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So i joined the Rat King covenant because it seemed like it might be fun and because i need more lockstones. (The Brotherhood of Blood might have to be the other one i pursue at some point, since it offers an awesome pyromancy spell. Jesus though, i have to win five hundred invasions.) I guess i need to wear the ring to be summoned? Do i actually need to be in those areas as well though?

I had kind of been avoiding them, so i decided to go explore the rat king areas and immediately got pulled in as a gray phantom. The guy i was fighting followed in behind a few large enemies and tried to go for backstabs, so i used the chaos storm pyromancy and that was enough to cause like 2/3rd's damage to him and clear out all the enemies. The guy realized he wasn't going to win a melee-range fight against me and backed off and started throwing lightning spears at me. He threw at least a dozen, but the massive magic resistance of the old king's shield basically just me let shrug it off. Kind of just chased him around as he spammed those bolts and killed him in two hits from my mace when i caught up. Later on though, when i was pulled into somebody else's world as a phantom, and in addition to the enemies in the water, there were guys on the upper level throwing axes at me. It ended up being close, but i lost. I guess that's the whole thing with the rat king covenant then? You upgrade those areas with lockstones to better stomp your ensnared victims? I need to join a covenant, i've kind of been ignoring that whole part of the game. I joined way of the blue early on, since i assumed invasions were going to be fairly frequent as it was in Dark Souls, and a covenant that summons a crew to protect you sounds awesome. Thing is, i have not had a single straight invasion happen.

The club and the mace? You sure? I didn't notice any difference, outside of varying swing speed. Edit: Oh hey, you're right. They have slightly different light attacks, they definitely share the heavy attack though.

Fair enough, I totally hadn't really given the small soap stone any further thought after i found the normal one. I have the club, i don't like it as much as the mace. It does less poise damage and has lower base damage, though it scales better and might have slightly longer reach. Either way, having both would be super redundant, they actually share the same moveset. (Speaking of poise damage, the stone ring apparently adds a flat 10 points of poise damage to any physical damage you cause, which is pretty damn good.)

For me, the hardest boss so far was the Smelter Demon, though after beating him, i realized i probably should have rolled around in that puddle of water before heading in. (There's another small system change, being soaked in water, which lasts for a couple minutes, gives you massive fire resistance. If i was able to figure out how to get to that chaos storm chest, i don't know why i didn't think about using that to fight the boss.) It's kind of wild seeing how many summon signs are using the small soapstone. Those poor people, what else did they miss? (Though now i'm reading that the small soap stone might not obey the same matchmaking range as the normal soapstone, and may open you up to a broader range of players. It still severely limits what you can gain from that co-op session though.) The heavy attack on the mace has a more reliable hit box and better range, and the first hit almost always staggers. (I'm not clear how much of that is the stone ring.) I've been consistently able to kill most enemies in the game in two or three hits with almost no chance of retaliation. In particular, the enemies in the Iron Keep were a total joke. (Though i assume they were also vulnerable to strike, given the armor.) I also always keep some augmentation consumables equipped for bosses, because why not. Also, yeah, the stamina regen buff isn't nearly as good as it was in the last game, i'll probably drop it for something else eventually. I need a good lightweight secondary str weapon though, because you're right, the mace's range sucks and doesn't play well with the hitbox on its light attack. (ARRRGH, CRYSTAL LIZARDS. ARRGH.)

