When did you realize that Dark Souls 2 is actually the best souls in the series?

When did you realize that Dark Souls 2 is actually the best souls in the series?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=Z9dNrmGD7mU
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Except that it's not

>Best hubworld Majula
>Best pvp, Iron Keep bridge duels are fucking amazingly fun
>Most levels in the series
>Biggest customization in the series

(You)

never because it's fucking trash

Never? Dark Souls 2 is the worst game in the series easily

These.

Enjoyed the more aggressive gameplay and build variety, but god damn the actual levels were a slog.

When i played it. Couldn't finish three it's so bad.

autist samefaggot

I'm pretty sure it is the best Souls game if Sup Forums doesn't like it. Sup Forumsirgins have notoriously bad taste. Look at the games being discussed in the other threads. WoW, Sonic, Metal Gear Solid. Why would the opinion of these people matter?

True, people here have shit taste.

*blocks your path*

After I played SotFS. There's so much content that it got me hooked.

That webm is pretty bad. You can tell by the roll distance that the faggot is wearing heavy armour and expects his roll to be amazing. Also, I did not see a single jump. He kills his speed while sprinting by rolling. The lack of gud is embarrassing.

I'd rank Demon ahead of it due to it being my first Souls game and the atmosphere and relentlessness of the difficulty.

Dark Souls also ahead due to it basically perfecting everything from Demon Souls and, despite it's shortcomings (2nd half, etc.) it is still one of the greatest games of all time.

BB is better due to its incredibly different combat system and atmosphere, but it seemed a bit lacking in variety in both general atmosphere, builds, etc. But it was more of a straight action game anyway.

I would possibly rank it above or equal to three. 3 took too much from BB's combat and a lot of the environments were rehashed from previous games.

Ds2's DLC really excelled it from the base game.

DS>DeS>BB>DS2=DS3

>Sup Forums doesn't like it
>a million contrarian shitposts about how DaS2 is the best Souls game every day

Giving this game a second chance. I'm up to Iron Keep and it's still not doing much for me.

I legit never had problems with that part. Keep a bow up to date and you're pretty much set.

>Keep a bow
I do exclusively melee builds in all Souls games.

I realized how casual Sup Forums really was when I saw how many people had difficulty with that part.
You don't even need a bow, just not being a fatrolling retard.

>I realized how casual Sup Forums really was
You're on a board where people unironically claim Vicar Amelia from Bloodborne is a hard boss and that they get stuck on her, let that sink in.

I like how the game had a ton of optional bosses.
The dual wielding mechanic was the best in the series.

I still like 3 better but I still love DS2

being this bad lmao

>fucked up combat and movement mechanics, feels worse than your regular free to play mmorpg
>estus gives hp regen instead of just fucking heal u because the game itself is slow and uncomfortable
>have to level up a stat to increase roll i-frames
>unnecessarily long parry, backstab and riposte animations
>you can take damage while riposting/backstabbing
>map is like a compilation of hundreds of completely different scenarios somehow connected to each other
>mob animation is worse than 3d anime meme videos
>fucked up scenarios and textures even in sotfs
>mob AI is shit so game difficulty depends on how many mobs ur fighting at once
>bosses are disgustingly easy, even the dlc ones

yeah, the "best" in the series. totally. at least u can dual meme wield, but that's the only good thing in the whole game

>The dual wielding mechanic was the best in the series.
Nope.

That area is the peak of Souls level design, the enemy composition is brilliant, if you think the opposite, you just like easy shit.

Ok well don't be surprised if the game expects you to maybe think a little bit about encounters and maybe mix your approach to them up a little bit. It's completely finishable to just use melee weapons and nothing else, but it's tougher if you decide not to use the tools the game gives you.

I think Sup Forums has just decided that this game is "unfair", I recently played it and I had no problem with the apparent "swarms of enemies", I felt like as long as you can properly manage them, use the environment to your advantage and not just expect to wade through them all. I still think the game is flawed in a lot of ways, but the difficulty isn't one of them.

never
>lacked the cohesive world of DaS1
>kept the same clunky combat
>worst bosses in the series even if there are a handful of great fights
after playing BB and then DaS3 it's annoying to go back to 1 or 2 because of how slow they are when it comes to actual gameplay
PvP is a joke so DaS2 having the best means very little

Could be challenging for your first playthrough if you didnt overlevel to fuck. She does alot of damage desu

I really cannot forgive that Soul Memory system or whatever it's called. It makes losing huge sums of souls really detrimental to pvp, and dissuades from using souls to buy stuff from vendors.

fpbp

Dark Souls 2 had the blandest level design, the worst art direction, graphics, and aesthetic. Most of the difficult just stems from lazily copy/pasting mobs of enemies together that all aggro together, and saying "DUDE LMAO NOW LET'S THROW A BUNCH OF THESE ENEMIES AT THE PLAYER!". Or the shitty invasion mechanics and that soul memory faggotry. Or the lazy world design that was just 4 linear paths from majula, with little connectivity and bonfire warping used as a crutch instead. And most importantly, it has the worst controls.

