In Defense of Dark Souls 2
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- Опубликовано: 27 сен 2024
- In this video we explore Dark Souls 2 and its differences from the previous games in design and execution and the ways, on inspection, it actually proves to be better.
We also watch, in real time, as all my subscribers melt away and a dunce's hat descends from the heavens directly onto my balding head, and I start to go mad from the realisation that I'm still not sure whether to spell it Defense or Defence and words lose all meaning.
My Twitter: / hbomberguy
My Patreon: / hbomb
Good guy timestamps
00:00 INTRO
1:29 Part 1: HEALING
9:27 Part 2: ENEMY DESIGN
24:12 Part 3A: WORLD DESIGN (Interconnectedness)
32:30 Part 3B: WORLD DESIGN (Non-Linearity)
43:54 Part 4: PLAY CONDITIONING
50:22 Part 5: STORY COMPARISON
1:06:02 Part 6: THE DLC & SCHOLAR OF THE FIRST SIN
1:10:45 CONCLUSION
screw the both of you
Dark soul Gael Why so angry? And there's only one person
The Bright Lord hes mad because Hbomb won't give him any attention awwww.
The Bright Lord he didnt finish the part in his special ed class where the teacher discusses proper arguments and having common sense in general
Siba Smith do you use Bots why the fuck do you have 2.3 Million subs and only 8 views per video
"It's almost like this game was made for people who don't want to run in circles for hours." ~ Man who spent 60+ hours in Pathologic
Congrats, I somehow found you in top comments
Its also funny considering how you fight so many enemies in this game, even in his footage
@@liamfackelman6582 Yeah it did
Lol, I think Harris made it pretty clear that he didn't want to run in circles for hours while playing Pathologic.
what you said would be ironic if hbomberguy had said that pathologic was a fun game instead of a pain simulator and more of an artsy game
I think you sell the fight with Gwyn really short by saying the best they could do was put some sad music over it. A lot of the things you praise about Vendrick apply to Gwyn as well. Gwyn is hyped up for the entire game as a literal god among men, with a title like "The Lord of Sunlight" that can shoot Zeus-style lightning bolts powerful enough to rip the scales off of dragons. When you finally get there he doesn't even get an intro cutscene like 99% of the bosses do; you enter the fog gate and this withered old man just mindlessly charges you. His name is changed to "Lord of Cinder" and it's implied that his power, over the long course of guarding the first flame, dwindled tremendously. You go in expecting this huge final boss but instead it's a rather simple one-on-one duel against a "god" so weak you can parry his ass and riposte him into oblivion.
Don't get me wrong, I love Dark Souls 2 and I really like what they did with Vendrick, but let's not act like Gwyn's presentation wasn't just as good, if for different reasons.
give this guy/gal a prize. yep he absurdly reduced a really good lore and praised a very derivative one.
>that can shoot Zeus-style lightning bolts powerful enough to rip the scales off of dragons
you're greatly overbloating the implication of his power, probably because you've watched copious amounts of lore videos providing ideas or interpretations of it.
However, nothing we see in the intro cutscene implies he was uniquely powerful at all; literally every lightning bolt launched at the dragon does as much damage as his.
His bossfight doesn't have a cutscene, and is extremely streamlined is because the second half of the game was notoriously rushed, not because of some deeper reason theorists desperately use mental gymnastics to try and claim.
jerkin off you're tripping. loreists are what I hate most about DS because they rarely agree and they all swear they're right, but he was still a lord. we're meant to have high expectations to get there and be let down. he's a husk now. he split his lord soul and burned the rest fighting off entropy for his whole universe. there's no gymnastics necessary. it's laid out for you plain as day.
I would've enjoyed the story elements of Vendrick's hollowed state if he were actually a hollow, who's weak and killing him would be like putting down a suffering pet. But instead he's a super-powered gank-machine with a stupid gimmick, unless you hunt down extremely out of place items that make it so that your attacks can damage him. TL;DR if you're going to connect story and gameplay, do it, don't just talk about it.
+A Spooky Dog funny how people like to act like Gwyn was supposed to be unstoppable but was a joke, in reality he was the hardest boss unless you mastered parrying. He didn't seem like the ultimate personification of one of the two central themes of Dark Souls, one being duality and the other which Gwyn supposedly is the incarnation of, being entropy. The sad music was good but he didn't seem withered, he was relentless and you had to hold him back using the stupid pillars in his boss room, trash design. Really Vendrick was a much better iteration on everything people value about Gwyn.
I can’t believe how uncontroversial this video is! No dislikes!
Truly is a breath of fresh air. I have high hopes for the inevitable "difficulty debate" we'll see as soon as elden ring drops
thank you susan! no, you guys really should use that extension before they ban it for "misconduct of terms or conditions" or some shite like that
ok but actually the anti dislike plugin says it only has 285 dislikes which is incredibly surprising
@@Renteks- 21k dislike according to me
@@Tototoo88 weird
H-bomb 5 years ago: I cut this out of my video bc it would be too long
H-bomb now: I made a 3.5 hour long video about a pretty alright game
Don’t forget Tommy talaricos mother is proud of him!
*Character development*
And he still won't leave the stalker dark sky rant in
It's a shit video about a shit game, he doesn't even defend it in the least convincing way possible, almost everything he says is objectively wrong lmao
@@caolanmoore4027or any of the Phantom Menace rants
I enjoy the fact this video stirs up more controversy than Hbomber's political videos.
Hbomberguy makes a video about gay representation and HP Lovecraft: I sleep
Hbomberguy makes a video defending Dark Souls 2: *GAMERS RISE UP*
Probably because Hbomb's political views aren't really that controversial.
@@stevencleere4912 "Probably because Hbomb's political views aren't really that controversial.
"
They kind of are in the gaming's community at least sadly.
@@Arkayjiya That's because he's wildly flailing about trying to justify Dark Souls 2, which he does by constantly lying about Dark Souls 1 and saying that 2 is better than 1.
@@SocBeefBoi I don't think you have any idea what we were talking about because it has nothing to do with Dark Souls xD
this video was the biggest drama the souls borne community ever had and i refuse to believe it was 3 years ago
Why is this video so controversial?
@@mikeexits Because of how wrong hbomberguy is and how he shits on a youtuber that makes better arguments and is smarter than him
@@NenaWednesdays "I can't accept a different and correct perspective"
@@aaronbennett4767 I could if it's properly supported. You realize he contradicts himself in this video several times? And that's not even getting into the deceptive editing and constant strawmanning re: Matthewmatosis.
@@NenaWednesdays Nah Hbomber guy is right. :) DS2 is better.
beginning January 1st I played through, for the first time, DS1, DS2, DS3, Bloodborne and the Demon's Souls remake, and I can say with confidence that Dark Souls 2 is a video game.
That's a bold claim.
But I must agree.
its one of the games ever
I wasn't sure at first, but the more I think about it... yeah, you might be right
@@nerfytheclown bro you probly searched up Polybius by accident
Faction neutral npc moment
"Artorias isn't ridiculous"
queue footage of Artorias spin-jumping with a big fuckoff sword before doing a superhero landing that creates a small crater
Yeah it's easy boss fight!! Fairly malaynd
Boss post-Bloodborne bosses jumping everywhere like a madman.
"Yep all good" :)
Dark Souls 1 Artorias
"So hard, why this happen" >:(
Tbf that's actually something the player can do if you use his weapon. An invader in full Artorius gear could do the same thing. Given we can use 500 lb Ultra Greatswords that isn't surprising.
@leolux6056 it was sarcasm
@leolux6056 BRO I WAS JOKING
Dark Souls 2 is objectively better due to the introduction of Tongue but Hole.
I totally agree, man.
Okay what's that?
RED Phoenix ingame messages
@@alizard7617 for what. I am really confused. Is that for a boss. Maybe Last Gaint?
RED Phoenix no as in the messages players leave on the ground
"I like having friends"
- shows footage of an NPC summon
Forever Alonne.
Vyers Reaver. 😄
felicia the brave is my friend..
Nice pun.
Haha I get it it’s like knight alonne right?? Hahah!!!1!
you mean forever "sir alonne"
This video is more controversial than a marxist video essay.
thats because it talks about things that actually matter!!!1
"in his opinion"
@@Jacob-zk1jy You've got that backwards! Dark Souls II _is_ the key to world peace, we just need to see the Emerald Heralds feet.
@Charles Wetherspoon damn that’s crazy tell me more
@Charles Wetherspoon beep boop beep beep
"Humanity is a rare resource in dark souls 1" Laughs in darkwraith
Laughs in the depths.
omg its like he never played the DLC its not like theirs an enemy that's literally humanity
Laughs in small mountain of rat corpses.
Laughs in fire keeper soul duplication glitch.
Laughs in the knowledge of pressing B
Tommy Tallarico spent 5 years creating this game
His mother is very proud
He was the first American to ever be hired by Fromsoft
This is my new favorite hbomberguy meme
@@franklinbadge1215most underared comment comment in youtube history
NO, IT WAS JOEY. IT'S ALWAYS JOEY!
It's really odd that I absolutely adore DS2, but for almost none of the reasons Harry does.
Aqua Necromancer probably
so true
he didnt do this game justice even though he was trying his best, somehow 😂😂
Welcome to the subjectivity of Art!
Same here. I still like it the least of all Souls games though. It's just a nice goofy adventure for me.
Talks about balanced npc fights
Shows Jester Thomas
Though to be fair, a player invasion is leagues less balanced
@@justsomeguy6841 depends
Honestly I didn't think Jester Thomas was all that hard. The dude has no poise so you can use a decently fast weapon to just cheese him if you want to, no pyromancy comes out fast enough to avoid stunlock. Power stancing with a straight sword in the left and a thrusting sword in the right and doing a basic L1+R1 combo annihilated him pretty efficiently for me
One thing that I absolutely hate about the npc encounters is that when I hit the enemy npc with my greatsword he does not budge at all and keeps hitting me like a little bitch with 4000hp and I even with 120 poise still get staggered. Using the slam of ultra greatswords and clubs & shit is for pussies.
You didn"t fight npcs in demon souls xd, that was truly a hell, specially the one in the poison swamp aginst a specter with a sword that ignore shields
Complains about walking to the bosses in ds1
*Frigid outskirts has entered the chat*
See MauLer for analysis. 😂
One boss does not speak for a wider trend though. It IS the worst area of the game, but luckily that's a DLC thing that's not even required. Izalith is an entire third of the Lordsoul quest (feels more like half) that you can only skip most of if you max out spider covenant and know the shortcut.
@@WeskAlber yeah I enjoy dark souls 2 and it is my favorite in the series. I just think the frigid outskirts deserves to be mentioned.
