Darkest Dungeon II is a game of pure, unbridled skill. "Git gud" has never applied more to any game ever. Everything can be overcome with enough understan--haha nah I'm just playin' with you. It's RNG all the way down, actually. Nothing matters. :)
I'm gonna start off on a positive note and talk about what I like, before I get to the meat of the review.
The artstyle and atmosphere is every bit as great as in the original. The 3D animations and improved character sprites really make the combat come alive, and it's difficult to go back to DD1 after seeing them.
I think the combat is an improvement on the original. The combat itself is less RNG-based, largely due to the token system. You are much less likely to randomly get one-shot in DD2, thanks to the ability to generate defensive tokens or debuff and damage reducing tokens on enemies. Generally, I loved the combat.
And that's pretty much where the positives end. Onto the negatives. I suppose we'll go in order of least annoying to the stuff that makes me pull my hair out. (I'm balding thanks to this game).
While I won't spoil anything, I do want to touch on the horrendous boss design, and what complete letdowns they are. A good boss, in my opinion, should have something unique that you have to play around, but not something that is so unique as to be a gimmick that can only be overcome at the hero selection screen before you even know what the boss is. Enter: Darkest Dungeon II bosses. Every single one of these guys is nothing but a gimmick; not an encounter to be hard fought and overcome with skill, no, a puzzle to be solved before you've even started your run and you are selecting your team. The game gives you zero hints about what the boss' BS gimmick is. So if you've made a team that was capable enough to breeze through the enemies and get you to the boss, but you failed to account for the complete unknown puzzle mechanic of said boss, welp, your run ends.
- Failed to bring a shuffle or pull? Nope. You lose!
- Have no back row damage because you rely on shuffle to bring problematic enemies to the front? Haha--♥♥♥♥ you, moron. Not on this boss!
- Only brought single target damage? Yikes, Reddit--assemble back at the start!
- Didn't bring a way to clear tokens or DoTs? Oh, geez... that means you automatically lose, actually!
Skill is simply NEVER ENOUGH if your party happens to be hard countered by the idiotic puzzle-like boss design that, again, was not revealed or even hinted at, before you encountered them for the first time.
The relationship and affinity system. I honestly cannot even fathom what they were thinking with this. Relationships range from 0 - 20 points, with each pair of heroes starting at a 9 of 20--neutral--opinion of each other, and a 5% chance for a positive OR negative relationship to form. Dip ONE SINGLE point, to 8, and you hit the Unfriendly breakpoint, where those heroes now have a 33% chance to form a negative relationship and 0% chance for positive. The positive breakpoint, however, requires gaining FIVE points to reach 14. There are further breakpoints along the 20 point scale, obviously, but right from the start it is weighted against the player, as all things are in this game.
The most common shift in affinity will come from decisions related to the route your stagecoach takes. When you get to a crossroads where the path splits or an event, your heroes will have opinions on the route to take or what choice to make. When two or more heroes disagree, they lose affinity. Likewise, they gain affinity when they agree.
One of the myriad problems here is that the best tactical choice may be the one that causes the most conflict. Or maybe it's just the option YOU, the player and purchaser of this video game, want to pick. What if you actually want to play the game and fight this enemy encounter, and experience the combat that (should) make up most of the game? Well, in some cases, that's just too bad--your idiot heroes will bicker and hate each other if you choose the fight option. Sometimes, of course, for that same choice, they'll ALSO do that if you choose to run away. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
You can also gain and lose affinity in combat. If a hero is low HP/stress and you make a hero heal them, +affinity; heal a DIFFERENT hero, -affinity. Meltdowns (stress maxed out) -affinity with everyone. I don't hate the in-combat affinity gains/losses as much as I hate the tactical layer affinity gains/losses. In combat, you can mitigate the losses; if you let two heroes get to low HP/high stress, I think it's a reasonable punishment to tax their relationship when you inevitably heal one before the other. That is, in my opinion, a fair example of a skill tax.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, the vast majority of affinity changes will come not from combat, which can be managed and is less subject to RNG, but from the "Tactical" (I use this word loosely) layer--the stagecoach. And you will routinely be forced to choose between hero affinity and what you, the player, deem as the actual best approach, or simply what you want.
A negative relationship does two things: locks a skill on your hero, and curses it, causing every use of that cursed skill to debuff the other half of the relationship. It's hard to adequately describe just how disgustingly oppressive it is to lock a skill in a game where you're only allowed to equip 5 out of 11. Furthermore, and honestly the most damning thing about this whole godforsaken system, is the skill that gets locked can be one YOU DIDN'T ORIGINALLY HAVE EQUIPPED and weren't going to use to begin with, which can completely ruin entire team comps.
And if all that wasn't enough, this will be accompanied in combat by the heroes having special "Act out" interactions in the form of random stress dealing barks (character chatter). Basically the affliction barks from DD1.
Negative relationships are the single most punishing thing in the entire game, and the fact you're given so little control over them, yet have to account for their potentially run ending, cataclysmic effects at every possible turn, renders any other decisions you can make pretty much meaningless. I may want to repair the stagecoach's wheels at the event, or simply choose a route that takes me to a hospital, but if that option will risk reaching a negative breakpoint in some relationship, I cannot choose it. The risk of a negative relationship and the potential effect that will have on my run is simply too high. Much higher than the risk of basically anything else in these dilemmas.
This system completely dominates every choice made throughout the game, and it never feels like you can ignore it. It is staggeringly awful. Like genuinely one of the most poorly designed things I've ever encountered. I absolutely detest it, I resent the person who thought it up, and it ruins my day just thinking about it.
In DD2, whatever skill you have is always tempered by bad luck and RNG. Which is, for me, the antithesis of what makes a good roguelike. A good game in general, to be honest. But the best roguelikes out there are the literal opposite of that formula, where your skill alone can carry you all the way to the end--even on your first couple runs if you're truly that maidenless. The RNG serves to spice that up, by hindering you and making you rely even more on your own skill, or making you truly OP so you DON'T have to rely as hard on your own skill. In DD2, skill just doesn't really enter into the equation, except at the very start when you're creating your team and preparing for one of the stupid gimmick bosses. Skill in DD2 is basically just game knowledge. Knowledge of comps and synergy and knowledge of boss gimmicks. The rest is just... RNG.
