While the variety in places to fight and explore is great, the world of Dark Souls II lacks a certain cohesion that was present in the original. You'll travel between crumbling seaside kingdoms to marshes layered with thick coats of poison to what feels like the bowels of hell itself. The world of Drangelic is massive and filled with a wide variety of different locales. Can’t get past a particularly tricky boss? Maybe head down another path to the Shaded Woods instead, and come back once you've leveled up.

Stuck at haunted dock full of fire-wielding marauders? Well, you can work your way down a well and find a tomb full of talking rats. One of my favorite elements here is that you always have at least a handful of different routes through the world at your disposal. True, this system is similar to how it was in Demon's Souls, but I'm a much bigger fan of how the original Dark implemented it.īut I pushed through and was rewarded for it, because the sprawling and diverse world of Dark Souls II proves to be ripe for non-linear exploration. While undoubtedly a hardcore feature, I found it frustrating because it slightly stifled my urge to explore the world with a fear of being too harshly penalized for failure. This can be counteracted by using a Human Effigy, but those items are few and far between in the early half of the campaign. I say “almost” because developer From Software went a little too far with a penalty that decreases your max HP every time you die. From learning to exploit enemy attack patterns to picking up the signs of environmental traps, the high difficulty almost never felt insurmountable. Each moment of failure taught me more about how Dark Souls II works that helped me get better. But like the original, no death was ever in vain.

As a guy who earned both the 'To Link the Fire' and 'Dark Lord' endgame Achievements in the original Dark Souls, I have no shame in admitting that Dark Souls II put me down hundreds of times throughout the massive, 60-hour journey.

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