@@WeskAlber Nashandra is an 80 second walk. Longer than any in DS1. Velstadt is a 60 second walk. As long as the longest run in DS1. Lud & Zallen is about a 300 second run, and that's if you know which way to go as a very experienced player. That's about four times the longest boss run of DS1. Those three are just off the top of my head. See MauLer's response videos for some more examples, he lists about five DS2 boss runs that are longer than any of DS1.
In other words, no the one boss doesn't speak for a wider trend. But the five bosses or so definitely do.
@@TheStraightestWhitest Capra is NOT a 60 second walk. There's no way. That trip always took like 2 mins at best.
Izalith, no way that's 60 seconds either. Trip to the fire asylum demon too. Even the close bonfire to Quelagg... No way that's a single minute. The Kiln is also no way shorter than the trip to Nash.
Walks in the series have always been pretty bad because they're meant to be full levels not walks. I think DS2 feels way better about it due to stupidly generous checkpointing for most of the game. Only a few places starve you where DS1 starving was a feature while DS2 most bosses have a bonfire what feels like super close. Maybe a lot of it is thanks to my skill level increasing in the years between DS1 and today, but I didn't get sick of the walks nearly as quickly as I did to Capra and Quelagg
The way I’ve barely heard the name of most of these games but I’ve spent critical hours of my life watching every single 65 hour essay on all of them… this guy can talk.
i know the feeling :-)
Bro fr
Play them
play the games immediately
play them now
few things in the souls series devastated me as much as fighting all the way to the bottom of the tomb of the giants before having placed the lordvessel (as i was struggling with smough and ornstein and wanted to level my character more to help improve my odds) only to find that fucking golden mist, THEN realising i had to climb all the way back out again
Holy shit, same kinda thing happened during my first playthrough. There was a point where I didn't know where I was supposed to go next, so I thought, "Oh, maybe I'm supposed to go further and further down into the pitch-black skeleton pit." Through much suffering, I finally hit a roadblock when I found that wall of piss mist, and then a horrific realization set in that I can't teleport back to the surface and have to run all the way back up.
I just restarted when it happened to me, I couldn't find the way back up
The thing that kills me about that is you can see the bed of chaos and ash lake from deep in the tomb, why the fuck didn't they just connect these areas.
"But Dark Souls 1 is so great - it's like a Metroidvania where you can go anywhere and then everything just comes together brilliantly" 😂 (except when it doesn't)
@@SuperLotus It comes back together tbh, but only for the first half of the game, all the lord souls are pretty much dead ends lmao
A critique on your critique around the 41 minute mark: It could easily be argued that anyone that was able to make their way through the first Dark Souls would have an advantage in trying to make it through Dark Souls 2. Your friend not asking questions on how to get through the game is possibly attributed to their growth as a player, not the level design of Dark Souls 2.
There was also a fully established community and forums where he could seek out help or get straightforward answers when DS2 came out.
DS1 had none of that safe for a few Demons Souls enthusiasts but that was really only a spec compared to what came into existence after DS1.
Is nobody going to cover how easy DS2 was or how linear it is? Sure, you get to choose WHICH linear path you get to go down, but there's little branching off at all. Sure, linearity isn't all that bad but it makes things easy. Piss easy. With 4 areas just HANGING AROUND at the beginning of DS2, none of them were really allowed to bring up the difficulty. Maybe Freja's area (can't remember the name since the atmosphere is so pitifully unremarkable) turns up the damage numbers on the spider hollows but if you even get hit by one of them, I consider you bad.
Seriously, they move at like 2km/h. Just like, go around them and get to the boss. Boss souls are the only ones that matter in the long run anyways. Trash mobs give like 500 souls max in NG so thankfully, grinding is pretty ineffectual compared to actually playing the game.
Since most, if not all, of the mobs are these painfully slow enemies that always group up in threes or fours, it's a lot easier to just run past em. They can't catch up to you because if three or four FAST monsters constantly attacked you, then the game would be seen as unfair.
Not only all this, but with SO MANY HUMAN ENEMIES, telegraphing on enemy attacks is ridiculously, hilariously, pitifully, saddeningly, punishingly.... easy to read. Enemy raises arm? Stop holding forward on control stick. Now hold left until you're close to behind them. Press R1. There, you just beat all but like 2 bosses in this entire game.
Off the top of my head, those two would the Throne Watcher/Defender and Freja. Everyone else in the entire game can be beaten by backstab fishing. Since they're so fixed on homing in on you via rotating and not... idk... having AOE attacks or moving, or being well programmed, you can easily get at least 2 big attacks in before the enemy has full spun around. Took me about an afternoon to beat DS2 after I figured out how vulnerable everything is in this game to backstabs compared to 1. At least they put up a shield or had an animation to back away from you. Dark Souls 2 is so easy and sloppy, it can't even prevent me from cheesing it through 8 hours of backstabs.
Not that I needed to. About 15 minutes in DS1 can prepare you for #2. Imagine what 150 hours got me
Everytime I watch that bit after actually going away and playing the game, I like to think that its because his friend gave up on the game because of how unintuative the progression is, how broken the healing is, how stiff and glitchy the fighting it and how there are areas filled with ganks despite his lies in this video.
@@ArtyoumPlays I know it's been 3 years, but I felt the need to make this reply.
if you really try to give DS2 a chance to be enjoyed, you will enjoy it. That I can guarantee. Speaking as someone who played and loved DS1 and DS3 long before DS2, I can still honestly say I enjoyed experiencing DS2 the most of the trio. I never found the game easier or more linear than any of the others.
To respond to your first paragraph, the game isn't linear. Objectively speaking it isn't. It grants so many different paths and ways to reach the castle in the first section that has already been brought up in the video. Each path is close enough to the same difficulty that while each person will typically take certain paths first, it could be challenged in any order and still feel legitimate. When I first played, I remember walking into the room with the petrified pyromancer on the switch and found that so interesting. I found it interesting enough that I searched up how to free her and got a fragrant branch from the merchant in the forest. Freja ended up being the first old one's soul that I got in my first ever playthrough of the game, and it's become my habit to go that way because I got used to that path.
Every time I tried to explore and enjoy the world in the first game, I was punished for it. Not only was I was punished, I got through it after a long time, and then reached a massive wall that told me what I did was wrong. It told me that what I did lacked value. The first game didn't permit me to enjoy the game outside of a set path and even if that path looped around and intersected itself, it didn't feel nonlinear. The first game felt, to me, interconnected but bland. It was a game that forced me to go in circles getting keys and ringing bells to go to new branches of the world, and it was tedious. I didn't feel that in DS2. Don't misunderstand me, I loved my time playing DS1, but the way DS2 was made brought more enjoyment to me. It made me feel more important as a player than DS1 ever did, and that's why I enjoyed it more than the other games.
For your next point about enemies being too easy to cheese, I'd say that's your fault. I got the black knight halberd on my first run of DS1 and I didn't enjoy most of the bosses as a result. I used an OP weapon, and I got severely disappointed when I finally reached Ornstien and Smough. My build killed them in 10-12 hits total and I had a moment after the fight when I thought "really? This fight is what was leading up to getting this magic relic that lets me literally teleport? DS1 is, to a degree, easier to trivialize even if not every method is through backstabs.
Maybe it's because of the mindset I adopted when I began playing, but I don't think I backstabbed very much at all when I played. Every fight was a different method of exploring how fights could be done. DS1 lacked that. Encounters in DS1 could always be calculated down into a different type of block, dodge, hit, repeat. By the time that becomes even remotely viable in DS2, it feels foreign to you because you were taught to take more risks and do more with what you had. If you didn't enjoy DS2 because you thought it was too easy through backstabs, then maybe you should have done something else.
In my later runs that didn't have the black knight halberd, I learned why everyone else seemed to love the O and S fight in DS1. I changed the way I played that part, and my experience improved as a result.
Playing a game in one unenjoyable way and ignoring the countless other, more fun methods you were given to choose from doesn't make the game a bad game. It makes you a bad player for not choosing the way that would have brought you more enjoyment. Games are made to be enjoyed. If you can't enjoy it no matter what you do, then maybe it's the fault of the developer, but if you dislike one method and never change from that method you know you dislike, you don't have the right to say the game is at fault. The game gave you every chance and incentive to change, but it was you who chose to rebuke it.
All in all, you're allowed to have your opinion. I honestly believe what you say was your honest experience. The thing that I find disappointing with your comment is that you decided that your experience meant the game itself was bad when you didn't go in intending to find an enjoyable game. Maybe it's true that the way the game is made makes it unfun for you, but there's a good reason that DS2 is the Dark Souls game I return to when I find myself wanting to play the series again even if it was the third souls game I played.
The reason no one is talking about those aspects of the game you find problematic is because other people adapted. Any game has flaws, and the player's job is to at least attempt to find a fun experience despite those flaws. That's what every player did with DS1, and that's what every player did with DS2. The only difference was the set of flaws people had to adapt to. The reason you maybe didn't enjoy the game as much and think it's far more poorly designed is because you didn't try to adapt to the newer set of flaws. You went into a new game and tried to play it like a previous game, and that's not possible even within franchises.
Not trying to adapt to a new game is your fault, not the game's. You need to accept that and either move to a different game or try to enjoy the game in a new way. What you don't need to do is continue spending time disliking a game that you dislike. Find a way to enjoy it, or forget it. There's no need for something else.
@@timmothyjames7876 Kind of a lopsided argument there, isn't it? So it's the players fault if the game seems to actively downgrade it's mechanics and we don't like how it did that? Literally dumbing down AI to the point where it doesn't even have character left in it and not dumbing down our playstyle is our fault? I'm sorry if I'm coming off as a little aggressive here, but what you just wrote is a literate slap to the face. By your logic, it's your fault for not looking deeply enough into the world that is DS1 and picking out the well thought out the narrative is entwined with item drops and NPC locations. Like discovering the Black Iron set and realizing the the fate of Black Iron Tarkus. Simple, concise, and tells a story with only a few points. I would argue that DS1 did a far better job of building a world than DS2 building pretty sky boxes and video game levels back from the 80s. Did you even care to stop and compare Dranglaic castle with Lordran? At least Lordran put a couple bedrooms in like an actual castle would.
Also, at the beginning of DS2, you only really have 2 pathways open at the beginning, 3 if you get the cats ring. Otherwise, you'll need to follow the two paths until to find the items needed to unlock the rest of the paths.
I usually like Hbomb's videos, and while I agree that Dark Souls 2 is good, I just can't agree with some of his takes on Dark Souls 1 here.
