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[berserkerlbs]

This game is dogshit and I believe it's only highly regarded by critics because it's got Dark Souls in its name. Dark Souls has made quite a name for itself due to the difficulty, and somehow difficulty became indicative of good quality, so the harder it is, the "better" it is, but I think Dark Souls 2 is hard for the wrong reasons.

Not only are your i-frames locked behind and determined by a stupid stat that the game doesn't even bother explaining to you, but the overall stamina consumption for rolls and attacks is higher in this game, so if you don't increase your ADP stat, rolling is utter garbage. The level design is awful and nonsensical at times, the bosses are shoddy and generic, the hitboxes are godawful and this is where the "difficult for the wrong reasons" I mentioned comes in.

So, your healing is slower, your recovery frames after attacking are slower, your stamina recovery is slower and the consumption is larger. Hitboxes are garbage. All these issues make for a rather clunky game and let's not forget the fact that one of the means through which the developers attempted to artificially amp up the difficulty was by riddling the game with ganks everywhere and that stinks.

 

[treemk]

Dark Souls 2 felt rough at first for me, like a Dark Souls imitation from another company. But I gave it a chance and it turned out to be a great game. Ranking the best souls game is just splitting hairs and their differences make them all worth playing much more than they make any one better than the other.

 

[Malio]

My favorite souls game, especially with the dlc. It had spotty hit boxes and other issues, but it had the most memorable areas hands down.

 

[RafterXL]

Dunno how you can call yourself a Souls fan and hate DS2. I also don't see how you can think Elden Ring is amazing and DS2 sucks, considering they share so much in common.

Discussion around this game is kind of a joke, because *at worst* it is a slightly worse game than the others, yet you have people acting like the rest are amazing and DS2 is "dogshit". Frankly, it's stupid and makes no sense. It's like calling Miles Morales the best game you ever played but Spider-Man was dogshit, even though they share 90% of their DNA.

Anyway, the games good. Sucks people try and tear it down just to prop up the others.

 

[berserkerlbs]

Dunno how you can call yourself a Souls fan and hate DS2. I also don't see how you can think Elden Ring is amazing and DS2 sucks, considering they share so much in common.

Discussion around this game is kind of a joke, because *at worst* it is a slightly worse game than the others, yet you have people acting like the rest are amazing and DS2 is "dogshit". Frankly, it's stupid and makes no sense. It's like calling Miles Morales the best game you ever played but Spider-Man was dogshit, even though they share 90% of their DNA.

Anyway, the games good. Sucks people try and tear it down just to prop up the others.

Being a fan of a franchise doesn't necessarily mean you have to like every product. I said Dark Souls 2 is dogshit because from my point of view it's fundamentally a bad game for all the reasons I mentioned above.

 

[rofif]

For people who are gonna try Ds2 SotfS from this thread just be ready for Evil, if you dont have any tolerance for it I wouldnt recommend it, its really Evil, it wants you to hate it.

Yep. Vanilla/original is better. I don’t understand why they changed enemy and item placement in Sotfs. Heidi knights are now all in heide like some fucking tools. They are supposed to be lost knights looking for their land which is destroyed. But nope. They are all there now.
Or dragon in from of dragonslayer?
Or ogre first thing early in the game.

Plenty of examples. They also added too many gank squads, traps and f you moments because dark souls is all about difficulty which sotfs does not understand.

Then there is dlc - the worst piece of souls that exists. Beautiful looking levels that are absolute nightmare to play. In a bad way. And you cannot level up to these enemies since the game is scaled only for base game. It’s full of ganks and weird non souls puzzles. There are some good moments. If you have to play any one of them, play the fire one.

So yeah. I would recommend the vanilla game. But I can still be wrong. I’ve not finished vanilla in a long time and last playthrough I did was of Sotfs.

 

[rofif]

You enter a building with almost NOTHING around, you take the elevator UP and you end up at the bottom of the vulcano with LAVA everywhere.

Yeah, that's what I call GREAT game

Spoiler

no,no it's not

.

And don't even start me with those turtle enemies with SHELL at the back (to avoid being stabbed for massive damage) that, instead of rolling on me and dealing ME damage, just try to turn around to face me

That part is good. I never minded it. In fact I like the this choice. The land is dreamy and convoluted. It only lends itself to stuff like that and Inthink it’s a good choice.
If you played ringed city, this confirms this theory.

 

[rofif]

The worst game in the series and the only one i have no intention of replaying.
The hitboxes, the ADP bs, bad bosses, worse level design, awful looking areas (with some exceptions, like majula and dragon aeriee), enemy gank squads, floaty controls, and the list goes on and on. And some of those issues actually became worse with SotFS

How anyone can say this is the best souls game, i have no idea.

It has the best pvp and ng+, i'll give it that, but thats the only thing it does better than the rest.

Fine hitboxes
Adp gives you control to spend points elsewhere if you don’t want to roll
Better variety of unique bosses than Elden ring which just reuses enemies.
Fantastic creative and mostly good looking areas.
Gank squads - only true in worse sotfs.
Floaty controls - yeah. Maybe.

