Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin Review (Ghetto Gepetto)
This game is a circus, and you play as the clown
Just played for the 4th or 5th time coming back and decided to 100% the game's achievements. I wouldn't wish this upon my worst enemy, but it gave me more insight into the game and the design choices that made themselves apparent now that I've done everything. I was in love, but weirded out on my first playthrough. Stayed up all night at a friend's house and went absolutely ham and loved it. Ive had mixed feelings up until this last experience, and I've come to a final conclusion:
Dark Souls 2 is a miserable pile of shit from a butt. Its a series of frustrating scenarios where the game straight up trolls you, and not in a way that can be simply and/or consistently avoided like in the other titles. It gimps you, then hits you when you're down and laughs at you. Like the game prides itself on putting you at an insurmountable disadvantage because it just has to one-up its predecessor. The mechanics like SM and ADP are there set in stone to punish you for playing the game how you would like, and even when youre spending your precious soul memory on damage stats, they soft cap as soon as you get the requirements for mid game spells and weapons and most have crushingly diminishing returns. Its like the game wants to steer you toward a weak jack of all trades build regardless of your starting class, and punishes you for specializing.
Wanna use spells? Chaos Fireball and WotG were too easy to acquire in 1, lets make the player beat the game 2 and a half times or win 500 janky ass PVP fights in order to get them now. Genius nerf by B-Team. And many of these hard earned spells are ridiculously bad or useless. 90% of the sorceries are like a 5 second cast time spell that has an effect similar to something you would see at a water park with similar damage until you get 50 INT and 3 rings to amp the damage. And I don't mean like Homeward useless, I mean literally there is never a single reason to ever buy or use this spell in any scenario ever due to poor design or aggressively weak effects that also never hit anything. Favorite moment was launching an 80,000 soul "climax" at Fume Knight for a whopping 300 damage. Out fucking standing.
The NPCs all go about talking about you being a strong chosen one who is destined to fight against the curse, when you are a fucking bozo clown disaster magnet who has to run through a trial of the steamiest horseshit encounters designed by people who hate you and want you to quit. It's like they got the designers of the Bed of Chaos and had them make a whole ass game with that "fuck you for even trying" vibe. Surprise enemy gangbangs throughout the entire game and well into the DLCs, Pharros Puzzles that give you a puddle of water, multiple instances of doors that lead to dead ends or sheer drops, or ladders that end prematurely and crash you into acid vases, you walk 10 feet in any direction and the game has a gag at your expense waiting for you.
The game simultaneously tries and doesn't try to take itself seriously. Bland puke green and gray environments with level design that doesn't make sense and lore that is wholeheartedly derivative of DS1. Like they just can't stop themselves from copy pasting bosses just so they can point at it and go "ooo look remember Ornstein? Remember the Gargoyles? Remember Red Smelter Demon?" btw the 4 Lord's Souls are all actually the end bosses from ds1 with one of them being Gwyn for some reason and all the original ones are uhhhhh *looks at Ornstein* dudes in armor. I used to like ds2 for its silliness, but upon retrospect, all the stuff that wasn't ripped off from ds1 is clearly random ass spitball ideas that have no depth whatsoever. The amount of work that went into making that goofy ass tree that does nothing in the middle of nowhere and red crystal lizards that only exist to troll you probably would have been better spent on hiring a fucking design leader or someone who can do more than just stick them in random ass places throughout the game.
It's all a cheap rotten circus and it turns you into the clown for making the mistake of giving it a chance. Fuck you B-team and fuck this ass blast of a game.