Like for instance about the map; he finds it more interesting that it connects in ways that don't make sense, but that to me just seems like regular video game fair. The interconnectedness of Dark Souls 1 was much more impressive to me, as that takes more effort to pull off, and it's also a great feeling learning how to navigate the dangerous world in new and faster ways. It feels really memorable and rewarding finding a new path to the hub when you haven't unlocked warp yet and could really use that shortcut.
He instead of telling how Dark souls story is complex and deep and everything he said it like was saying to a child go bells then kill lords then link fire which he skipped over all the details that made DS 1 good in the first place then he starts in DS 2 saying the details like it is so biased which i don't like .
He makes this thing on combat world and everything instead of comparing them fair he is just biased
Exactly, many things he's saying that he likes less in DS1 than in DS2 are things that are more generic in DS2. Dark Souls with its connectivity and focus to go through levels back and forth (and get to know them well) made it so unique. After playing each game once I could remember most of most DS1 areas, how they were constructed, and maybe 1 or 2 of DS2, the ones where I died the most...
He is so needlessly antagonistic and passive aggressive towards MatthewMatosis' critique.
He has this weird problem where he can't just argue a point. He has to affect this smug attitude to make himself feel like his position is just so clearly superior.
Usually, in this video, it's clearly for the sake of humor ("This is treason, and I'll see you in hell"), but other times he's just being an ass. ("Matthew simply didn't like Dark Souls II as much because he failed to learn what the game was trying to teach him").
You can love Dark Souls II, but stop pretending people are simply dummies because they didn't.
Finding DS1 interconnectedness more impressive doesn't do anything to counter his point. He even said he loved the interconnectedness too, he found it really cool.
What he did say was that that having to design areas such that they can be traversed both ways limits what you can do with the area in certain ways, which is just objectively true. This doesn't mean it's bad or unimpressive, it just means he thinks it could've had more interesting design and enemy placement if they didn't have to account for players having to go back the same way.
@@realmarsastro But that would make it have less interesting design since it would be more generic. If it lost that interconnectedness it wouldn't be as unique and we wouldn't be talking about the areas almost 10 years later.
Wait, holdup. So the scholar of the first sin version is harder? This was not made clear to me when I got it, no wonder I had more trouble than my homies and they didn't know what I was talking about. Thanks for the new cope for an old wound lol.
it redid a bunch of enemy placements, generally with the goal of making a replay rewarding & still challenging to those who already played the original. this kind of inherently makes it harder, as its a response to it's own original design. scholar also has way more enemies in general, as in the amount of bodies on screen at any given point.
Sotfs isn’t that hard
I'd say some areas are easier in vanilla, some harder in Scholar. Scholar made the path to the Ancient Dragon a cakewalk and if you have a torch equipped for the Duke's Dear Freja she becomes a complete joke. Other areas, I wouldn't call difficult but they were certainly tedious to get through, particularly with enemies being able to cancel the fog wall animation.
I'm 15 minutes into the video, enjoying it so far, had a small comment: I don't think people's issue with Dark Souls 2 was ever ACTUALLY about dudes in armor. Dark Souls 3 has more dudes in armor than DS2 and no one ever complains about that. I think it's more that the fights, although decent individually, have very similar mechanics and don't require you to actually learn new strategies for new bosses. Champion Gundyr and Dragonslayer Armor are like night and day, but if i hadn't played through DS2 as many times as I have I doubt I'd know the difference between Velstadt, the Pursuer, and Dragonrider.
Velszt that's the truth. dudes in armor was never a problem, boring boss fights were
At 30 minutes now. The Gutter, for as much hate as it gets, is the best-designed area in Dark Souls 2 by far and better than any area in Dark Souls 1 save Undead Burg and the Painted World. It's my favorite part of the game and I wish the rest of it had been held to the same standard of quality but I understand the game had a lot of development problems.
54 minutes now. It's true Vendrick has gone hollow but that's no different from the story of Dark Souls 1, the difference is that Dark Souls 1 was more subtle. Throughout the game you're hearing stories of the might Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight, but you finally meet him and he's a crazed hollow, unable to even speak to you: no longer the Lord of Sunlight, but the Lord of Cinder. You've been manipulated into going to kill him by Frampt and Gwyndolin and Velka, who want to extend the Age of Fire to keep their power. Ultimately, you burn yourself alive in the Kiln, not even realizing the fate that has befallen you. I don't think this story criticism you're making is fair.
Totally agree. I quite enjoy bosses like Vorrken from W101 or Black Knight from Shovel Knight. They're literally the same, your rivals, and appear multiple times. But the big difference is that they change, and pretty much no boss in DS2 felt unique to me. Either they're dudes in armor with samey combos, have a bunch of smaller enemies/helpers for some reason, or plain repeats.
Both Gwyn and Vendrick went Hollow, but that carries different weight when the entire story of the game is about you going Hollow. In DS1, Gwyn went Hollow, and that was just a vaguely-tragic Thing That Happened. In DS2, Vendrick went Hollow, and given that the entire game is about going Hollow and losing your memories, and how little everything matters because everything is going to repeat, it ends up meaning a whole lot more. DS1 makes Gwyn going Hollow tragic because he was Great (not as in good, but just in terms of having a large effect on the world) and this is him being brought low. Vendrick going Hollow is (imo) much more tragic because it reflects the sorry state of the world- he was the closest to great there was at his time, but he was really just re-treading well-traveled ground and ultimately he, and Drangleic, and the player, means absolutely nothing.
Dear Hbomber,
I genuinely got my feelings hurt, when you mentioned that the Adjudicator fight from Demon's Souls was "the most forgettable fight in the game"... It was my favorite boss... I hate you, please continue to make videos.
Love,
-Me
Agreed. Dirty Colossus was easily the lamest and least memorable fight in Demon's Souls. Adjudicator at least had a cool design and some interesting moves.
"My favourite boss was the super easy one with the attacks that almost never come close to hitting you"
Maybe you should play a different game
@@xourbo8734 I like adjudicator because he looks cool as fuck
@@xourbo8734 I can't tell if you're in on the joke or seriously annoyed
@@silversnail1413 holy shit like I actually actually forgot about Dirty Colossus. So fair point
4:17 - "A lot of early players die while mashing the heal button. That's not fun."
This argument confuses me. Of course a lot of new players die while mashing the heal button, they also die while mashing the dodge and attack buttons. A lot of new players die walking off cliffs. Is any of it fun? No, of course not, dying isn't fun. Dying was never meant to be fun. Dying is meant to teach you a lesson, in this case that you tried to heal when you didn't have the space for it. Healing in souls games has always been about picking your moment very carefully, being rewarded for picking the right moment and getting punished when you didn't.
Bearing in mind I haven't played a souls game so I have no idea if this is the actual experience of it or not, but I think the point Hbomb is making here is that there are fun ways to die or lose, and that's more emotional than logical. If you lose because you didn't dodge correctly or you attacked at the wrong time, that might feel like a satisfying way to lose, you made a mistake, one you can get better at and learn from. Logically yes the same applies to healing, but I can see it being the case that emotionally it's just not a fun way to die, it feels more like you being bad, rather than the enemy being better than you.
To take an example I am familiar with, in a game of Warhammer 40k, if I lose because I played the best I could, made a few mistakes and lost because they were just better than me, that's a fun way to lose. If I lost because my dice kept rolling 1's every time I try to cast a psychic power, that feels like a bad way to lose which isn't fun. It's not exactly the same situation, but I just wanted to illustrate the point that not all ways to lose are equal, and good game design can involve minimising players losing in ways that aren't fun, while allowing them to lose in ways that are.
@@alexrandell5559 the issue with that comparison is that one of those is on you as a player, and the other is just RNG. Dying while healing is on you as a player. It's not RNG based.
Making mistakes and being smacked for it is a perfectly reasonable thing. And it serves to reinforce that you as a player need to improve.
@alexrandell5559 "I have absolutely no bloody idea what I'm talking about but let me give you a long winded explanation as to why I think you're wrong anyway"
@@felixfischer6168 hes still objectively right tho, playing these games you learn when to heal, its not whenever you want
Replaying the game, there was one major issue I had with 2. There were countless instances of invisible lines you crossed that scripted everyone in the room to gank you, and this included unreachable enemies in hidden spots that you couldnt flush out with a bow. These enemies often times would also sprint as fast as you did, and often had too much poise to be stunned. These fights were often just not fun, especially on repeated attempts.
especially bad on SotFS, flashbacks of iron keep
Uhhh just kill the enemies on the way then
"just kill the enemies on the way then" bit fucking hard when they aren't "on the way" but rather 50 fucking meters forwards with 1 or more walls between you until their sword is up your ass while you are trying to kill the 4 other dudes blocking your path to the boss.
@Asgth I feel your pain
@@asgth6147 kill them until they despawn /s
The game apparently wants to teach you to fight without a shield and rely on dodging and rolling, but then gives you extremely low iFrames during rolls, unless you built up the Adaptability stat quite a lot, and then doesn't tell you that...
aliquidcow Yeah. This video is only opinion and then occasional out of context nitpicking of Matthew's video.
I do have to agree though that the example with the 2 dragon riders is a bit pathetic on Matthew as you can just lower the music volume a bit and hear the bow reloading absolutely fine.
@@QuackerHead-j It always feels like a bad tactic to take one particular person's argument and pick it apart as if it shows that the viewpoint as a whole is wrong. Like Matthew may very well be making bad points about why DS2 sucks, but that doesn't mean that DS2 doesn't suck.
@@QuackerHead-j so it was designed poorly and you have to fix it? Matthews point is still very valid then
@@KingKongsFingers Then again he didn't know when he pulled off a succesful bunnyhop in Devil Daggers because the ocvious sound que and fov shift was apparently too hard to make out when the screen became cluttered.
To be fair, if you develop the ability to dodge with DS2 shitty starting i-frames, you'll be able to dodge damn well anything with the proper i-frames. During my first run through DS2, I didn't even know what Agility/Adaptability were and just thought that the dodge in DS2 was garbage by default, but I stuck with it and when I got to DS3 I was basically invincible.
Elden ring was my first souls game. After beating it I went back and played the others from the first one onto the second and I remember a comment I saw about elden ring from someone online who said if you can learn how to fight without the lock on always being on then you will be better at the game. And in DS 2 that advice really helped me out
playing without lock-on is fine for melee, but free-aiming spells rarely works out. seems like even when your camera is positioned completely straight ahead, the projectile always travels either way over your aim point, or directly to your feet. wish they had a crosshair-based aim for spells like they do for bows/crossbows.
for me, lock-on is suitable for humanoid bosses. But for larger size bosses, without lock-on is better.
