought I'd share a sort of first look at Dark Souls 2, give my critiques, and try to say how it stacks up to the original.  Probably less editing and pictures and more discussion for this one.  There will be minor spoilers, but nothing too specific, so relax.

The Good: Dark Souls 2 has fantastic game mechanics.  They copy much from the original, with the tight controls based around wielding an item in each hand, shield or weapon, and having spells and regular tools for use in specific slots.  The enemies follow similar rules, with varying degrees of speed and power, all with their proper tells and weaknesses, if you're willing to be patient and look.  It's a system that rewards patience and persistence, as well as a bit of mastery.  If you learn your weapon or spell or attack style and its use, then you can overcome almost anything, with the right amount of practice.

Alongside the game mechanics, there have been additions throughout the game.  The ability to duel wield adds new combos to an already established weapon at the risk of extra damage, and there is now an option to two hand items in either hand instead of just the one in your right.  There are more item and weapon slots, more ring slots, and a much more diverse range of weapons and spells in the game.  This includes twin blades that, while weak when wielded with one hand, are very powerful if wielded with two hands.

Yes, there is dual wielding.  It's pretty cool.

The graphics are beautiful and the design of everything from the buildings to the enemies is superb.  One enemy was literally a giant mass of corpses made to look like a person and the corpses wriggled about, while one vista had a tree that was the corpse of a giant, complete with a fruit I could harvest.  Everything here is worth taking a second to stop and examine, because the world is truly much more beautiful than the original Dark Souls.  It's a wonder to behold.

The game really is beautiful

Music is competent.  Regular music is ambient, while boss music is exciting, and the sound effects are nice and meaty, giving your weapons a powerful and satisfying feel.  Speaking of music, it really contributes to the atmosphere.  While not as lonely as the original Dark Souls, it has a very distinctive feel...in darkness, things are quiet, but also hectic, frightening, and will keep you on edge for fear of the blade in your back.  In day time, even when facing huge monsters, you have a feeling of ease and calm that is different from previous games...the disparity here really helps make the game a rollercoaster of experience.

Surprises.  The game is full of unexpected twists and turns that you won't really be expecting.  I don't just mean traps, either, like the mimic chests which will eat you.  I'm referring to anything from walls you can blow up on accident or which enemies can smash through, to hidden doors and areas, to NPCs who do the most unusual of things.  In one instance, I used a torch to help navigate a darkened area near the seaside and while it didn't do damage, some of the bestial enemies were visibly frightened by it, preferring to hide rather than fight.  In that same area, an enemy threw something at me that exploded in black tar...it didn't damage or even slow me down, but if I was hit with a flaming arrow or if I had my torch out, I'd explode.  In another area, if you douse yourself with water, you take reduced fire damage, while others have traps activated with certain key items.  It's an interesting mix of things you wouldn't expect, offering surprising complexity and richness of things to explore.

Yeah, walls can be destroyed, you can be jumped, and there are a lot of surprises waiting for you.

Side Stories:  The game has a few interesting side stories.  Talking to NPCs can get you items for listening, but sometimes the best stories are ones told by the world or that you see for yourself.  One area has a farm that is full of peasants and pigs, wielding farm equipment.  They are working until they see you, at which point they go feral and attack, rolling boulders at you and generally acting crazy.  Then, further on, you see a cultish ceremony and above them is a jovial pardoner, surrounded by corpses.  What happened here?  That is for us to piece together and it's delightfully creepy.  Very Resident Evil 4.  In another area, you hear tell of a mystic queen who bathed herself in poison to try and keep herself young...and if you're not careful, you'll have to battle here in a pit of poison, as she tries to reclaim her youth.  My personal favorite has to be a chapel surrounded by decaying knights where an old friend from a previous game waits.  If you go looking, the game has plenty of fascinating little stories to tell you.

Hey, here's a familiar face! ^_^

The Bad: The main story is just tosh.  It's pretty uninvolving and kinda lame.  This does encourage players to make up their own reasons for fighting, but...I wanted more.

The enemy design may be pretty, but it's painfully uninspired.  While a precious few bosses are actually interesting looking, most enemies are guys in suits of armor.  Hell, even the bosses feel lame.  One is basically a giant slug that is almost impossible to die to, while another is a rat with a mohawk.  Some bosses get re-used later in the game as enemies and as major boss fights...it's disappointing that we didn't have a gaping dragon or a four kings...I hated those bastards, but I have to admit, they didn't look like regular enemies.  I've seen some interesting designs, but not enough, at least not after 40 hours.  Little depressing.