Dear god, those controls. Playing this games feels like you're constantly trudging through a swamp. The controls feel imprecise, loose, and sloppy. Not to mention the inherent delay many actions seem to have, the terrible hitboxes, the i-frames for your dodges that aren't reflected in the animations (t-thanks adaptability), etc etc etc. It just feels awful to play. All the other souls games feel nice and snappy and precise to play. DaS2 is the odd man out here.

DaS2 had some good ideas. I liked the dual-wielding mechanics, and I liked what they were trying to do with various spells and making more varied playstyles and such. That was all good. But it was at too high of a cost.

I'm also still pissed at the downgraded graphics/lighting, and how this wasn't even restored with SOTFS

DaS first half > BB = DeS > DaS3 > DaS second half > DaS2

This is objectively correct

>The dual wielding mechanic was the best in the series.

Yeah I thought so too.

Then I realized that my dual axes and dual maces were literally using the same fucking moveset.

And it got even worse when I realized that a simple light-->heavy was always faster than the animeniggery powerstanced attacks.

Then I realized it was an afterthought at best.

>That area is the peak of Souls level design
Undead Burg, Painted World of Ariamis and Central Yharnam are as they all revolve around a single point and have you continually loop back to said point through shortcuts that you find via exploration and Central Yharnam in particular as a ton of optional content for a first area: Optional boss, two optional character quest lines, optional weapon to find, tons of equipment to find.

Dark Souls 2 just throws bonfires at the player like candy in a linear fashion, not a single level comes close to those three I just mentioned in DaS 2.

It also ruins the hexes that require souls to cast.

I can get behind this for the most part.

I think BB is better than DeS for sure. Dark Souls 3 is probably about as bad as Dark Souls 2 for different reasons. I think if 3 was just massively rebalanced it would be the second best Souls game, but the balance and speed are FUCKED.

i can't maneuver.webm

Nah, you have to be pretty bad to get stuck on her due to how easy she staggers. As long as you have been upgrading your weapons and just stay very aggressive on her, she's not a threat at all. Assuming you did Blood Starved Beast you can buy Fire Paper from the Hunter's Dream and the game even gives you Numbing Mist, if you're really that bad, outside her boss room.

No excuse.

I think DS3 is worse than 2 just because of how "sequel-y" it felt and how it didn't try to do its own thing as much but instead just shoved stuff the fans wanted into the game, which is a shame because DS3 had some neat ideas that were shoved aside for stuff we had already seen.

Amelia is such a fucking cool boss

That's some good old unpatched ds2 webms you got there! I can clearly see the enemies hitting the player when he rolls. You don't like polished hitboxes?

I'm not saying that the movesets are better than other games dual wielding, I'm just saying that the mechanic for being able to dual wield was good. I like the idea of any two similar weapons being able to be dual wielding rather than being restricted to a specific weapon like in DS3 and BB.

This is correct. And the magic of this is that because of the nature of dark souls, you can basically just quit your progression prematurely if you don't want to bother with the lord soul areas, and instead go do the DLC or just stick around and do dickwraith invasions or whatever.

First 2/3rds of DaS1 is absolute god-tier. The way the world is intricately woven together and interconnected is absolutely fantastic. It's just a shame they've completely foregone this in the sequels, which just use lazy bonfire warping and linear level progression. Nothing will beat the way DaS1 had such high points and low points, stemming from the fact that you could actually feel trapped and helpless deep down in certain areas, far away from your safe spaces like firelink. I still remember how I felt first playing DaS1 and descending down into the lower burg, then the deep, then upper blighttown, and then finally into blighttown swamp. I remember feeling trapped down there, like I was thousands of miles below the surface and trapped in that godforsaken place. And it just made me feel all the more triumphant when I got back out of there and unlocked shortcuts and got back to the surface world. Felt like fucking Dante escaping from Hell. That's something that's totally missing from all the other souls games.