To go into more detail, i'm doing strength/vigor/endurance mainly, though my stats are kind of all over the place from early-game indecisiveness, i'll have to respec at some point. (Those respec items are definitely rare, i've only found two.) The basic mace seems to be one of the best strength weapons this time. Fast swings with great scaling and base damage, and strike damage seems very valuable in DS2. The main problem is that its moveset kind of seizes up if you're pushed into a corner, the swings clang at startup with the surface behind you. (More easily than other weapons with similar or shared movesets, seemingly.) I was really torn between sorcery and miracles while investing points, and that just sort of ended with me putting no points into either and going into pyromancy instead, but it's probably worked out for the best, i think. (Chaos Storm is an awesome spell, and fireballs are always useful.) Miracles tend to be best for strength builds, which is completely what i'm doing, but i already did miracles in DS1. The shields all seem to have been nerfed quite hard. Unless you're willing to carry the weight of a greatshield, there's really no way to get a shield with great stability. The old knight's shield is the heaviest medium shield, and it has phenomenal stats overall, but still nowhere near the stability of something like the silver knight shield from DS1. The game having essentially broken endurance up into two stats is making it much harder to manage encumbrance, so i actually dropped down to the alva set from the knight set, which has slightly less poise and damage resistance, but is still very good and is a fair bit lighter. It was a trade-off i had to make to work the old knight's shield into my build without investing a ton of points into vitality. (The alva set also looks awesome, so there's that too.) Does adaptibility affect block stun after taking a hit with your shield, or the speed of raising your shield? That would be hugely valuable for my build, recovery in this game feels much slower, just across the board. I already have a few points into adaptibility, but only thing i've really noticed is that my estus flask animation is faster, which has been extremely helpful. Also, rings. Chloranthy +1 for stamina, Ring of Blades +1 for damage, Stone Ring for poise damage, and the Old Sun Ring to break an opponent's combos. I also have a short bow equipped for pulling, early on i put some points into dex for it without realizing that crossbows can now be aimed when dual-wielded, which would have been a better choice for my strength build.

The way every funimation dub sounds the same is incredibly irksome. It doesn't matter if the voice actor is wildly inappropriate for the role, they have that select group of actors and they will stick with them.

It's to the credit of Dark Souls 2 that there are basically no puzzle bosses as there were in Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, the one i can think of that came closest ended up feeling like a well-rounded boss fight by its conclusion, but scarcely few have been as dynamic and exciting as the best boss fights from Dark Souls. Additionally, the difficulty of those fights is wildly uneven. There's a possibility that might be me doing the game slightly out of order, since the way DS2 is structured prevents it from using a lot of metroidvania-style level-design tricks to guide players towards the next intended objective, so i'm on my own just constantly jumping back and forth between the various pathways extending out from Majula trying to figure out what i should do next. Even with that excuse suggested though, the end-of-path bosses, like the old iron king and the lost sinner, are total pushovers. (That might possibly be intentional though, explicitly optional bosses have been by far the most challenging fights in Dark Souls 2.) Another thing i've been finding kind of annoying is that there are really obscure "tricks" engineered into the levels to make some of the bosses significantly easier. To say something nice about the game though, because i do really love it, the rebalanced combat system seems to be working out so, so much better for PVP. (The netcode also seems very good, or at least much better.) Also, i didn't play Demon's Souls, but... The way Dark Souls 2 has a clear hub and has you mostly teleporting between between largely linear levels, isn't this more like Demon's Souls than Dark Souls? So what's everybody's build? I've been using the Alva set, the Mace, the Old Knight's Shield, and pyromancy. (Chaos Storm is a way, way better spell than its DS1 equivalent.)

NG+ playthroughs apparently expand on a lot of the item descriptions. (In addition to actually remixing enemy layouts instead of just buffing everything, though it does that too.) I will say, i've enjoyed how DS2 plays around with its universe, treating the first game and its inscrutable, but imminently present history as a distant, largely forgotten creation myth. Things you know from that game are referenced in corrupted, unreliable forms and the environments are filled with allusions and teases. I've seen people assert that Dark Souls 2 is being too vague, or that there isn't anything there at all, but i think it feels very in line Dark Souls. It's that same kind of intricate world-building and story-telling that puts the onus entirely on the player to make any sense of it, just now that's happening within a setting that has existing familiarity and expectations. Really, It definitely took a few months of dedicated fans mining that first game to really put together a picture of what it was even about. Similarly, in Dark Souls 2, it definitely feels like there's a lot there, people just haven't put it all together yet. Anyways, so match-making in Dark Souls 2 is based on "soul memory" rather than player level, and it's basically just a running tally of how many souls you've collected. It's a controversial system, to say the least. It seems the theory behind it was that it would alleviate some of the matchmaking ambiguities raised by equipment and pyromancy, and perhaps it does, but it also creates a whole host of new ambiguities. However, the real issue is that invaders with hacked characters can be worth really ridiculous amounts of souls, and they can show up and lose on purpose, permanently raising the invaded player's soul memory by a massive amount and pushing them into an entirely different matchmaking bracket, essentially. (Or far out of range of any matchmaking, since it only searches 25% in either direction of your current soul memory.) That's a potentially game-ruining issue, and i've seen the story repeated by quite a few people in different places. There's not really even anything you can do to protect yourself against it, if you die and lose the souls, your soul memory remains elevated. (I think so? I guess i should confirm that, but that's how i've seen it described.) Despite stuff like this, i see people now bitching about how the game is VAC secured, and it's really just silly. Mods are great and everything, but this is an online game with a huge pvp component inescapably woven throughout. (As an aside, if VAC is working as intended for the game, VAC bans probably haven't even gone out yet since Valve issues those bans in waves.)

