Few games come along that get me so excited that I absolutely have to pre-order and start playing right when they’re released. Even fewer of those games make me eagerly anticipate how I’m going to go about playing before I even have my copy, talking with friends about my strategy and planning out when I’ll have ideal conditions and time to sit and play. The only other game I can think of that caused this much anticipation for me was Mass Effect 3. Say what you will about the ending, but I was absolutely enthralled for 95% of my time playing ME3, and I was expecting no less from Dark Souls II.

Kind of an unrealistic set of expectations, I know. Even now, having beaten the final boss and seen the credits roll, I can’t quite quantify exactly how much I liked this game. I find that the Dark Souls experience is very similar to golf. Now that I think of it, it’s JUST like golf. If you ask me at the end of a Dark Souls session or a round of golf how it was, I’ll say “Oh it was really good. I had a great time!”. That’s a big dirty lie, in both cases. If you observed me golfing or playing Dark Souls you’d see that 75% of my time is spent being really pissed off and aggrivated, 20% is spent wading cautiously forward just knowing more frustration is ahead, and 5% is spent actually enjoying myself.

I love golf and I love Dark Souls for one reason. The feeling you get from that 5% is EASILY worth the pain of the other 95%.

I’ve written about Dark Souls before, so I’m going to mostly jump right into the specifics of Dark Souls II in particular. There are quite a few changes, but the essence of the game really is pretty much the same. You can finish a playthrough of DS1 and pick right up and go into DS2 without missing a beat in terms of basic mechanics. It’s the fringe mechanics that really changed, and in some very interesting (and evil) ways.

There’s a real pro-con aspect to the gameplay changes they made. Some theoretically should make the game easier, but the others negate any perceived edge you might get. For starters, there’s the healing items. In Dark Souls you got five estus flasks each time you went to a bonfire. You could increase this by “kindling” up to a maximum of 20. That was pretty much it for healing items. This time there are consumable items called lifegems that will also restore your health, and you can stockpile them! That seems like it should make things a little easier. Oh wait, no it doesn’t, because now instead of getting 5-20 estus flasks at each bonfire you now get one. ONE! Oh, and the downside of items you can stockpile is that you can also totally run out. Imagine using all your consumable items and flasks on a boss fight only to die, and next time you don’t even have the benefit of the items you just used.

In the original you could be pretty liberal with the flasks in the early going. For the most part you wanted to enter every new encounter with full health. In the early stages of this game you simply don’t have that luxury. I have ONE flask, so if my health is at 50% it’s not worth using that flask yet. Of course this increases the risk of dying. Oh and the dying, the mechanic that Dark Souls is literally built around. Dying is so much worse than it was before.

There were criticisms in Dark Souls 1 that there weren’t enough compelling reasons to go un-hollow. Sure, you could summon help for fights, but you could also be invaded, and deaths were far more costly. No, it was far safer and less stressful just to play through the whole game as a hollow. DS2 addressed this problem too. They did so by making being human far more attractive than it used to be.

Haha, just kidding. That’s not the Dark Souls style. They made being human more attractive by making dying and becoming hollow REALLY SUCK. As the ultimate punishment for daring to make even the slightest mistake, every time you die you lose about 5-10% of your max health, permanently. This means that if you’re having trouble with a certain area and you’ve died 5-6 times (at least, and this WILL happen to you) you’re now charging in for attempt number 7 with only about half your max health. This effect can be reversed by turning human, but doing so requires burning a consumable item that is in relatively short supply. You can also get invaded at any time now, not just when you’re human.

One quality of life improvement that doesn’t really affect difficulty, just convenience, is the ability to instantly warp between any bonfire in the game. That’s just logical, and a nice perk. Another big change is that if you have killed the mobs in a particular area a certain number of times some of them will stop spawning. Many enthusiasts got up in arms about this change, claiming it was coddling newcomers and the incapable. It isn’t. First of all, it takes grinding for levels pretty much right off the table. Secondly, you need to die in the same single area a whole lot of times before the game does you the service of despawning a few enemies. When they finally do despawn, you won’t be relieved, you’ll be ashamed. It’s a subtle middle finger from the game creators.

As always, discovery and the community hivemind play a large role in the Dark Souls experience. The first time around I didn’t play the game until literally every stone had been unturned. There was no mystery, and all the answers were right there on my phone if I ever got stuck. Also, while summoning and invasions did happen, the only people kicking around that late in the game’s life were hyper-leveled PVPers who would wreck and grief you all day. By playing the game right at launch this time I was exposed to a whole new and wonderful experience.

The messaging system (wherein players can leave templated text messages on the ground for other players to see) is absolutely crucial. There were messages everywhere, pointing me towards bonfires, alerting me to hidden doors, and just generally displaying a positive attitude towards skeletons. Adding to the dynamic were juuusssst enough false messages where someone was trying to trick you. Nothing is more soul crushing than going through a really tough area and seeing a message someone placed that says “Bonfire Below!” only to find out that instead of a bonfire below you just jumped into a 400 foot chasm and died. The messages are helpful, don’t get me wrong, but each one is only potentially helpful. My reaction to most messages was “Hmmmm. Okay, maybe“.

The gameplay is full of the same brutality as always. You’re going to die a great deal. In fact, I died to literally the first thing in the game that came at me. People who were claiming Dark Souls 2 is easier than the first game didn’t have the same experience I had. I definitely had a more difficult experience this time around. I prided myself on never summoning help in for boss fights unless I desperately needed to. As it turned out, I only needed to summon in help twice, although on one of those bosses it still took over a dozen attempts even with three people all attacking the boss at once. My build allowed me to dispatch the final boss relatively easily, but there were a ton of areas that were REALLY hard. In most cases they weren’t bosses at all ,but just really tough clusters of regular enemies.

The more I play, the less I buy into that old thing everyone says about Dark Souls “Every death is your fault”. That’s total nonsense. There are definitely deaths that are beyond your control. While I do agree that the game is mostly fair, there are some areas that feel like they require more luck than skill.

Dark Souls II really requires a certain mindset to play. When I first picked up the game I played for about 20 hours in one weekend. It was rough, and I was fully immersed. Once the work week started I didn’t have time to play for a night or two, and suddenly I had gone almost three straight weeks without playing. I had fallen out of the mental state necessary to play. I’m a goal-oriented person to my core. I want to accomplish something in every play session. It doesn’t even need to be a boss kill, it can just be a run from one bonfire to a new bonfire. On weekdays by the time I got home, did chores, and ate supper it was already 8-9:00. By that time I just wasn’t ready for the commitment that was a Dark Souls play session. I didn’t want to start working towards a boss kill that late, because if I struggled I knew I wouldn’t be able to go to bed until I succeeded.

Finally, a couple weeks later I got into the “zone” again and finished it. Finishing such a challenging game and finally knocking off all those tough bosses combine to make up the 5%. That magical time where all the hard work and frustration feels worth it. In those times you come to realize that the brutal grind is necessary, because without it the highs wouldn’t feel so high.