Welcome back to Souls Week! Today, Caelyn’s going to make the case for Dark Souls 2, in a piece that contains spoilers.
It took me a while to get into Dark Souls. That seems like a weird thing to be writing now, akin to, “I wasn’t sure about ice cream at first” or, “I didn’t like the look of puppies.” But I bounced off it a couple of times before being properly ensnared. As a result, by the time I was looking for more Soulsian adventures, Dark Souls 2 Original had been and gone and Scholar of the First Sin was on shelves. According to The Internet, Dark Souls 2 is rubbish. You may be surprised to learn that The Internet is, just for once, spouting hyperbolic nonsense. Dark Souls 2 is actually really good and, let me just brace for impact here, better than Dark Souls 1 in a lot of ways.
I’ve got to hold my hands up and admit that I was suckered in for a while. You can wring a lot of quality gaming time out of the original Dark Souls. It hides so many secrets and there are so many different ways to build a character, so many different weapons and spells to experiment with. I still go back and play it now and whether it’s finding new things to love or just spending time with a good old sword-and-board combo, it’s always worthwhile. Back then, after playing it through with a couple of different builds and dabbling in a bit of NG+, “more of the same, but less good” didn’t seem appealing. I mean, why not just play the original some more. I believe it was my brother who prodded me into giving Dark Souls 2 a go and I’m very glad that I did.
In many ways, Dark Souls 2 has exactly what you’d expect from a sequel. It takes the systems from the original and builds on them in new and interesting ways. There are callbacks to the original, though in typical Dark Souls fashion these are mostly small hints that gradually bring the realisation that they are set in the same place, just separated by a vast span of years.