Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin2015

With Dark Souls II I am really hard. I have already played part 1 and 3 before and have now gone through the second part together with two friends in the Seamless Coop. In direct comparison, it just feels much more wrong for me. This starts with the design of many areas. While Dark Souls 1 and 3 often have strong, memorable areas, for my taste one walks far too often through any brown caves, ruins or altogether rather uninspired sections. In addition, there are opponent placements that are more annoying than demanding, and a general feeling of “more opponents = more difficult” instead of really clever counter design. Also in the combat system and weapons scaling a lot felt strange to me. There are definitely moments when everything clicks and you realize why people like this part. Especially in the coop we always had really fun situations. But those good moments are constantly held back by things that just feel unnecessarily cumbersome, bulky, or poorly tuned. In the end, Dark Souls II is not a complete disaster for me, but clearly the weakest part of the series compared to Parts 1 and 3. There are good ideas and individual strong moments, but for me all this never comes together to a really round overall picture.

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