DARK SOULS™ II

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ horrible i loved it

I’ve just started my journey into Souls games, and I can already tell this is going to be the worst game in the entire series. Unlike the masterpiece that was DS1, this one feels bland, soulless lol, and ugly. The whole thing feels incredibly clunky, from the controls to the broken hitboxes. The difficulty is just artificially inflated with massive crowds of tanky mobs on the way to every boss. And thank God I’m not playing Scholar of the First Sin, because I hear that problem is even worse there! You could easily beat most bosses in 1 to 3 tries if you weren't already tilted by these enemies. I’m convinced these mobs were put there on purpose just to wear you down and catch you off guard around every corner. It feels like the devs did this just to troll the players. Honestly, it feels like some random, obscure Western studio was given the right to make a sequel, not FromSoftware. Even the monster designs feel super generic. Unlike the first game, the Hollows just look like basic, uninspired zombies. The bosses are either totally dull about 80% of them are just big knights or downright terrible, like Mytha. She looks like she got lost and wandered in from some indie mobile game about ancient Greece. And the level design is a joke; you just walk into empty, cube-shaped rooms with four lazy textures. No one would’ve allowed that in DS1. On top of that, there are so many annoying, punishing mechanics, like losing max health every time you die. In the original Dark Souls, dying was an essential part of the loop because you learned from it and got better. Here, the game flat-out punishes you just for trying to explore and learn. It feels so wrong that I don’t even know how they thought it was a good idea. Don’t even get me started on the world layout, which completely lacks that interconnected genius of the first game. It's just a meaningless sequence of arenas designed to suffocate you. I am extremely disappointed.