Being snarky about people who don't want to summon help for fights (And I summon NPC help because hell yea more wrenches in the gears) is kinda really ironic considering the whole "Don't use a shield or else you play the game wrong" thing. Yea, you tried to brush it off with "Just an opinion, bro" but we know what you mean.
god damnit I made this comment at 45min mark then saw 1:11 mark fucking long videos FUCKIBNG FUCQKADOSFUADOFJ
the two things are REALLY no equivalent. the "don't use shield" argument is that the game flows better that way, and it's faster to kill enemies. the "don't summon" thing is basically "look how much of a badass i am" which, like he said, is fine, just kindda silly.
No it's totally the same thing, it's about judging people on how they have fun. Does someone have more fun out of a challenge of not summoning help, NPC or otherwise? Fine. Does someone have more fun using a shield or not? Fine. Stop being fun police. There's a difference between "Hey Dark Souls flows and plays a lot better for me when I don't use a shield" to "GUYS YOU ARE USING A SHIELD YOU ARE PLAYING THE GAME WRONG (I'm not actually judging you BUT IM TOTALLY JUDGING YOU). LOOK THE DEVS AGREE WITH ME!"
Ularg i dont see it as judgement, i see it as the game's flaw if the players are playing it """wrong"" (or, more accurately, not finding out the most practical way to play as intuitively as we should), and h.b.g made the same point, that this is the game's fault. since watching that vid, it made me think about the way games are sometimes designed to be played, and after i started playing Horizon i caught myself having a hard time at some points and wondering wtf, when i realised i was "playing it wrong" by trying to meelee too much, when the game puts sooooo much obvious emphasis on range combat and traps. so i changes my ways and the game became 173717 times more fun. it wasn't some shameful failing on my part, its just a game. and about the "play alone and make it challenging," im sorry but i cannot dissociate that attitude with the elitist bs that infests the gaming community. the kind of attitude that calls people "casuals" and despises mobile/short games and shit. i just can't help feeling like people like making games more challenging not for fun but to brag and to me that defeats the purpose. im absolutely sure there are exceptions to this, but generally speaking this attitude is full of red flags to me.
anyway he says so many times that these are his opinions, i don't see why people are so salty. gamers take shit so so so so so so personally, get so defensive, god damn.
its also cute how the way he says it atops just short of saying if you dont summon you dont like having friends
The argument made around 30:25 is nonsense. You don't need magical elevators or nonsensical level connections from Dark Souls 2 to provide a sense of mystery. You can literally see Duke's Archives from Anor Londo, yet you have no idea what the area looks like. You can't see Ash Lake from Sen's Fortress or Firelink Shrine, or heck even Blighttown, but those are logically connected.
That's a good point, I got so caught up in the video I didn't even think of that and took it as a "well he might have a point, I guess". Thanks for bringing it up.
It's not an argument you moron, it's a presentation method.
Dark Souls 3 also totally fucking canonizes this completely disorganized world design. How are people missing this?
TheMadIsraeli dark souls 3 doesn't. stop being butthurt, this comment or the video isn't even about dark souls 3
"The sense of mystery this creates was really compelling to me as I worked my way through the world. I never knew what I was going to see next because I literally couldn't see it coming."
Nothing about the awful world connectedness or "embracing inconsistency" that Dark Souls 2 has is required for there to be a sense of mystery about what comes next. Levels can be logically linked or places can be visible in the distance without having their contents ruined.
ponpojp Except he also made the point that the logical inconsistency was thematically appropiate for the game, not just that it was mysterious.
The thing I think many players should learn is that they should nly heal during a punish opportunity, for example, the best time to heal during a fight against gael is after he does the leaping attack since that has a long recovery animation
Frankly you shouldnt have to heal at all if you never get hit unless your playing dks2 where you take damage for no reason at all. I'm looking at you smelter 0.0
@@kylemenosbro said “just don’t get hit”
@@namarie.2289 true tho
@@kylemenos tbf I did no-hit 2 bosses so far, Midir and Maliketh. I know fairly well how these games work
@@limb-o7180 Never said you didnt know anything about the bosses. Just saying I dont think you should take damage for being close to an enemy. thats some bs
"These fights are what the soulds games are vessels for."
I beat every single of the DS2 humanoid bosses by circle-strafing toward the shield side and whacking 'em on the butt. The problem isn't the monotony of designs, but rather that all the battle designs in DS2 are poorly executed.
There is also no precedent for saying that this is the "ideal" Dark Souls fight. If DeS is to be seen as the prototype of the Souls games, then this is the exact opposite of the ideal, since the typical fight in DeS was against larger than life monsters. And that is honestly what I prefer to see in a Souls game. I want to battle horrendously large ancient demons for the most part.
I mean, not saying you are wrong for preferring this, but it seems you are stretching "I prefer this" into "this is what the games are all about."
SlimeQueenSupreme You can't just circle strafe around their shields.
In, fact Boss have a move specifically for that kind of attack.
I won't say I never had to dodge or block, but once I figured out this strategy in the Pursuer fight and noticed that an abundant amount of attacks of the boss just hit empty air and the few attacks that had a chance of hitting me were heavily telegraphed or just not very disruptive, I tried the same tactic on any other boss that was a humanoid and found that it trivialized a lot of battles. When I entered the looking glass knight's boss room, I went in thinking "oh, this guy will be a pushover." And I was right! I was disappointed because one-on-one batttles against humanoid enemies in DS1 were really intense and my heart rate goes up still when I replay those battles.
SlimeQueenSupreme .There is no logical reason your strategy wouldn't work on non-human enemies either.
Especially considering their attacks are even more telegraphed.
Non-human enemies tend to have claws which do not favor a dominant side, they are usually larger and therefore more difficult to get around, and they often have tails or hind claws to cover their backs. That does not necessarily mean that humanoid enemies can't have ways of dealing with this strategy, but there are some elements in their design that lend themselves more to having this strategy work of designers don't take this approach into account. This strategy just worked less welll against non-human enemies in DS2, and I usually had to do at least some work figuring out the best position to attack from while still being able to dodge attacks.
SlimeQueenSupreme Most human enemies in DS2 do have such counter measure. Most of them being very effective.
I kind of feel like pointing out that I played through DS1 for the first time with a dex build on a friend's advice. I had little health and even less armor, so taking a hit was pretty devastating. However, I did carry a shield around. I had a light roll, lots of I-frames, but also constantly blocked. Because shields in dark souls can be incorporated in many kinds of builds, not just "hit-trade" builds like high-poise slow-roll builds. A light shield in DS1 means you have the ability to parry, a very cool and dynamic ability to use. And even a small shield blocked considerable amounts of damage, while dropping it to attack took no time at all.
TL;DR: shields aren't that bad in DS1, and don't lock you in a passive playstyle. However, I can see how they insentivise you to play that way.
Went through the whole of dark souls 1 role-playing as a knight with a sword and shield and I gotta say using a shield to beat the game is totally viable apart from a few times where two handing and dodging is better.
I also played through with a light dex build. I think I ended the game with a vitality of, like, 16-18? basically all bosses could 2 shot me. My main shield was the grass crest because of the stamina buff and I spent most fights balancing keeping my shield up to give me time to think, dropping it to recover stamina and dodging to give an opening to attack. It's a fun gameplay loop, and I think it's closer to the intent behind the design of shields.
Ds1 is probably the most unbalanced in the series, strength builds were sooo crazy
@@carrops black knight weapons
Thats why I've heard that deprived is the best starting class for new players, since you start with a weak shield, so it encourages you to not rely on it too much
the falconer armor doesn't let you have a falcon companion 0/100
But the SHOES are ASYMMETRIC....... 2/100
Yo I paid 40 bucks for a game that doesn't let me have a falcon companion! 0/10 bruh, give me my birb
That would have been sweet or the rapid arrow bow would have been cool o3o
Guard Counters in Elden Ring was a really elegant way to encourage action with a shield that i used a great shield the whole game and it felt so much more kinetic than DS1 and ostensibly parries being a way to encourage action with a shield
Because you need to know what attacks are good to block counter, which you should not to avoid being punished, and which you should not try to block at all to conserve your stamina so that you can keep up the pressure.
you start by saying that herald is a best waifu than gwynevere, but fail to acknowledge the true best waifu
Crossbreed Priscila
Dude...
Ornifex.
Solaire
I think you mean Gwyndolin
No, the best waifu is the doll
@@Hopper_Arts I find it funny that you can't remember their name.
whenever i talk about games, movies etc. i always have to second guess my opinions because are they my own, or did i just hear them in a review at some point
If you agree that's your opinion, but it is just that you couldn't express it before
@@armored1033 not necessarily true
@@marciamakesmusic How is it not true? If you agree with something, then it is your opinion that it is correct. It doesn't matter if you heard it from someone else, because it became your opinion, as well.
@@josiahferrell5022 I'm pretty sure he just likes disagreeing with people for fun judging by his other comments on here.
still an opinion you agree with so it's okay...
or did i tell you that because someone told me it's okay?
"I like having friends" *shows npc summon*
Are you saying lucatiel Isn't my friend?
@@evilpub damn now i feel bad
He was talking about the NPCs though?
Like Solarie is your friend.
I mean, maybe he had no video recorded with friends on his oc and he rushed an entire run recording it for the video?
Some ppl think utubers are Magic creature able to do everything in this world :).
Srsly Your comment is a bit dumb :'D
And also, whats wrong with npc lol
video games friend simulator
The hidey knights getting up and going for you works even if scholar is your first taste of 2. They wait until you're just used to them not getting up before they start getting up.
Scholar is the only way I ever played 2, And I loved it
"deus ex lets do that one" did that one take FIVE YEARS?
Worth it, best Three Hours Thirty Three Minutes Thirty Three Seconds spent in AGES
"In Defense of In Defense of Dark Souls 2" when, Harris?
When dark souls 2 stops being a dead game
Never, because DS2 is a trash game.
@@simpletonapollo9723 tell me about it. You know, it had so many cool ideas, but got so lost because of how incompetant the team who made it was. It could have been great, but it was not good, and I feel really bad.
@@simpletonapollo9723 And yet I still go back to play it more than dark souls 1, despite it's numerous problems. There's just something very charming and fun about it that the first game doesn't hit for me
@@nozomashii821 Whether DS2 is good or bad is purely subjective and those who preach about how bad it was are either trolling or are trying to shove their opinions down people's throat's. I for one enjoyed DS3 the most purely because mechanically it was the most responsive and fun, whereas DS2 hit me with interesting areas, ideas, fun PvP and the best NG on them all. DS on the other hand, was the last game I played and frankly, aside from some feels, it did not feel all that fun or interesting. Perhaps it was because I played in a different order? I would rank BB - DS3 - DS2 - DS from best to worst. Am I wrong? No. Are others who say DS2 is the worst? No. It's all subjective and there is no point in arguement.
i think his take on lifegems is kinda strange. there are plenty of bossfights that you can use lifegems as your main heal for due to how quickly you move whilst using them, that speed allowing you to dodge attacks to make a healing window
U talk Like u can run while using a gem.