Hey...here's a familiar face -_-u

The new stat allocation system makes things a lot more complicated than I think it needed to be.  It also makes the game a helluva lot harder, with equip load and general speed being made into two stats unto themselves rather than being folded into other stats.  It's a little annoying, having to level up both vitality and endurance to be able to wield a sword, but also have the stamina to use it more than once.

Voice acting is just terrible.  Granted, it's not like people care, I tend to just read the dialogue and skip it, because we're here for the gameplay, but the characters seldom really emote and the script doesn't really give them the leeway too.  We get more character out of the environment than the NPCs.

Lack of gimmicks.  This one might seem a bit strange, but stick with me.  In Dark Souls, you could often do weird things to enemies, gimmicks, that would change the way a battle progressed, like cutting off a beast's tail, or using a Lloyd talisman to prevent them from using estus to heal, or nullifying a poisonous enemy with pyromancy.  And while there are some new wrinkles to combat and enemies with tricks in Dark Souls 2, several gimmicks were taken out...and that makes me sad, because I liked cutting off enemy tails or trying to outwit my opponents.

Know what you could do in Dark Souls?  Cut off tails and wield them as weapons.  Know what you can't do in Dark Souls 2?  Cut off tails and wield them as weapons...

Lack of explanation.  This has always bugged me a little in both Dark Souls games.  See, this is kind of a hallmark of the series.  It's part of the exploration...but god, is it frustrating at some points.  I have no idea how to even switch arrows.  Sometimes, this can be an interesting twist.  You don't always understand the controls, so you experiment.  You try and see what each item does or what each weapon's moveset is and, by comparison, this game does offer more explanation than Dark Souls did.  However, I still feel frustrated by a lack of explanation on certain controls.  Not just with how to switch arrows in the middle of combat, either.  Duel wielding is never explained.  You have to have two weapons of the same type, 1.5 times the stats of the highest stats required for the weapon, and hold triangle...that wasn't explained anywhere and I just discovered it while farting around with my weapons.  I get that that might be the point, but it limits the abilities of a player to progress and enjoy the game and I think that, even if you don't want to include it in the game, at least give us an instruction manual outlining all the controls.  Dark Souls 2 doesn't have an instruction manual.  It has a warranty slip...I am not kidding at all.

Lack of interconnectivity in the world is probably what makes me the saddest about this game.  Rather than a large, interconnected world where you could warp, but which you could actually scale from one end to the other, you have a hub area, a few basic areas attached to the hub, and warps to others areas.  They all go off in straight lines and never intersect and that's lame, to me.  I liked being able to go from the forest, to the city, to the shrine all in a few minutes of hectic sprinting in the original Dark Souls.  The reason for this is also something I hate.  Load walls.  Most of the starting areas are hidden behind doors that lock behind you, but which you can still open, and they do this to hide the areas loading.  The original Dark Souls never needed time to load.  It was all seamless.  Here though...while the separate areas are seamless, there are plenty of seams in between them and the hub and it feels awkward.  I wish more thought had been given to the world's layout.

The Mixed:  The hub town.  While this could have been an interesting idea, Majula, the main city, bothers me for how reminiscent it is of Demons Souls, the game I hate most in the Souls Series.  You HAVE to go back there a lot, because the only way to level up is there.  You can't do it by bonfire.  And really, plenty of NPCs may come there to live, but others don't, so you still have to warp around.  However, why is this mixed and not bad?  Well, two reasons.  It gives you some down time...a place to collect your thoughts and breathe and in Dark Souls 2, that's important.  And two, because I think it may have been an interesting psychological experiment.  This is only speculation, but I think that what with the load times and what not, they took away the ability to level up at the bonfire to wage a psychological battle with the player.  It's easier to horde souls now, rather than going to Majula to spend them, since you have to warp, and wait for the load, and talk to the NPC who levels you up...so it's easy to get overconfident and lose big.  If this was intentional, it is a stroke of genius in game design.  I'll be talking more about that in next week's article.

Get used to being here...you'll be coming back ALOT

Questionable design choices.  This mostly comes down to putting a bonfire so close to enemies that you can't use it once you get up, cause the enemies respawn.  This happened to me where a bonfire was right next to three archers who would start to snipe me as soon as I got up.  It forces you to kill them a dozen times to stop them respawning and...this happens in more than one place.  I don't know if this was intentional or not...it could go either way.