Is Dark Souls 2 the Dark Souls of the Dark Souls series?

>i don't know what IASA frames are

Liking Dark Souls 2 is the Dark Souls of the Dark Souls series.

>I like the idea of any two similar weapons being able to be dual wielding rather than being restricted to a specific weapon like in DS3 and BB.

It only works in the context of you having 10000 weapons that are basically the same garbage anyways.

Fewer options with more love and character are always going to trump DaS2s method of throwing a dozen reskins of the same 12 movesets and hoping dipshits are too busy oogling over a gazzilion guns to care that none of them are particularly interesting. This is also why Bloodborne is forever going to have the best weapons in the entire series. Every single one was full of flavor.

But what's the Demon Souls of liking Bloodborne?

Agreed. I think if BB was less associated from the Souls genre then it would be better, but I always tend to compare it to the others in terms of environment variety and build variety.

Agreed. Luckily it was my second game after DeS so I didn't get TOO many of the fan service references, but even so, it seemed like 3 borrowed a lot from DeS, probbaly because DeS always felt like the beta version of DS.

I'm still trying to decide whether Amelia was evil or not. I mean the Healing Church was corrupt as fuck and Amelia was the Vicar. But she seemed to honestly believe the bullshit that they were spreading. So has it just been so many cycles of Vicars turning into Cleric Beasts that somewhere along the way they forgot that they're supposed to be afraid of the Old Blood. Not drink the stuff like juice?

Those weapon animations are awful, christ.

Most of Sup Forums are casuals that used a shield all game long in ds1 and since ds2 doesn't give u 100% block shields at the start, they threw a tantrum and called it "unfair". I know because I was one of them.

The early game of ds2 is alot harder than ds1 unless you grind and farm life-gems, then again, if u grind all souls games is easy. The early game of ds2:

- 1 estus as opposed to 5 from ds1
- estus and healing in general is incredibly slow
- no early OP shield like in ds1
- multiple enemies with better AI than ds1
- max hp is reduced after each death
- Those bullshit ogres that everyone tried to fight and got their asses kicked because they weren't a joke like the black knights in ds1.

ds2 was the series that really taught people to "git gud", for the early game anyways. The game actually gets alot easier as time goes on and you level some ADP to get the OP amount of invincibility frames ds1 had because apart from a handful of bosses (smelter, darklurker, watcher/defender) most of the bosses in the base ds2 game are very easy compared to ds1 and ds3.

Dark Souls 3 definitely has that "let's just give the fans what they want. All dessert and no dinner" sort of feel to it. I still think it's the far superior game, but it still loses out to the first game because of the linear level design/progression, the total emphasis on one (1) style of play over all others, the shit-tier invasion mechanics, and the lack of replayability that results from these things.

Dual wield power stance

At about that point.

They are touching you faggot, are you expecting to be inmortal until you finish your roll animation?

I feel the same way, I still felt the weapons were pretty good in DS2, but it's really no contest compared to how interesting and well thought out the Bloodborne weapons were, even if there were way less of them.

It's like having either 200 ice cream flavours that are tiny variants on 5 different ones, or 20 ice cream flavours that are all completely different from one another (except maybe some of the saw weapons), even though there are more DS2 weapons, the actual variety comes out as less than Bloodborne.

Dark Souls 3 was the first time where the base game bosses were largely good though. Rather than a bunch of throw away trash like Moonlight Butterfly, Ceaseless Discharge, Seath, Pinwheel or Iron Golem you had Abyss Watchers, Pontiff, Boreal Dancer, Twin Princes, Nameless King and Soul of Cinder.

For me it was completing the loop between Undead Burg and the forest. I made it past the Gargoyles and went on past Andre. Got to the forest but didn't find the bonfire there because I hadn't internalized the idea of illusory walls yet. So I wandered the forest for hours until I found the bonfire next to the Black Knight. Which brought me to the Valley of the Drakes. Wandered to BlightTown until I found the key. Got killed by Toxic a bunch of times so I went the other way into New Londo where I got gangbanged by ghosts. Felt well and truly lost until I stumbled on the elevator. And lo and behold I've been in Firelink Shrine's backyard this whole time. I was hooked forever after that.

DaS3 is in no way worse than 2. It is far more derivative than 2, but if your game ends up being total trash, what the fuck is the point of being original? At least DaS3 took certain concepts and made them fully realized. High Lord to me was a straight up better, more atmospheric version of Nito, who had the fucking retarded exploding knees drop and did nothing but easy to avoid attacks while farting out dust that killed his own adds.