The vast majority of the messages people are leaving about hidden doors are indeed people trolling, just not for that reason. I have no idea how those false messages get so upvoted, sometimes hundreds of times, and they're everywhere too. Possibly hijinx are afoot, or people are just real dicks. Probably the latter.

Sen's Fortress wasn't really one of my favorite areas in the game, but it did also for me feel like the place where the game first really clicked. It's kind of the first area of the game that you really, really can't brute force through. If you haven't come to grips with the systems and the controls yet, Sen's Fortress will bludgeon that knowledge into you.

The individual areas are fine, some of them are really very good and maybe actually better than many locations from the first game, but they feel like a lot of disjointed regions strapped together by underground tunnels. I have no idea where they exist in relation to eachother, they may as well be in completely different worlds. Majula is also much more nakedly a hub than Firelink ever was, with the paths that spoke out from it rarely overlapping with eachother in interesting ways. It feels like you basically have three or four mostly linear paths spreading outward from Majula as their center, where the environment in the first Dark Souls was this intensely intricate web of shortcuts and connective tissue tying all of those locations together into a whole. Dark Souls definitely gave you a phenomenal sense of place as you came to understand all the ways its world folded back on itself, or saw how it tried to set up situations to kind of frame vistas for the player to clearly illustrate where everything is in relation to everything else, presenting Lordran as this singular entity. The absence of that kind of incredibly elaborate and careful environment design, more than anything else, is the thing that i find disappointing about Dark Souls 2. I also think that opening the teleportation up from the start contributes to the disjointed feeling of the world in Dark Souls 2, but the way they've built their world wouldn't allow for the kind of kind of exploration and back-tracking that the first game was entirely designed around.

I obviously loved it a whole lot, i put a ton of time into it, i still think it's a really great game. Unfortunately, the community became a bit toxic, lots of boosting and network manipulation. I got a good few months out of it though, probably would have kept playing if it didn't go the way it did. I haven't played in a few months, so i don't know if there's even still a community still around it on the western servers, but i think there's been several big patches since i last played. (Matches were pretty easy to find when i was playing, especially compared to AC5, which was just a disaster.) There's probably enough solo content in there that it's still worth checking out if you're into AC, though probably not enough for anybody else, and don't put your hopes on the multiplayer at this point.

Alright, i guess i need to go beat that boss, then.

Yeah, the two bell towers in Dark Souls 2 are analogous to the so-called "PVP forest" in the Darkroot Garden of Dark Souls, which was protected by the Forest Hunter covenant. The invasion rate seems way higher though, holy shit. I'm through Huntsman's Copse and Lost Bastille, and i have access to the tunnels beneath Majula. How do i uncurse people turned to stone? Is that something i should already be able to do?

I've had one win in three invasions so far, two of which happened at the same time as per my above story. I was starting to feel the game start to catch up with me shortly after i made that post, to be fair. It definitely gets harder. Expanding stat scaling out to most of the gear is a pretty big system change, one i quite like, and it definitely makes armor better than it was in Dark Souls. Contrast that with recovery on most actions being slowed down a ton from Dark Souls, and i guess it's easy to see how the game could either be really easy or really difficult based on pre-existing playstyles. (Somewhat related, did the internet really ever come to a consensus on whether or not the adaptibility stat is worth investing in?) I've also been having a ton of problems with titanite supply, namely that i just can't find any. I wasn't really finding any weapons early on that emulated the ones i liked from the last game, so i ended up using my titanite on a bunch of random things without realizing that you apparently don't run into any enemies that drop it, nor do you find shops with an unlimited supply, until much further in the game. So now i'm kind of stuck using sub optimal gear just because it's the gear i had happened to have upgraded. It's entirely possible i brought that completely on myself, but titanite feels more rare than it was in the last game.

