Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin (2015)

I was going to post a whole review but I decided to not put much more energy into this game.

I spent the last week playing Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin (SotFS) where these were my conditions:

• I own the original Dark Souls 2.
• I had played the original for MAYBE an hour.
• I installed cheats for the original DS2 to make a super powered character to compare differences between it and SotFS.
• I played through SotFS without any cheats or guides, trying to experience it as it is intended.
• I did not play the DLC areas, but watched a friend do them. I wont talk about these cause I did not experience them myself.

Things I wont really talk about more:

• Story: I never really follow the stories in souls games, but I assume it's fine and good if you dive into it. I will leave that to the people who read every item description and put it together.

• Online features: I disabled this early on in my play through as I continued to get invaded by people who have been playing the game for much too long, and it was making an already frustrating experience even more frustrating. I could only be invaded by "PvPEnjoyer" (yes this was their name) so many times before I gave up and turned it off.

Pros:

• Beautiful World: I loved the world that was created here, there were a lot of cool locales and nooks and crannies to explore in each one.
• Great cast: The characters were fun to interact with and progress their little story lines or have them help you around the world.
• Backstab attack animations are greatly improved with varied animations depending on weapons
• The music was nice when it played.

Cons:

• Mob density is absolutely atrocious in MOST areas. I've had arguments with people on this back and forth at this point, but the amount of enemies in what I think is most of the game make the game an un-fun environment to navigate, especially for run backs.
• Bosses are a dull affair. Most of them have relatively boring visual designs, but even more-so boring is their move sets. Easily the weakest part of the game, with very few standouts. One that made was particularly disappointing was Demon of Song, who had a very cool design, and a very disappointing move set.
• Estus Flask drinking and recovery is atrocious in this game.
• The hollowing mechanic is reminiscent of Demon's Souls, and honestly if this game was called Demon's Souls 2, I think I would have taken less umbrage with it.
• Being able to get invaded while hollow is not fun.
• Stat distributions are absolutely insane in this game. Having animation speed and iframes tied to a stat is just asinine to me. Splitting Equip Load to its own stat instead of being tied to Endurance makes spending points more tedious.
• In relation to the last point, armor felt mostly not useful to upgrade (though this can be said about most souls games).

I think all in all, this game is definitely not for me, but I feel with how much frustration and dull affairs I experienced here, I have a hard time understanding how this game was for anyone. I've talked to many people who love it, and kudos to them, but I cannot see it, even after finishing the entire game.

Still engrossed in Dark Souls 2 as ever. Despite having a lot of criticisms of the game's design, it is very hard to put down. I've started branching out my stats with the intent to use magic, although my attunement is low enough for that to be a distant prospect. I think my intelligence and faith are both up to 12 at this point.

I'd like to switch away from my basic broadsword, but I don't know what would suit me. The number of available weapons is overwhelming. I've experimented with warped sword and it seems like it might be a viable option, but I can't get the damage in line with my main weapon. Petrified dragon bone is in very short supply. I know you can eventually farm it, but I haven't reached that point in the game yet.

Currently working on Brightstone Cove and Huntsman's Copse, done with Sinner's Rise and Black Gulch.

I'm level 86 and haven't beaten a single boss. Am I playing this game right?

Bonfires lit: 14. Soul level: 405572

I'm astonished that you can get all the way to Black Gulch without beating a single boss. I would have expected The Gutter to have one, despite basically being a capstone challenge in itself.

Going to start making forward progress now. The only way I could do significantly more without hitting a boss wall is grinding all the way to one million SL, which is an insane task with only early-ish areas.

For the longest time there was one boss I hadn't actually beaten in the Souls games. That was ol' Lud and Zallen, of the Frigid Outskirts. I had suffered through the area once or twice to reach them and die only to decide it just wasn't worth my time to keep trying when the boss and the rewards were mediocre at best.

Well, I've been playing a fresh file in this game again recently and decided I'd finally commit to beating them once and for all. Today, it's finally done! It was only worth it to say I did it. The boss is every bit as bad as I remember and the Frigid Outskirts make getting there a pain in the ass, but it's okay because it's over now.

I've been hankering for some multiplayer Souls gameplay recently (co-op, mostly) so I fired this up and was working my way through Aldia's Keep to see if I could get summoned for its boss. I summoned this absolute chad NPC Sellsword Luet (pic below from the wiki) since I couldn't recall if I ever had before for this area.

About halfway down the really long center hallway I was invaded by a real person, which is itself a rarity these days, so it was kind of exciting. The invader and I waved to each other and made a silent agreement to let him fight Luet 1v1 first while I watched.

The poor guy probably backstabbed Luet upwards of 10 times (!!!) but he's just so TANKY that he was still at 50% hp and ended up killing the invader himself. Easily goes up there among my favorite multiplayer DS2 memories. It was wild to watch unfold.