>But High Lord is also just as easy

But still manages to feel and play less like shit. Which is the point. Thematically he is the better boss. Mechanically he is the better boss, even if it is just straightforward weakpoints.

2015

Soul of Cinder became my favorite boss fight in the series. I know it's pandering but the Gwyn transition blew my balls off.

You probably only ever played the patched version. The unpatched version was hell. Every single caster would automatically aggro and start shooting their homing magic at you as soon as they're close enough for their character models to be generated in-game. That is to say, the only time they're not firing at you, IS WHEN THEY'RE LITERALLY NOT IN THE GAME WORLD.

And the real problem isn't even the casters. It's the fucking lighting effects on the water. You legitimately cannot see where the water drops off into an underwater cliff. The water lighting looks like saran wrap is covering everything, and the only way to see underneath and distinguish the cliffs is to point the camera directly down at your feet. But doing this means you can't see where you're going, or where magic is being shot at you from. There are simply too many "fuck you" parts in that level where the ground deceives you and what looks like a correct path will take you flying off an underwater cliff and such.

It's not even that hard of a part, all things considered. I still beat it with a bow. But my point is that it's quite irritating to both with this, and that it doesn't add any enjoyment to the experience whatsoever. It's a shitty level, at least pre-patch.

The bosses were good. My complaints are more about the lack of replayability dueto the game's stricter linearity, piss-poor invasion mechanics, and lots of formerly interesting playstyles no longer being viable, with all emphasis being purely on a dodgy ninja with fast weapons.

>Not cheesing this fight

Pleb

God I Love These Faggotry Threads

>2:16
youtube.com/watch?v=Z9dNrmGD7mU

They're dodgeable without retarded trial and error that's what they are.

>not understanding the point
Dumb

Agreed, just giving Dark Souls 3 credit where its due. The past games were salvaged by their DLC when it came to boss fights since there were usually a ton of throwaway encounters in the base games but Dark Souls 3 hit it out of the park with the base game although I still don't understand why FROM insists on stuff like Deacons of the Deep or Ancient Wyvern but whatever I guess it adds variety.

I wish the entire Gwyn segment stayed like the short transition part instead of becoming just the piano again.

>When did you realize that Dark Souls 2 is actually the best souls in the series?
When I developed my IQ into the triple digits.

I want to ____ amelia!

at Heide's Tower

that was the area where I got my gitguds for the first time. I just ran through and cheesed DaS1 like a speedrunner and just kind of fumbled the boss fights but for whatever reason when I got here the entire series just got so much easier. it's a pretty great area, you can aggro single enemies out of a group for practice, good soul farm so you can actually level and make steady progress. teaches you how to fight a whole gang of big dudes all with different weapon sets that you can't just backstab cheese

felt so fucking good when I cleared everything by myself for the first time, then hit the fogwall and killed the dragon rider on the first try, then kept my momentum going and killed the drake and the old dragon rider all at once on the first attempt. man I love that place

Cute!
I have some lewd pictures of her too.

Post them and I WILL find and kill you

Don't sexualize beastly idiocy

You know, Bloodborne has pretty weak bosses overall. The best bosses are in the DLC.

To be fair, I do have some issues with the overall package of DaS3's boss gallery. While they're all their own thing, they all follow the same overall pattern. Mostly being quick bosses that you dodge a rapid-fire flurry of attacks from, poke when vulnerable, and then repeat. And sure, oversimplifying it like this can be applied to literally all fights, but I felt like it was more pronounced in DaS3. Almost like From said to themselves "hey, everyone really liked Artorias, so let's make literally every fight be like the Artorias fight!"

So it's like each fight on its own is really well done, but when they're all put together, it almost feels like I'm fighting slightly different variations on the same thing. Not enough variability, IMO. And there were exceptions (Aldritch, the Tree boss, the giant skeletor, etc) but overall, it's clear where their mindset was. And it's almost like having all dessert and no dinner. I would've liked to see more variety.

