I try to hold to some standard of writing for most blog entries, but I allow myself to throw that out the window for blah blah blog entries. Mostly I just blather about things without worrying too much about it. Reader, be warned! Also, spoilers for the plot and some areas of Dark Souls 2
I dabbled a bit in the Atelier game last week (it's really good, and I'm excited to get back to it), but my weekend was pretty much consumed by Dark Souls 2. I'm finally nearing the endgame-- about five more areas, only three regular bosses left I think-- and the game really is just stellar. I can't believe how engrossing the game is, despite the challenge (or maybe because of it?), and I will say that it's one of the very few games where after putting it away for the night, I have not just a sense of pleasure, but a sense of accomplishment. Major spoilers ahead, read at your own risk!
Despite how excellent the game is, there are a couple of small missteps or regressions from the previous games. While the lore for the series continues strong-- each item description helps paint a vivid, "living" world (well, un-living I suppose, given that everything is about ancient history)-- compared to the previous game, things don't hang together quite as gracefully. For example, the questline in the first game had you moving towards concrete goals that made sense; you were trying to get to Anor Londo to escape your curse (though the player might not have realized that at first), which meant ringing the two bells to open the path. Once there, you get the Lordvessal, and are told to acquire Great Souls to offer to open the way to the Cinder Lord. The souls were held by factions who were figures in the history of the land, and the locations they were in were tied to their actions since the War of the Dragons (the witch's soul ended up in the hellish demon-world they accidentally created, the dragon betrayer's soul was under his fortress where he engaged in magical experiments, the undead lord was in the great catacombs). Everything fit together, and while the player may not have understood why everything was happening at the moment, it all made sense in the gameworld. Each location in the game flowed to the next, with only one odd jump (you fly from Sen's Fortress to Anor Londo).
Dark Souls 2, for all its strengths, lacks that cohesion, partly because it's a bigger world overall, and partly because it's incredibly difficult to come up with another clever reason for everything. There's a chance they might tie it all together in the end, but at the moment, it seemed like there were just four powerful souls "just because," with only one mention that the king previously had used/killed four souls to become king. You get the souls because a special NPC tells you to, you take them to the castle because she says to, you hunt down the king because the queen there tells you to, and after you find him the first NPC says you will become the next king. Your motivation is to escape the curse, but I'm nearly at the end of the game and it's completely unclear how any of this works, other than as a random "prove your worth" mcguffin (literally, there's a door that doesn't open until you have four souls, or is it lit four special bonfires? Oh, and there's apparently five of them actually, and double oh, some players hit a glitch where they seem to be stuck because they went there too soon with too few souls and the other door won't ever open). The first game, you were sort of reassembling the great soul that kicked off the whole shebang, this one you're just proving you're a bad enough dude to get an audience with the king.
Similarly, compared to the first game, the areas are a bit haphazardly strung together. The levels themselves are great, a decent amount of variety (only "decent" because there's a few too many crumbling fortress areas, though at least each has a theme), with nicely paced secrets and challenges. But, most of individual areas just don't fit together-- why does the "tower of flame" (which has no fire and isn't a tower as far as I can tell) lead to a pirate grotto? Why do you go through the poison fort to get to the Iron Keep? There's some good bits still-- the wharf area ships you to the huge prison area, because that was the path of the cast-off criminals; the poison fort comes after a mining area full of poison gas pumped around by windmills, and is all related to the area boss's desire for eternal beauty through poison alchemy. But in the previous game, from the first real area onward I can trace a path from memory because everything fits sensibly; you go down the gutter from the city to get to the muck swamp, and there you go down further to either the roots of the world or the lost demon ruins, etc.
The series also has generally had at least one area in each game that really screwed the player unfairly or unnecessarily frustratingly. Demon's Souls had the swamp level, Dark Soul had Blight Town (and possibly New Londo/the swamp), Dark Souls 2 has one in Amana's Shrine. It's a gorgeous, tension-filled level, reminiscent of Ash Lake from the last game in terms of pure spectacle. It also has just one too many tricky elements at once-- not only are there hard-to-see cliffs everywhere (you can do alright if you try to stay in the highest area), there's also near-invisible enemies everywhere, and most egregiously enemies that fire constant, hard-to-dodge homing magic attacks from very far away (outside of draw distance in one case!), and you can't dodge willy-nilly because 1) there's those hidden enemies everywhere 2) there's obstacles in your way you can't see 3) you can't see those cliff edges without light, but your torch goes out quickly if you dodge 4) there's up to three homing missiles fired at you at once, from multiple directions. You won't even have a decent shield to block magic with by this point-- the game helpfully gives you one in the next area, though right after it would have been most useful. The solution is to snipe the magic users from far, far away, which means you need to be able to use a decent bow, and you need to have found a pretty well-hidden item to snipe with (if you even realize using it with a bow lets you snipe). Remove even one of those elements and it would have been a challenging, but fair level you didn't have to "cheese" through.
Partly because everything else about the game was done so right, these annoyances stick out more than they would for other games. And, I still hope the plot will come together at the end-- I've read enough online now to see that you eventually go back in time or something and can get the souls the King had (to weaken him in the present). Maybe during all that, it will make sense, especially since the game has alluded to this war with the giants....
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