Its still slow act, still slow healing, and u walk.
@@AtreyusNinja that walking is more than enough to make windows by dodging certain attacks. if you struggle with doing that its not my fault
@@rat9041 i was not complaining At all, saying gems > estus is Just right, but the way u Said that was like insinuation that gems are actually the best way of healing ever.
I play since day 1 vanilla preorder Edition, i dont have to use any healing At all.
@@AtreyusNinja lifegems are significantly better than estus in most scenarios though
I think estus is better if you know how to use it. The only bossfight I used lifegems as my main source of healing was Dukes Dear Freja, and I only did that because I spent all my estus in Brightstone Cove Tseldora.
They are good but they require you to not get hit after using them because they heal so slow. Estus is much faster and not too hard to use when you are only fighting 1 enemy.
Would it be fair to say the tight tracking in DS2 is bad as an aesthetic/telegraphing concern? Like, in the DS1 Capra Demon example, the tracking loosens as he winds up, but then he snaps to you using a believable animation shift with convincing inertia. When turtle knight in DS2 tracks you, his feet literally swivel in place as if he's standing on a spinning disc, the entire time he lifts his weapon over his head. I don't mind that I can't just "walk out of the way" of attacks anymore, but, for example, if the knight continued to face his torso in the wrong direction, but turned his head towards me and one-hand dropped the club on me, I wouldn't feel nearly as incredulous about it.
A lot of the large beasts in Bloodborne do exactly this, and I think the Dancer of the Boreal Valley fight in DS3 is a spectacular example of what I'm talking about--her tracking is insane, but her movements are always believable.
not to mention the pursuer who's curse attack that turns you hollow even if you dodge will sometimes just teleport you on to the attack even if your character is no where near the tip of the blade, or how the hippo ogres sometimes still grab you after what feels like a proper dodge.
I played the first dark souls purely by dodging and attacking, i never parried or used shields so it was bizarre to see him talk about rolling in dark souls 2 when it feels like that was actually gutted compared to the first game since unless you get a certain amount of agility your block feels as slow, clunky, and as useless as it does in the first game with really heavy armor. He also talked about how shields are garbage and my first thought was "i felt like i needed a shield in dark souls 2" due to the way rolling felt. Granted i eventually built enough agility to feel a difference but even then it sometimes still feels clunky and some attacks hit you when they feel like they shouldnt.
@@is0lated I felt the same way tbh. I just played DS1 and followed immediately into DS2 and man the physical mechanics, hitboxes, and hurtboxes made the game feel incredibly clunky at times. My biggest problem with parts of this video are that he tends to just make things overly biased with what he thinks are "good game design". He seems to value novelty or a differing uniqueness for something that equates to inherent value. Like...World design is so jacked up in DS2 and doesnt make sense, yet he tries to argue that that should just be overlooked because it's...chaotic and cool? Like, why tf should that argument hold real weight? Sure, the individual worlds are cool in asthetics, but the world as a whole just doesn't make sense or feel real, whereas DS1 felt tangible and grounded. Why should that be scoffed at for a point of better game design?
@@Azureflame20 yeah it's a weird argument to make, i mean if you like it... Cool! That's great! However he continuously tries to bring down the first game because it doesn't fit with this weird and arbitrary standard. If the whole video was like "oh yeah I think dark souls 2 is cool" instead of "here's why YOU should like ds2" i'd honestly have no problem.
@@Azureflame20 I agree on the world design being confusing, but It DOES fit in the style, The world is literally collapsing, and the devs had that in mind because, that must be HARD to program two places in one place yet only one takes effect.
However the hitbox issues are annoying in general, but good specifically. You can sometimes hit the ground instead of damaging your opponent (while still hitting your opponent,) But you can learn enough about your opponent to make them miss attacks without you dodging. (Easiest the Old Knights in Heide's Tower of Flame.)
Completely unrelated to the video but I absolutely love how, at 47:56, you can practically see the excitement Hbomb has at getting lucky enough to roll a black knight sword as he immediately goes to equip it
Drinking estus in combat is viable. All you do is either bait an attack or run for a bit. It helps to get your agility up.
It's a little bit like the concept of "turns" in the fighting game genre (which iirc Miyazaki has confirmed were an influence on the Souls formula.) Of course it's not the same as an actual turnbased game where turns are enforced explicitly, but implicitly the concept is there; the point is that if you want to heal, you need to use a "turn" that you otherwise could have used to attack, reposition etc. It's not that you can't drink estus in combat, it's that to do so, you need to use time and space that you could have used offensively, and if your enemy manages to put you in a position where you're always needing to use your turns to heal, then you're on your way back to the bonfire.
Anyway just throwing in my two cents, I think it's an interesting aspect of the game design.
@@blazaybla22 yea I agree, I recently started play DS2 for the first time and I thought I would have a bigger problem with the time to heal like most other people did but it turns out im doing just fine, fine enough to not really upgrade adp as much as I thought I would. Mostly cause of what you said, most bosses and enemies have an attack animation that you can dodge out of, once dodged, you have about two or 3 seconds of the enemy just standing/walking/looking/regaining stance and so on. I use that time to heal immediately after I dodge even if I'm still next to the enemy(doing this with some enemies can be risky) but it works most of the time.
I think it's just in comparison to 1 where you can absolutely quickdrink and tank a hit at the same time and come out ahead
which is fun in its own way but it's nice to see the formula varied
Better than DS3's Estus usage, where you basically punch yourself in the face due to how fast the effect takes place.
@@Battleguild You still need discipline for DS3 healing, you know. You can move while estusing, but not much, and it still takes a long time considering the speed that DS3 enemies attack. If they added DS2 estus into DS3, that game would be a shitshow.
Did you say it is impossible to riposte while 2-handing a weapon in DS1? Because that is incorrect.
Other than that the video is oscillating between stating "get good" and "appreciate it for what it is", while ignoring valid criticisms like level/map/world design.
@@__asher__So you're online insulting people who have played the game when you yourself haven't.... People tell you it's a bad game with fundamentally worse mechanics so you take it as an endorsement to purchase the game. Alright, enjoy wasting your money.
@@__asher__ Watch a video by Mauler if you want evidence
im pretty sure he meant parry.
Jesus what was wrong with my spelling?
@@ThisisKyle
MauLer, the guy who doesn't understand the difference between Objective and Subjective and makes needlessly long videos? No thanks 😂 been there done that and not happening again 😄
"that's a nice argument, unfortunately, adaptability"
"Humanity is a rare resource"
Rats: are we a joke to you?
Humanity sprites: Yes you are.
@@xuanathan 😂😂😂
Skeleton Babies too.
Xuanathan, Both have to be farmed, so do skeleton babies. Then again, it's the same for Dark Souls 2.
@@xuanathan Fire keeper soul glitch: *laughs in the distance*
Kind of overfocussing on the part of Matthew's lock-on critique. He is completely right about the part where bosses aren't actually hard, it's just a lot of enemies at once.
Or about how the overworld makes zero sense and was clearly thrown together last-minute. Or how poorly considered some Bonfire locations are. Or how consumable healing items and regeneration rings undermines how carefully Estus flask need to be rationed. Or how the new lighting system ruins readability when using torches. Or how changes to rolling animations make it harder to use consistently.
It's focusing, not over-focusing. And it's a focus because that's Matthew's only explanation for why he thinks it's too hard. What is exactly is the difference between hard and "actually hard"? Is using multiple enemies to instill more difficulty inherently bad? I honestly don't understand the argument except in that it is not the same as DS1...
"i know i speak authoritatively sometimes"
*sometimes*
S O M E T I M E S
I love hbomberguy but I'll admit, that made me smile.
People have been conditioned to always pacify and mollify and qualify every word they say. We've been taught to not be confident on our own opinions, regardless of how much time we spent considering them or how well we establish and support them. It's telling that so many people (not you but other people in the comment section) get really salty just by the fact that someone states their opinion in a way that doesn't meekly offer concession to every other possible take on a game, movie or situation.
you're in a comments section on youtube, mate; we're not in a subculture conditioned to be meek in any way
hbomb's reading of controversial works like dark souls 2 or the star wars prequels or whatever very often has a dismissive tone to people who disagree with him. he genuinely believes that detractors have missed something, which is fine, but he often shares this belief in a belittling manner
I remember seeing an exchange between him and the pop culture detective where PCD observes a particular scene in one of the prequels and points problems he sees with it. in response, hbomb sarcastically pointed out things like the lighting and framing in the scene like PCD was some kind of dense idiot, doing what he could to point out what he thought was obviously intentional by lucas but most of the rest of us saw as a glaring mistake (and he could be right. maybe). he came across as snooty dipshit and it left a bad taste in my mouth. when he has time to write and edit himself, however, hbomb is excellent at balancing between being a performative shit and making an excellent point but sometimes his pretentiousness slips even in his videos and he paints his detractors as witless morons
i still find his critiques and observations interesting and useful but yeah he can be a butt sometimes and people can react poorly to it
KTSamurai1 [to the melody of "everybody hurts"]
you know, after playing trough all of the 3 games just now, i enjoyed them all
Me too. I really wish the community would stop trying to rank them and pit them against each other all the time TBH.
@@mawichan exactly. I prefer ds1 by far but I don't care if others don't share my opinion and all of the games can co exist. If people stoped trying to say why their favorite is better than my favoriteI wouldn't feel so required to say why their favorite game is bad
@@finn488 I agree, who cares about another's opinion, for instance, I enjoyed ds1 the least, but I KNOW it is a better game than What I think it is. (Which is still a decent game)
After sinking at least 40 hours into every game(yet to finish 3 and 2) I can say that they are all equally good and share many issues as well the souls franchise is and should be known as a flawed masterpiece.
@@gecho5427 "they are all equally good" No, please stop, DS2 is objectivley worst game in the series. If you enjoy it that's fine just don't pretend that it's as well made as the rest of the series.
I'm willing to bet that the incoherent world design of DkS2 wasn't intentional but rather the result of an utterly fucked development cycle.
you would win that bet
I agree, but I did like that the world wasn’t predictable.
@@madcashewnutjob3345 Same, but its still badly designed.