 

[Sony]

Unpopular opinion: most soulsborne games are bad, from combat to performance, yet those failures are seen as 'design', giving praise for these games for their challenging difficulties.

 

[EviLore]

Yep. Vanilla/original is better. I don’t understand why they changed enemy and item placement in Sotfs. Heidi knights are now all in heide like some fucking tools. They are supposed to be lost knights looking for their land which is destroyed. But nope. They are all there now.
Or dragon in from of dragonslayer?
Or ogre first thing early in the game.

Plenty of examples. They also added too many gank squads, traps and f you moments because dark souls is all about difficulty which sotfs does not understand.

Then there is dlc - the worst piece of souls that exists. Beautiful looking levels that are absolute nightmare to play. In a bad way. And you cannot level up to these enemies since the game is scaled only for base game. It’s full of ganks and weird non souls puzzles. There are some good moments. If you have to play any one of them, play the fire one.

So yeah. I would recommend the vanilla game. But I can still be wrong. I’ve not finished vanilla in a long time and last playthrough I did was of Sotfs.

Sounds like you had problems with the difficulty. It can ruin your experience if you have a non-viable build and get behind the power curve. Properly approached, though, the DLCs are awesome, some of the best content in the series.

 

[rofif]

Sounds like you had problems with the difficulty. It can ruin your experience if you have a non-viable build and get behind the power curve. Properly approached, though, the DLCs are awesome, some of the best content in the series.

I’ve finished the dlc but in the process I’ve discovered that it’s so will balanced that most weapons end up within the same dps range. I even respecced few times and nothing. It’s way way more difficult than base game and not in a fun way for me. There are good elements to of course.
The dps kinda soft caps around your ending of base game…. Which is probably a point and dlc is supposed to be a challenge.

I will need to give it another try. But after finishing original and not Sotfs, so I have more room for gank squads tolerance left

 

[Imru’ al-Qays]

Anyone saying DS2 is the best game in the series is a hipster contrarian with no credibility

 

[kyussman]

I gave it a miss after playing Dark Souls,Bloodborne and Dark Souls III......something looked seriously off with the game to me.I've since watched Youtube playthroughs and it's very obvious Miyazaki wasn't at the helm for this one.That doesn't make it a bad game though,just one I've no interest in playing.

 

[AV]

I only played Scholar so I don't know the difference. It's still a great game but it's the absolute bottom of the Souls piles. The people who rank it at the top are damaged.

 

[newtypepilot]

The only bad thing about DS2 is map design, specifically, the transition between areas. The game tries to convey that there's a great distance between areas but the maps themselves were obviously too small. If you look at the maps in a 3D viewer, you can see that there are several areas that actually overlap with each other in the same 3D space.

 

[BbMajor7th]

Honestly, it's the most interesting game in the series. It adds so many new ideas and does a lot of cool things, but it's constantly shit-on for the visual downgrades and the hitbox gifs. As for the graphics, it was clearly an issue of ambition outstretching reach. The game attempted a far more complex lighting system and added in things like cloth physics, wet shaders, and much more detailed armour and character models, all whilst still targeting PS3/360. It gets hammered for the downgrade, but I admire them for shooting high and falling short, rather than aiming for average, as they've done for all the games that followed (people complain about FromSoft games always looking a generation behind from a technical standpoint, but after the 'downgrade' backlash on DSII, you can hardly blame them).

People also ignore the fact that it introduced a lot of the ideas that are now expected in FromSoft games, like multi-directional rolling, off-hand torches (that function as weapons, rather than the dopey Skull Lantern), four ring-slots instead of two, character respeccing options, regaining humanity without being at a bonfire, plus a whole bunch of stuff they never revisited like creating shortcuts by blowing up walls, progressive scaling for weight equip-weight management, true NG+, or altering boss encounters by solving environmental puzzles... I can go on all day.

I've spent hundreds of hours in FromSoft worlds and I'm always more intrigued and admiring of DSII than any other, not for what it gets right, but for how much it was willing to attempt.

 

[Radical Dreamer]

Its good because it has Majula - aside hunter's dream - best hub in the series, imo.

 

[Kaachan]

How does any sane person get to Majula and just stop? MAJULA

 

[H4ze]

Trash opinion is trash, git gud op, DS2 is amazing.

 

[digdug2]

Unpopular opinion: most soulsborne games are bad, from combat to performance, yet those failures are seen as 'design', giving praise for these games for their challenging difficulties.

This opinion is unpopular, mainly because it sucks. How anyone could see the combat decisions in these games as a 'failure' is laughable.

 

[MagnesD3]

Unpopular opinion: most soulsborne games are bad, from combat to performance, yet those failures are seen as 'design', giving praise for these games for their challenging difficulties.

I agree there is bad game design that the soulsbourne community actually let's slide but in terms of quality these are some of the best games ever made... Maybe even THE best game ever with Elden Ring.