Enemy despawning.  So, in this game, you can actually farm an area of enemies until they no longer spawn.  This is an interesting idea because it forces you to move on, rather than grind.  And the game is balanced, for the most part, so that you don't need to grind.  You can sell items, you get souls, you can go to other areas, if you need souls, usually, you can get them.  However, this also means that if people mess up too much and despawn the only area they can handle, they could be in a real no win scenario...and have to restart the game.  It's a mixed bag, actually.  It adds to difficulty, but can also be convenient, if you just wanna run to the boss.  However, it can also be detrimental.

Secrets.  Yes, I love the surprises the game throws at you, but some secrets are so hard to find, like the hidden doors which you cannot tell from other areas of wall, that it makes the game stupid hard or annoyingly tedious when you wanna search for new items.  Just...frustrating.

Lack of starting options.  In the first Dark Souls, if you knew where to go, because of the connected world, you could be rolling in weapons, armor, and items right from the start.  However, in Dark Souls 2, you can't go everywhere right away...so you have to make do with your starting character's items.  What's more, lots of services like smiths or item vendors who buy your unused equipment are unlocked much later in the game...so you can't improve or get a quick boost of souls to help you out.  This is both good and bad.  Good in that it gives weight to your character choice early on and affects how you will play, since you won't have many other options, but bad because...you can't easily cover your weaknesses.  The starting merchants do make this less of an issue, but it's an interesting balancing act between starting in an interconnected world with lots of options, but making your starting choice meaningless or starting in a more divided world and making you really think about your class.

Choose wisely, cause this is all you'll get for a while.

Change in tone.  I enjoyed the solitary journey that was Dark Souls, but the change in tone puts more of an emphasis on the multiplayer and the NPCs.  You are not alone in this world, the game seems to say, and so you have to interact with either the NPCs or your fellow players.  While I'm not overly fond of this, it is going for a different feel than the original Dark Souls and it's not bad, just...different.  However, it is head scratching.  Many rewards for covenants can only be gotten through multiplayer in Dark Souls 2 and this is a stark contrast to the original, where even the multiplayer focused covenants had rewards that anyone and everyone could get.

This is a less lonely Dark Souls...more NPCs, more multiplayer, less solitude

How it stacks up:  Compared to the original Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2 is a definite improvement mechanically and graphically.  I think that Dark Souls was more polished and diverse than Dark Souls 2, probably because it was the first we'd seen anything like it, and I miss the open world and unique monster designs.  On the whole though, I wouldn't say that one is better than the other.  Part of Dark Souls charm was that the combat, while not perfect, was so tight and in so little need of improvement.  The improvements in Dark Souls 2 are nice, but some of the changes are annoying.  Dark Souls 2 has prettier worlds than Dark Souls.  Dark Souls has a more satisfying journey because of the interconnected worlds and characters.  You could make comparisons till you're blue in the face.  But I think Yahtzee Croshaw said it best.  It's like trying to decide which is better between Portal and Portal 2.  It's kinda pointless.  More of Dark Souls is never a bad thing.

Prepare to die...and love every second of it.

Dark Souls 2 is different from Dark Souls.  That's not better or worse, it's different.  Standing on it's own, it's a damn fine, very enjoyable, very HARD game.  I'd recommend both to anyone, because Dark Souls 2 is more fun to look at and explore, but I love the world of Dark Souls.  So far, they're on an even keel, I think, with me liking Dark Souls just slightly more than Dark Souls 2 because of the convenience of leveling up at the bonfire.

Before anyone asks, no, I don't have a problem with the system of death.  Losing incremental health actually feels like a nice balance to me between Demons Souls and Dark Souls.  It makes you want to get better, without making death consequenceless or too punishing.  It kind of encourages growth, but without actually making it too unfair, unless you screw up just way way too much.  I may not really like it or be jumping for joy about it, but it's okay.

And that's a basic first impression of Dark Souls 2.  I have beaten it, I died 330 times(thank you for the death counter by the way, From Software) and it was DAMNED hard.  As hard as the original?  Dunno...there are changes that make the game easier and changes that make the game much much tougher.  Regardless, it's a good game, even if it is different from what I was expecting.

Don't expect this to be easy.  The players claiming this is easier than the original...yeah, no.