Still a pretty fun game though. Incredibly rough, but at least its not something awful like TLOU2. This is still, like, a 7-8 out of 10 game.
that's literally just a fact at this point lmao. they outright said in an interview that they had 1 year to piece together a new game from the assets they had already made for the previous version
"utterly fucked cycle"
just like linking a specific flame...
47:50 You can get a riposte while twohanding a weapon. It's something people do a lot in pvp. You simply didn't twohand your weapon fast enough and the riposte window closed.
I remember seeing that being confused and more than a little irritated.
He wasted time walking into his face, stood still for a bit, then pressed R1. Is he doing this on purpose lmao
@@derpi3438yeah because this entire video is comprised of him being a disingenuous moron
What were you doing with unupgraded estus at O&S
So he can use it as 'evidence that DS1 is bad'
@@TheLawliet10 you should have a +3 by that point in the game it's unexcusable
He is a casul
@@ms06fzakuii26 It's honestly just unpreparedness at that point
Maybe for the challenge?
Hello Hbomber. I like your videos, and in general I love long videogame analysis videos, including Matt's and Joseph's. That said, I feel this video is WAY too positive, even for a defense of the game, and I'm saying that even though I loved DaS2 and SotFS, I consider DaS3 > DaS2 > DaS1 (that's just opinion of course), but I'm by no means a DaS1 fanboy. I will elaborate, on what I DON'T agree from your video and would love to get a response from you :
1. "All you get in DaS1 in terms of story is a guy telling you to ring some bells and a serpent telling you to grab the Lord Vessel and then to kill the lords". DaS2 does exactly this, you get the Herald telling you to kill the lords, then you get her to tell you to go to the castle, then you get a human version of Nashandra to tell you to go kill the king... Its the same thing.
2. Lifegems existing are not a step up from the healing in DaS1. They are only meant to counter the fact that there are lots of multi-enemy encounters, and/or to make the game easier since you got effectively infinite healing, as opposed to making the game more fair and only relying on bonfires.
3. The Gutter is better designed than Blight Town cause its meant to be traversed in only one way?. The gutter's saving grace is that it makes great use of the light system in the game, the rest of it is mostly hollow enemies and a bunch of wooden box-like structures displayed in a 'maze' fashion,that isn't really a maze since it has a clear path forward. Blight Town is by no means the best area ever, but it has branching paths leading to items, more vertical design, more enemy variety, and connects to 4 areas (Ash Lake,Firelink,Depths and Demon Ruins).
4. The problem with "humanoids in armor" in DaS2 isn't that there are too many,its that they are unremarkable. Asides from the DLC ones,that everyone knows are amazing fights, Throne Watcher and Defender got nothing compared to O&S, you fight the Pursuer a hundred times through the game (SotFS), Dragon Rider is unremarkable and repeated, Old Dragonslayer is a fairly boring fight and only remembered cause it reuses Ornstein's model and the lore implications...I could go on. Velstadt is one of the best humanoids in armor in the best game, as well as mirror knight, but that's about it.
5. 'DaS1 isn't non-linear, it just gives you options in terms of the order you tackle different linear paths'. No, that's what DaS2 does. DaS2 gives you a few paths to take, and each of them is pretty much a straight line with obstacles leading to a boss. DaS is hardly the non-linear masterpiece some people claim, but the interconnected design IS a way to make it non-linear. Yes, if you know what you're doing and where you're going, it ends up feeling linear, but the first time you play you don't know if you should go to the cemetery, or to New Londo,or to Undeadburg, you don't know if you should go to the forest or the gargoyle boss,etc, in DaS2 you know where to go cause as soon as you go down a path,you have no other options. I'm aware that this design falls off at the latter half of DaS1, but even so, Tomb of the Giants and Lost Izalith are the least maze-like of the levels, New Londo and Archives definitly do NOT feel like a straight corridor with enemies, compared to most of the zones in DaS2.
6. "The world making no sense in DaS2 is actually a good thing cause it hides surprises". I'm sorry but no. At no point in DaS1 were you able to see any super special landmarks or bosses from a distance that would spoil the area for you. Looking at Lost Izalith from Tomb of the Giants only showed some lava and buildings, same with the trees in Ash Lake. This only creates atmosphere and makes the world more believable, the surprises were still there in DaS1. The world making sense and being able to surprise you with amazing buildings,monsters and places are NOT mutually exclusive.
7. Also, in Dark Souls 1 I KNEW who I was killing when it came to the Lords. In DaS2 we are just told to kill some big guys with powerful souls because apparently that will help us find the king,when in the end,all the souls let us do is open A DOOR that could've been bypassed, had there not been a pile of rubble on the other path.
8. I find it funny that you completly ignored the terrible addition of the ADP and AGI stat that are tied to inv frames and causes lots of issues with roll timings.
Of course I do agree with some points from your video, like the use of lock-on and the way you have to approach the game because its designed differently, and the fact that the DLC is top tier. But lots of it felt way too forced.
Matt's critique was way too negative, but this one felt too positive, yes, its a defense, but there is no need to entirely ignore the flaws, or turn the flaws into positive things like you did with the way the world doesn't make any sense geographically.
Either way, I still loved the video, and feel that you do a great job when it comes to videogame analysis, if anything, I love listening to people's arguments and thoughts on a game even if I don't agree with them. Keep up the good work!.
acknowledging this comment would be automatically admitting defeat so he wont do it, but good job proving how nonsensical most of his arguments are.
Jorge Marcano Thanks for this. I usually agree with Hbomber on most things, but a lot of his arguments here were too silly. (This coming from someone who also likes DaS2 and thinks SOTFS is absolutely amazing)
This.
Like the comment! Any thoughts on the seventh point? Could not knowing the significance of who you are killing be the point?
Jorge Marcano The simplicity of the story in DS1 is one of my favorite parts.
MatthewMatosis, clearly being used for Target practice in this video said it best: Oscar freed you from the Undead Asylum, and with his dying breath asked you to save the world. In my playthrough, I RP'ed that my character couldn't give 2 shits about the serpents, Gwyn, or linking the fire. All he wanted to do was honor Oscars final request. It's really all the motivation you need.
As someone who had fun with darksouls 2, i never expected people to not actually adapt their gameplay based on their enemies and on the level they are in ? Thats
Super basic
Someone should use clips of this video and clips of his Bloodborne video to make a video of Hbomberguy debating himself.
Do you have any examples where he contradicts himself?
CMH he makes a joke about how broken pvp is in dark souls during his bloodborne video.
Then during this video he says pvp is fun in dark souls 2 because it’s fair, completely ignoring the fact that he himself said it was broken.
Mauler did so on his series "in response of dark souls 2"
@Roxion 358 It still doesnt make sense as to where is the Iron keep standing and how we cant see any sign of it from the outside
@Roxion 358 The problem of the game was the fact that it was pressed for time. They where going to do this whole thing with time travel and space warping wich would explain the elevator, the giant memories, and the dlc warps. As the game is though it just doesnt make sense. Sad because to me the game could have had the best story of the whole souls series
I'm really surprised he didn't go more into the stances, which opened the door for customizing your build and how you want to fight. You can dual wield the iron greatsword. Dual wield. The mighty chungus. And it's an actual move set, not just swinging one then following up with the other.
Its always the same boring animation
Because this video isn't a defense for DS2. Is just saying that the other games are worse
@@kingdddinner2627 This, and he also does this by building faulted strawman arguments.
"You listen to a random knight's stupid family story, ring 2 bells, listen to 2 serpents say king good or king bad and then open a big door". They all tell you to meet the king. Just like in DS2. And just like in DS2, the king is now decrepit and hollow. Nothing revolutionary, just sadder in DS2 (which is a great thing). But the story isn't more dynamic than DS1's. The world is already dead in DS2 all the same, the only two living pieces of the chess game are Nashandra and the Emerald Herald.
Also, "oh DS2 encourages rolling while DS1 doesn't". What the fuck is he talking about? Nothing tells you agility is the way to have more roll I-Frames, so you don't roll at the start because of how awful rolling is. Also, if you don't want to just be a sack of fragile shit for 3 bosses while investing into Adaptability, you'll have to be forced not to dodge for a while through the game. Bruh. If that doesn't make players shy away from rolling Idk what does.
@@ambralemon The standard roll is good enough, I don't know why people complain about ADP when it isn't even necessary. I don't remember how many points I put into it, but considering I was focusing on just increasing my attack power as much as I could, it couldn't have been a lot. Dual caestus, so I couldn't block any attacks. Try a fisting build. It's quite fun :)
@@demonicloaf2100 5 i-frames to start with compared to the...
9 frames for a fatroll
11 frames for a midroll
and 13 frames for a fastroll
Imagine thinking Prowling Magus and the Congregation is a difficult fight
A fight can be poorly-designed without being difficult.
I actually started with DS2 scholar of the first sin
It was a very though start. I played it alone so after hours of searching I had to look up many things in Dark Souls Wiki but this expierience of learning it by my own was breathtaking. Im a huge Dark Souls fan now and Dark Souls 2 is still my favourite Dark Souls.
This video just showed that there are reasons why Dark souls 2 CAN be better than Dark Souls 1 and i love it.
I appreciate your work
@@babidibibidibibo5232 If you count bloodborne, ds2 sotfs was my third dark souls game. It is by far my favorite, and my first play through was awesome, there is so much variety in how you play, which is why i love it so much.
Its the pinwheel of ds2. If you have a greatsword, you can beat it in a few seconds.
Imagine dying to that boss multiple times before winning lololol. If you're one of those people... Damn lol. Not to sound like a dick head but you're not doing it right lol.
The interconnectivity of DS1 makes it stand out to me imo, how it masterfully connects later levels to previous ones in creative, surprising ways makes it way more memorable and exciting. How there is no obvious path and how you continue to figure out how everything connects as you progress. I feel like this is lessened in the later souls games.. the mechanics/ bosses may be better but you lose a little magic when it is reduced/ streamlined to a less imaginative, more predictable level design of unlock elevator, go to bonfire, repeat..
As for the Abstract poetic significance, for me. the feelings you get when you enter the game and see the word 'undead asylum' pop out across the screen, meeting the dying knight with the soft cryptic voice, the pale column of light shining down on him in such a desolate place and you have no idea why you are here or how you ended up on a dead prison on the top of a mountain really strikes you in a way DS2 doesn't really live up to imo..
The problem with DS1's inter-connectivity is that it leads to a lot of backtracking and going through the same old areas again before you can warp. The payoff of looping back to where you just were and whatnot is cool, but considering the cost of that is a lot of tedious retreading of old ground I think it's more or less a wash. The ability to go to X Y and Z places in whatever order is similarly kinda cool but ultimately most people will just go the "intended" path or a slightly different one that skips some optional stuff on the vast majority of their runs.
