This is a fantastic game, just a horrible follow-up to Dark Souls.

If you want to get into the series, at the moment this game is the one you want to start with, not the original. The games storylines are only really thematically related. The worlds appear to be totally separate, or at least separate enough that the events of the first game and this one do not appear to directly intersect, so you aren't missing anything by starting at #2.

This is a straight mechanical upgrade to Dark Souls. Almost every aspect of this game is better except one. The world design kind of sucks. It's just a really sparse game where the zones were clearly designed in a vacuum from one another, and you can really tell the second act was rushed.

For the most part, bosses are well designed. At first, I didn't think that many of the bosses were all that special and that quite a lot of them were just hot garbage. And then I played the game with a different build. Bosses I thought were cheap were now easy and bosses I thought were poorly designed were amazing. There are going to be some boss fights that you just aren't going to be well equipped for on your first playthrough. This game was not designed to pander solely to sword and board combat. Entire bosses were seemingly designed to be tackled by sorcerors or pyromancers or clerics instead of your generic knight. If you have heard people whine about the design of this game, try a different approach. It'll really open your eyes to the variety that they actually put into the bosses. It's hard to notice for most people because they don't put the time in to actually tackle the game in different ways. It's just one and done for most. But good lord, can I say this game was a treat to beat about a dozen times.

The DLC is gorgeous and amazing, but punishingly difficult to the point of frankly being more of a status symbol than an expectation to beat more than once on a single character.

This game is fantastic and in a lot of ways beats Dark Souls for me. It's just unfortunate that they couldn't quite capture the tight, cohesive level design and enigmatic characters from the first game. Where Dark Souls was an experience of a lifetime that you only get one of, Dark Souls II was just a really good game.

This is a fantastic game, just a horrible follow-up to Dark Souls. If you want to get into the series, at the moment this game is the one you want to start with, not the original. The games storylines are only really thematically related. The worlds appear to be totally separate, or at least separate enough that the events of the first game and this one do not appear to directly intersect, so you aren't missing anything by starting at #2. This is a straight mechanical upgrade to Dark Souls. Almost every aspect of this game is better except one. The world design kind of sucks. It's just a really sparse game where the zones were clearly designed in a vacuum from one another, and you can really tell the second act was rushed. For the most part, bosses are well designed. At first, I didn't think that many of the bosses were all that special and that quite a lot of them were just hot garbage. And then I played the game with a different build. Bosses I thought were cheap were now easy and bosses I thought were poorly designed were amazing. There are going to be some boss fights that you just aren't going to be well equipped for on your first playthrough. This game was not designed to pander solely to sword and board combat. Entire bosses were seemingly designed to be tackled by sorcerors or pyromancers or clerics instead of your generic knight. If you have heard people whine about the design of this game, try a different approach. It'll really open your eyes to the variety that they actually put into the bosses. It's hard to notice for most people because they don't put the time in to actually tackle the game in different ways. It's just one and done for most. But good lord, can I say this game was a treat to beat about a dozen times. The DLC is gorgeous and amazing, but punishingly difficult to the point of frankly being more of a status symbol than an expectation to beat more than once on a single character. This game is fantastic and in a lot of ways beats Dark Souls for me. It's just unfortunate that they couldn't quite capture the tight, cohesive level design and enigmatic characters from the first game. Where Dark Souls was an experience of a lifetime that you only get one of, Dark Souls II was just a really good game.