This also plays into the fact that I think DaS3 places too much emphasis on dodging and quick hits. They get rid of poise, make rolling overpowered as fuck (too many i-frames, too little staminia loss, too much leeway on weight encumbrance), and thus codified the "correct" way to play DaS3 be to ROLL ROLL ROLL and then spam your R1 a few times when you can. This applies to the entire game, but it also applies to how these boss fights work too. I like the fact that in past games, many different playstyles were all viable. I could be a no-shield flippy dex ninja. Or I could be a fucking invincible tank who was nigh-impossible to stun. Or I could be heavily reliant on casting. And there were tons of other variants and such, and they all worked well. But in DaS3, it really seems like they're twisting your ear and saying "THIS is the proper way to play the game and you're going to fucking like it"

Yeah it is, if you prefer it, great, I like both games and 3 definitely does a lot of things better than 2, like the bosses in 3 were consistently among the best designed in the series.

My big issue with DS3 is that it's just uninspired, it doesn't have the same amount of creativity or thought out world that the preceding games did, it just felt like an indulgant "Lets give the fans what they want" sequel which have always bugged me. When I played DS3 I wanted to see new stuff, I didn't want to have old characters shoved in my face for no other reason than because I recognise them, and I didn't want to go to Anor Londo because it's an iconic location, just show me new stuff that I haven't seen before, tell me a new story that isn't basically the same thing for the third time but with a "this time it's REALLY bad" garbage qualifier on it. Give me more stuff like the profaned capital, Irithyll, whatever the deep was meant to be, anything other than more rehashing of DS1 ideas and locations.

If you like the game, great, I wish I did, but I'd really have a sequel that tries its own thing, even if it fails, because at least it's trying new stuff and not just treading water.

Also, why bring up High Lord Wolnir as an example of a good boss fight? He was nowhere near as interesting on any dimension as Nito, he was just some big skeleton you fought without really knowing who he is in the world, the idea of him just being a big skeleton isn't really interesting where the Rotten at least had the minor twist of it being a bunch of fleshy corpses smushed together, and the fight itself is lame, like, not even that it was "too easy", it just didn't really much going on in it. I mean, he's not an awful boss or anything (like a good chunk of DS2 bosses) but he's like a D+ if I were to grade him.

trolling side

After I grew out of the Sup Forums hivemind, I realized Ds2 is alot better than I originally thought.

I still think the other 2 are better, but ds2 has many thing it did right

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Fear the old blood.

When i killed a lvl 837 Havelyin that used the dark fog+poison staff combo with my SL 150 Heide knight build
Best pvp by far

It's truly the Hulk (2003) of Souls games

fucking cancer

only way I beat this is because I died so much, that eventually a lot of the enemies stopped re spawning

...

I dunno, I only managed to beat it once. Every time I try to again I quit out of boredom once I get through Heides. It's the only souls game I have this problem with

A long time ago, get on my level plebs.

>Sexualizing beasts unironically
>Not sexualizing Kos(m)

I really hate how little to the profaned capital there was. They call it a capital, and yet it's a sloped bridge down to a small chamber and the entrance to the boss. For a "capital" there's really not much too it. Almost reminds of Izalith, in that it seems like it was supposed to be something more, but gut cut down because of time constraints or something. Obviously still better than fucking Izalith, but still.

...

I get it, but I played the King's Fields at launch so those are the best to me. I was so into them that I ran up an unpayable phone bill calling up for hints and walkthroughs.
So, 13 or whatever years later I play Demons unknowingly. Imagine the stains in my boxers recognizing all the sound effects and the type font. Immediately recognizable.

What was Micolash trying to do anyway

>play ds1 for 200+ hours, beating ng+7 and pvping for hours on end, get every achievement
>ds2 comes out, different in all the right ways, feels like a fresh experience, play for another 200 hours and get every achievement again
>ds3 comes out, feels like ds1.5, covenants don't work, every map is a cathedral, removed a lot of the interesting stuff from ds2, only get to ng+2 to get the rings and never even finish the dlc

I don't get it. Are you bragging about hours played?

When I first got there I was hoping it would be bigger than the dungeon leading to it and there would be actually interesting stuff to fight and look at, but it was just nigh vestigal with what we got ingame.

There was also all the weird stuff with the profaned flame but it was pretty much just 3 tiny interesting pieces of information and nothing else.

It takes a special kind of autism to think Dark Souls 2 isnt the best Souls game.
The kind of autism that demands their opinion be validated by others, the kind that credits just a single man as being responsible for a game's quality, the kind that will ignore facts if they violate the established agenda.

At the end of the day, DS2 is hated on Sup Forums because it is different, and Sup Forums hates change more than anything in the world. Even if its change for the better.

The best at having the most low effort of low effort cheese runs.

Such a shit game.