HOWEVER, the somewhat recently released Daughters of Ash mod builds on the inter-connectivity and actually makes the game legitimately non-linear so you can go through it a number of different ways, with parts of the game actually changing based on what you go do first, making the choice of paths actually meaningful for once. It's also hard as nails so it'll challenge even seasoned Souls veterans. Highly recommended for anyone who's a major fan of the series, and the first game in particular, because it takes the interesting things about the first game to the extreme.
The inter-connectivity in Dark Souls is one of my favorite things about it and very impressive level design. It's like an open world game but more vertical than being long flat plains.
Alright, well we can talk about whether a directed or interconnected path is better or not, but if you are really worried about having an interconnected path just play Dark Souls 3. Not only does it do the directed path thing better than Dark Souls 2, but you will never have to worry your little head about not being able to warp ever again, as the game has a plethora of bonfires and even gives you an infinite homeward bone after you beat it. There you go, problem solved. I mean Dark Souls 2 is a fine game, but saying it is better than the other Soulsborne titles or that someone should start off with it as their first is a bit of a stretch.
Linda Niemkiewicz I didn’t mean Dark Souls 3 was interconnected, I was saying if you are worried about your game being interconnected then play Dark Souls 3, as in You won’t have to because Dark Souls 3 really isn’t interconnected. I was saying that Dark Souls 3 does the directed path approach better than Dark Souls 2 because you can actually tell where you came from and where you are going, giving the world some scale as opposed to being connected through world spanning elevators and caves.
The metroidvania-like design of the world made Dark Souls feel truly unique among other games of the time. It's rare to see a 3D game with such a concise and intricately overlapping world like the one Dark Souls 1 has. Being able to look down and see parts of the world you've weaved through is such a cool feeling and makes the exploration more satisfying. The common "backtracking" complaint was never an issue for me because going through old areas again meant more souls for levels and upgrades.
The problem with the argument around 30:00 about DS2's world is that it feels like cheap mystery. It's only a mystery what's coming next because the world is poorly constructed and you can't tell what they were thinking.
In DS3, there's a literal lore reason for shit being in weird places; The fabric of reality is shifting in a cosmic attempt to bring the Lords of Cinder to their thrones, so the first flame can be kindled. It's addressed, it's intentional. In DS2, however, there is nothing like that. It's not a defined aspect of the world that shit is wack, it's not purposefully impossible; MOST areas are connected in sensible ways because they were supposed to be. But every now and then, there was oversight and there was a mistake in constructing the world. No item descriptions mention a mysterious elevator that tales you to a castle of lava, it's just fuckin there and doesn't make any sense.
Edit: That's not what linear means?
Yea, you have to do certain stuff before you do other stuff, but as you yourself say, you can change the order. By definition it is no longer linear. You have choice. The moment you are out of the asylum, you can go to the graveyard and go to the catacombs, or to the undead burg, or to New Londo, or to the Valley of the Drakes, or to Blighttown... that's five options. It doesn't matter that you have to do certain things to get to later parts of the game, that's exactly how DS2 works, but with fewer options. You can fight the four guys, or get enough souls and skip them.
In reality the literal lore of DS3 and DS2 is exactly the same. Drangleic is not as it originally was, it's a transitory land shuffled to Hell that can now only be accessed at all by passing through the portal shown in the opening cutscene. The difference is DS3 just gives you that information while in DS2 it's kept more ambiguous than a Kafka novel. What does the description of the Aged Feather mean? The world may never know...
Even in DS3, tho, you can *see* the different places smooshed together. The geography has been changed but it makes physical sense. The elevator thing in DS2 doesn't make any sense no matter how you look at it. It was just an oversight. That hardly ruins the game, but I don't think that specifically is very defend-able.
I really don't believe it was an oversight. Do you really think an elevator that goes down instead of up was just too much work for the development team? No...this was a deliberate decision.
That's exactly why I think it was an oversight. No magic effect, no mention ever in any item descriptions, nothing. Literally nothing.
I think they just accidentally made it go up. You see the disconnected models for the levels in the video, they weren't being reminded of the physical implications. I think someone just said "Have an elevator here to the Iron Keep" and it ended up going the wrong way.
Nothing about it feels like any of the other subtle world design choices in any of the Souls games. They don't even draw your attention to the top of the building in a specific moment or anything.
Sure, maybe the designers were a bunch of incompetent morons. But I think there was something closer to genius going on. The multiple disconnected geographic areas mirror the way someone with something like alzheimer's might experience the world or even just someone in a dream and there's evidence pointing to both of those. On the memory side, we know that all memory has been lost and all memory will be lost again. We see him forget his woman and child in the opening and we hear him convinced that souls may mend his ailing mind. On the dream aspect, ask yourself where Drangleic is. We actually know the answer to that in a sense, it's Lordran. Lordran is the only area that has titanite and it would be absurd to think all the titanite, all the lord souls, the soul vessel and lesser things like Havel's set, the exact altar of sunlight and many more things just happened to be here. But of course that doesn't fully answer the question because where are you at the start of the game? You enter a portal that presumably takes you back to the past as you see mirror images in the water of ruins and those same ruins in their former glory, but it doesn't quite take you there. Instead it takes you to Things Betwixt. What we know of that area is it is a limbo between worlds. Why is it a limbo? You could walk every inch of Earth and not find anything like it, it seems to be connecting something real and something less real, kind of like The Painted World of Ariamas. Trying to combine all of these things and make any sense of them is hopeless, instead you are just thrown into the middle of it and forced to deal with it. It is an existential horror of not knowing and not knowing if we will ever know, and yet we seek it, insatiably, such is our fate.
Having only bought and played SOTFS, I can't help but wonder what the game used to be. I remember getting really frustrated in Forest of the Giants because of just how MANY enemies there were around some corners, but once I got a playstyle down that could handle it I quite enjoyed it. I cannot imagine the game with less fuckers trying to swarm you
Monster Hunter World actually does have a lock-on, but I basically never use it because awareness is super important.
Monster Hunter - monster Hunter Generations and MHGU's Japanese Japanese release doesn't have a lock on system
@@bom.6658 Huh, didn't know that.
Yeah and how else are you gonna cream you pants when you pull of a badass move without free cam
Playing World with a button to snap the camera at the monster but still keeping control of the camera at all times has worked the best for me (the common camera controls present in games before world). World's lock on really messed me up especially when mons got far more mobile
So hbomberfah doesnt even get this one thing right lmao this video is a mess
Macbeth is happy go lucky guy who is destined to be king but it turns out being king isn't all it's cracked up to be.
- Macbeth starring Rob Schneider
They say rob schneieeeeieieieideer will be in the new “weekend at bernies” film
"Rated PG-13"
"I killed rotten 4 times and skipped a shitload of the game!!!" What a wondeful bit of design. You can skip most of the game by farming the same easy boss over an over and over again.
oh, and as for the anor londo archer thing, There is more than 1 way to deal with them.
There is the run your way through strat
There is the kill them all strat
There is the "Make the dumbass fall off a cliff" strat
And there is the "Poison arrow" strat.
Your inability to think of more than one solution (using a greatsword on a tight ass ledge like a fucking genius) does not mean that there is only 1 solution to be found.
You can also kill them with sorcery or pyromancy while dodging one of them on the ledge, because one of them is blocked from firing at you. I used to really hate that part of the game the first time through, but I can really be solved quite creatively.
In a way I feel like it's the game telling you it's ok to used whatever means you can to progress.
I did too at first, even now I think it could have been done way better, as I don't think anyone has actually got through on their first try, with a bonfire a hellishly long walk away, but they do add a little bit of interesting gameplay. They are not great, but are interesting, and make you improvise, which is cool.
@@Thejigholeman Still a shit area for a first time player.
@@dragonskinner7109 That's the description of all soulsbourne games. Suffer so you can feel good beating it lmao
"Humanity is a rare resource in dark souls 1"
*duplicator invades*
*drops stackes of humanity*
Hey don't dis the omnipotent invaders now, I've made friends and gotten through boring slogs faster thanks to those guys.
@UCLHgz4-EPeU98ZvX6Nrf9nw it's the best
Or H.bomberguy could just buy some from the lady in the tunnel with the rat
>gold serpent ring
>kill rat
>HERE COMES THE MONEY
Plays undead burg part look at all this humanity
Litterally first area after tutorial
Finally completed all Soulsborne games (minus Elden Ring). You def made me appreciate Dark Souls 2 a lot more. You're spot on about the whole knowing when to lock-on bit.
However I strongly disagree with the criticism of Dark Souls 1 for having a feasible interconnected world. That feeling of going through a new section and seeing it lead back to somewhere familiar was amazing and encouraged exploration. I thought that was one of the strongest points.
And I love that they brought that interconnection back in the DLCs
@@scandalouspanda7489 Makes me wish that Dark Souls Remastered had taken more liberties, like making Blighttown a one-way trip, giving access to teleportation to all accessible bonfires from the start, and ofc actually turning Demon Ruins into a finished proper level.
@@AnglerbeI mean it’s remastered, not remade
@@Anglerbe Teleportation from the start would completely invalidate the interconnected world
Should have titled this video In Attack of Dark Souls 1
15 minutes in, listening to hbombs arguments about healing items and fighting enemies on the same footing as you, and I wonder how much he must have loved Sekiro
@Banuner sekiro imo is top 3 best souls like game.
1) Bloodborne
2) Dark Souls 2
3) Sekiro
Selvin Fernandez I wish I could have enjoyed Sekiro. It’s the only souls game I walked away from, wasn’t difficulty, but the lack of visual feed back, I got mental health issues, numbers, math, all that stuff tickles my brain, and when I hit someone and see numbers it assures me that I’ve done something.
Sekiro lacked that feedback, so I felt lost the whole game, I made it to the owl before I just set the game down and gave up. It was to stressing to lack that feed back, gave me anxiety.
@@arutemisemtrai9769 There might be a mod for that. I learned the feedback as the big sparkling cloud that shows up when you deflect, and the higher pitch sound it made. But I must have played through twice before I actually started to get a hang on the system. Slow learner I guess
@@arutemisemtrai9769 dude for me what was really grinding my nutsack into a fine powder was saint isshin and shinobi owl. Fuck those two bosses, only time I've ever had to cheese a boss ever
@@steltzsm Owl was rough but the issue again was just a lack of fun. Games like Dark souls, Bloodborne, and now the Nioh series have a spot in my brain that just works, learning the patterns and stuff is easy, but the numerical feed back and number crunching was the fun bit for me.