I'm not really clear what the mechanics of the Rat King covenant are, even after reading about it. I have a feeling that members of that covenant are reaping a bunch of kills off of confused players, i definitely died in there. I also stumbled into one of the bell towers and, while the NPC at the door was explaining his covenant to me, i was invaded. Then i was invaded a second time while fighting the first invader, while the NPC was still describing his covenant to me. I won the first fight, and the join dialogue popped up in the middle of the second, leading me to die immediately at the hands of the second invader.

The slug cruisers are pretty good/interesting, they're worth unlocking.

I'm having this weird experience with the game where i'm not sure if the game is significantly easier than the original Dark Souls, or if this is just the result of me having experience with Dark Souls, but i've gone through several areas in the game without dying and defeated more than half of the bosses i've fought on my first try. (Just past the Lost Bastille now, with some exploration into the areas below Majula as well.) Certainly, the game isn't easy, i don't feel like it's giving me an easy time, i am definitely dying a lot. It's possible i may have done some areas slightly outside of the optimal order, but the game still overall feels easier than the original, i think. Of particular note, the move repetoires and AI patterns of both the normal enemies and the bosses seem to be very small and predictable, relative to the original game. Granted, my last experience with Dark Souls was the Oolacile areas on NG+, and NG+ Artorias was probably one of the toughest and most complicated fights in that game. Even starting new characters in that though, it always felt like Undead Burg was really the only area that you could expect to go completely smoothly. I've heard some rumblings to the effect that NG+ is the "real" Dark Souls 2 playthrough, with remixed gameplay beyond just stat buffs. I'm wondering if From consciously made the normal playthrough a bit more lenient. (I understand a number of the bosses were actually nerfed in a patch that was applied to the console versions prior to the release of the PC version.) Genuinely curious here, because this block of text here could - almost completely unchanged - apply to the first game, so if you were fine with them there, why do they bother you now?

Of the half dozen or so areas i've seen in the game so far, No Man's Wharf has been my favorite.

Also, coming upon a hallway that is just flooded with bloodstains and warning messages from other players and then proceeding to nail it on the first try will never not feel awesome.

I just got there in my game and was surprised to find that you can use the torches to intimidate some of the larger enemies, which is a neat little touch.

Regarding not offering multiple languages, it most often just seems to be an issue of disc/cartridge capacity, but i've also seen it blamed on technical limitations with the codebase of the game, licensing agreements with the actors, and other such things. Bravely Default was something i played recently where i found the english localization just intolerably awful, but that did have the option in there, so i was able to switch it over. The weeaboo answer might be something about wanting to hear the language track that was closest to the development of the game, and there probably is actually something to that, but the more honest answer is that bad voice acting in a language i don't understand isn't as offensive to my ears as bad english voice acting is. As a practical concern, it generally makes the most sense for games to be dubbed into a person's native language, especially if it's a game that doesn't partition narrative out into non-interactive story events like a JRPG does. Subtitles can be pretty much impossible to follow when you're splitting focus between subtitles, hud elements, and whatever onscreen action there is.

It's so tragically easy to get some of the important trainers killed in Dark Souls. I did my original playthrough of that game as a faith knight with no advanced miracles because i got Rhea of Thorolund killed. Gah!

So i am really, really loving Dark Souls 2, but there is one thing in particular that really stands out to me. In the first Dark Souls, because the game took time to make sure you had views of your surroundings that clearly illustrated your current location relative to the other areas in the game, and because you had to first exhaustively explore those areas through their elaborate interlocking passages before being allowed to teleport around, you ended up having a really very clear mental picture of the geography of that environment. By being able to just have this implicit understanding of how all the pieces of that world fit together, it felt like just one huge contiguous place instead of a lot of smaller pieces. I am getting no such sense of place from Dark Souls 2, each location feels like it exists off in its own corner by itself. It also feels like physical damage types are a much bigger deal in this game too. In addition to my sword, i've started carrying around a mace to deal with the larger and more heavily armored enemies, something i don't think i would have ever really felt pushed to do in the first Dark Souls. (Scaling bonuses seem to kick in much more significantly at much lower levels too.) I haven't been invaded yet... I think what they're doing with torches is neat, but if there aren't any areas that are as oppressively dark as some of the darker areas of the first game, i don't think it's going to matter all that much. (Those areas in the first game were super intimidating, they were real highlights, so i would hope there's something like those in DS2.)