Jason » Reviews » DARK SOULS™ II: Scholar of the First Sin
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35 people found this review helpful
11 people found this review funny
2
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 54.4 hrs on record
Posted: 19 Oct, 2024 @ 10:25pm
Updated: 19 Oct, 2024 @ 10:26pm

this game can be summarized as a combination of minor inconveniences

- ties invincibility frames into a stat, forcing players to spend 20+ levels and delaying access to str, dex, etc..

- enemies have a comically large aggro range and will follow the player to another country if they decided to immigrate

- has some of the worst run backs out of any game FromSoftware has released

- constantly reusing bosses, and the mainline bosses are quite forgettable

- the DLC has significantly higher quality in term of boss fights, it makes the base game seem unfinished,
(fume knight and sir alonne are the very few bosses that actually mix up their moves, while the other bosses are easily predictable)

- the difficulty is artificial, and mostly derives from the devs coming up with the right number of enemies to place in an area, and then doubling that

when this game executes its original ideas flawlessly, like the ivory king fight, it can actually exceed past the two other titles, but unfortunately the mainline content in this game is unremarkable in terms of boss design
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5 Comments
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Frost 4 Dec, 2024 @ 11:12am 
I mean at the end of the day, it's a personal review, you should never be concerned with if it's a "nitpick" or whatever. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, after all.
Jason 3 Dec, 2024 @ 8:21am 
tying invincibility frames to a stat still matters, imagine a newcomer playing the series and they didn't realize they needed to level up ADP to 20 or higher

doesn't matter how quickly you level up, the feeling of losing the potential of pumping up other stats that increase the viability of your build still feels awful

we can continue to argue whether my comment is more of a "nitpick" but the fact it was never reintroduced in any other game shows that it was completely unnecessary to do
Jason 3 Dec, 2024 @ 8:15am 
some reused bosses are not well spaced out within the game,

Lud and Zallen requires you to go through a 5 minute long venture through frigid outskirts, filled with ambushes from frozen reindeers and poor visibility

the path to Blue Smelter Demon is also riddled with horribly placed enemies that literally add extra weight to the player and overwhelm them with attacks

imagine going through all of that just to fight a reskin of a boss you already fought

I can concede on my point that they were "reused constantly" but I'll still argue that this game lacks engaging bosses that were memorable to fight

Mostly because the game relies on pumping up enemy numbers to inflate difficulty, the singular bosses are very easy, while the fights that involve ganking the player are by far the most difficult

Frost 17 Nov, 2024 @ 11:50am 
I hate how much everyone complains about ADP, you level up so much faster in dark souls 2 than the other games that the extra stat literally doesn't matter. It just gives players the CHOICE to have a super buffed dodge roll.
Canada 11 Nov, 2024 @ 6:01pm 
1: They do not reuse bosses constantly. The only bosses in the game that get reused are the Flexile Sentry, Ruin Sentinel, Executioners Chariot (Phase 2), as well as the Smelter Demon, Aava (Reused for Lud and Zallen), and the Covetous Demon. They are well spaced out within the game, and even in Dark Souls 1, as the game progressed, things that were once bosses would be reused as normal enemies.