Investing time and thought and seeing a return was the biggest part for me, striking an enemy and going from 128 on a backstab and like 256 on a reposte to dealing over 1,000 damage later on, the visual section of it showed me progress. And not just that, but finding ways to legitimately early game break stuff, min/maxing I think the term is. That also really contributed to my fun factor.
Sekiro gutted all that, to me its just 3-D castlevania, yeah I can fight the bosses, and base enemies, but without that exact feedback, I find myself needing to take mental breaks from the game. It wasn't worth the stress.
It's always interesting to me what aspects of a mechanic a critic is willing to believe are intentional, or at least meaningful, and what aspects they dismiss as "just bad design." This is an extremely minor example, but you sort of shrug off the fact that in DS1 you can't summon your friends as the game "not working." And of course, part of that is just playing the character of hbomberguy, man who makes the funnies on the interwebs. But I find the fact that you're almost always summoning a stranger to be quite meaningful in DS1 -- it's fitting with the eerie, ethereal quality of the game, for one thing, and the single-player-but-not-quite, bizarre nature of the multiplayer aspects, where it's simultaneously quite lonely and quite social. Here's this person who you've never met before, who you can't talk to directly and can only communicate with through crude sign language, but who's playing this crucial role in your particular quest and who you're sharing this one-of-a-kind, individualized experience with facing this boss. When you beat DS boss with a summon, it becomes the legend of how you and this one guy conquered this incredible challenge, and you feel this unique kinship with someone who you don't know at all and will probably never meet again. Very fitting with the game's themes of personalized, human-level hope in the face of globalized, world-level oppression and despair.
And of course, you're welcome not to find that meaningful. Art is subjective; that's the joy of criticism. But especially since a major thesis of this video is that people who complained about the multi-enemy encounters in DS2 just didn't understand what DS2 was going for, it's interesting to me the things that are dismissed as "just bad design" or "just better design," seemingly without warranting further explanation or proof, and which things deserve deconstruction and analysis. Obviously, you've only got so much time in this video that's already practically a treatise, and you naturally want to focus on the things that you particularly are interested in talking about. Totally fair and valid, that's how any sort of essay works, video or otherwise. It's just interesting to me that as video game criticism has evolved, and developed its own vocabulary and structures and theories and so on, there's more and more of an emphasis on digging deep into and dissecting the metaphor behind given mechanics, but it's simultaneously fine to just hand-wave certain things away as "the developers fucked this up." Who gets to pick what warrants deconstruction, and what warrants dismissal? I suppose in an ideal world everyone would have the time and attention for 43-hour-long videos about every solitary detail of a game, and we don't live in that ideal world. Again, fair enough. I just encourage all critics -- not just you, Hbomb, you're far from the worst offender here -- to think carefully and critically about what they hand-wave when they criticize others for hand-waving. Those who live in glass houses, yadda yadda yadda.
It doesn't really make sense in-universe, though. You can summon specific NPCs. It's very heavily implied that these NPCs are directing their summoning signs to your world, either because they just like helping people out in Solaire's case, or because they feel they have a debt to repay (most other NPCs). So it kindof breaks the universe's own rules that your friends can't do the same and specifically send their summon sign to your world.
I remember fighting Darkeater Midir and some player with no armor at all and a rapier completely owned Midir. He was literally the best summon I've ever had and I'll never see him again.
I don't know whether or right or not and I haven't played DS2 yet but I think this is the only remotely charitable critical comment I've seen on this video
Only thing is it wasn't interented to work like that in ds1 the system was shit
Is that you, Mauler?
So according to you megaman is linear because you have to beat the 8 bosses before going to the final boss...
No, but "linearity" has not really an upper end and you can apply it to *two* aspects.
One, where you have to reach a certain objective in order to progress to another objective, and secondly you can apply it to the world as visually being linear as in you have to walk one set way to reach your destination. No option to go left, then up, then right, then down but just straight.
There are games that are very obviously linear in both aspects, like FFXII, where you have to do Quest A, then Quest B, then Quest C and so on to get to the end AND every section/level of the game is a corridor like area. In games like that it's not just like the objectives are A, B, C,D until Z but also the route is.
Applying that to Dark Souls 2:
The center of everything is the Majula. There you can can choose a lot of paths to get to your destination however the way there is actually rather linear. To reach the Dragon Shrine you have to go through the Shrine of Winter, the Castle, the Shrine of Amana, the Crypt and so on. The way is linear.
In Dark Souls 1 you have, at least in some cases, more freedom because the whole world is connected.
In this case, Dark Souls 1 is less linear than DS2.
However, as for reaching a certain objective, DS1 is more linear.
Like in the Video said, you have to ring the two bells to get to Sens Fortress. You have to get to kill the Golem to get to Anor Londo. You have to get the Lord Vessel to open up the way to the Lord Souls. Then you have more freedom.
In DkS 2 you don't have these restrictions at the beginning of the game. Like in the video explained, you can just farm a million souls and go to the endgame areas. Then you get the King's ring, kill the Giant Lord and you can finish the game.
Generally the whole "linear"-argument is a bit over exaggerated in my eyes. Every game that doesn't spawn you right before a door to the final encounter and finish the final objective without any restrictions whatsoever, meaning everything else in the game is optional, can be called linear which would mean that 99% of all games are linear.
The only thing that matters is how or if the player feels the restrictions, if you feel you are forced in one direction/to do a things in a certain order.
I personally don't feel that with either DS1 or DS2, however, if I had to choose then I would also say that DS1, because of the main item, the Lord Vessel, is more linear.
tldr.
TL;DR:
Every game is linear. Linearity is only important if you *feel* you are forced into doing something.
It can apply to the world/routes or the objectives if they have to be done in a certain order.
Neither DS1 or DS2, as a whole, feel linear but in regards to the order you have to do things, DS1 feels more linear.
The guy who did the video doesn't necessarily say DS1 is linear. He only counters the claim that DS2 is linear by saying that if you think DS2 is linear, DS1 is ALSO linear.
Short enough?
Well that's basically what I said in one rhetorical question, but that will do.
Almost, but I felt that you, with your comparison to Mega Man, implied that hhomberguy claims DS1 is linear and how that's bad.
That's not really the case. His whole argument stands on the premise that some people think DS2 is linear.
If no one would have claimed DS2 is linear, there would be no need to address the linearity in DS1.
This is just a counter argument for people criticizing DS2 for it's linearity while being blind to the linearity in DS1.
I'd give you an example with something totally unrelated to video games but I fear that would end in "tl;dr"
In regards to the Bloodborne shield's description text, i'm fairly certain that's NOT meant to be a critique of shields in Souls or how players use them, but rather a somewhat meta statement about Bloodborne being a different game from Demon/Dark Souls with different mechanics. Just because the two IPs share similarities in their gameplay, they aren't meant to be played the same way, and the game is letting you know that BB is marked by aggression, evasion, and fast-paced combat -- in contrast with the slower and strategic gameplay of Souls. If the developers really intended you to never use shields in Souls, and solely rely on rollspamming to prevent damage, they wouldn't have bothered to include them at all; especially not with such variety and usefulness.
Funnily enough, this same mentality of "there is only one way to play Souls" is what has led so many series "veterans" to be monumentally bad at Elden Ring and whine about it being "unfair". They refuse to learn any of ER's new mechanics, particularly in regards to combat mobility (for instance, jumping to avoid ground-based AOEs rather than rolling), and instead insist that R1 and dodge roll are all they need. The refusal to engage with the full extent of the game's systems and instead cling to their old "tried and true" strategies from previous titles leads to their suffering, and that's exactly what the shield in Bloodborne is remarking on.
47:51 You can riposte two handed. You were just slow. Remember when that Matthew guy critiqued DS2 only because he didn't understand a mechanic? What a guy. Good thing you're not like that!
BeerPanda like he appeared to have forgotten where the triangle button is and he's seriously telling others their playing wrong or badly. Hbomb please.
You just press triangle mate.
He was fumbling around because he was trying to grasp all those straws, Sam Percy mate
While it's true that you can riposte with a two-handed weapon in DS1 (and for extra damage, to boot), you'd have to parry with a shield or parrying tool first, adding an extra step that isn't immediately obvious to a new player (this is in the Player Conditioning section of the video, after all). I think the point he wanted to make was that you can straight up parry and riposte using solely a two-handed weapon in DS2 (albeit it's a shitty option with only like 4 active frames to work with), and that the riposte animation in DS2 is much more obvious (at least to a new player) than in DS1.
As an aside, I felt that the backstab animations in DS2 made a LOT more sense than in any of the Dark Souls games. It was always kind of weird to me how enemies would conveniently spin their backs to me when I activated a backstab, especially as late as DS3; at least in DS2, they showed that I smacked them into a position that would allow me to jam this massive blade into their spines. The knockdown animations for the parry tried to achieve a similar level of realism while giving new players a proper cue for when to start the stabbing, but it really just threw off seasoned players and made just as little sense when you were knocking over a guy swinging gigantic hammer with a mere bitch slap from your bare hands.
Sam, you seem very riled up about this. Do you have shaky hands?
shocked that you think ds1s map design requiring a lot of back tracking is bad. Personally my favorite game in the bunch due to the map design.
My sentiments exactly despite Bloodborne being my favorite game in the series Dark Souls 1 is my favorite with how the world was put together.
it's a terrible opinion and he should go to jail
I never got the "backtracking is bad" criticism. Why is it bad? It just is okay?! *disregards the entire metroidvania genre*
@@t.d.3803 Because it's annoying
@@darragholeary8653 imo in dark souls 1 specifically it was really fun plotting out my journeys and weighing out the pros and cons of setting out to get something. i.e. i got cursed in the depths, so do i spend 6000 souls getting the purging stone from the sewer lady, or make the risk of trekking all the way to the top of undead parish to get it from oswald in order to get it for half the price
Adaptability, how could you not mention it ?
Probably because he didn't know about it. He doesn't strike me as an expert on the game, just a fan who isn't stupid.
@@TheColorUrple he also messed up a couple of names, so it is likely he hasn't played it in a long time and was going off by memory here, which still worked out perfectly.
Easy, because it's a video in *defense* of the game. Why bring up an annoying thing
i like how your analysis of the game's story completely ignores the existence of Nashandra (who is the actual villain, not Vendrick) since she completely undermines your argument that the game is about "symbolism about the self destructive nature of man" since the villain (and her sisters) destroyed kingdoms because they are Literally Just Evil and Darkness Incarnate. the moment when you find vendrick wandering around the room that subverts the "fighting the corrupted king" cliche is subverted itself by the actual villain being an Evil Queen cliche.
also shields are more useful in this game than in any other souls game, ESPECIALLY in the early game since the ADP stat (that you ignored) makes your rolls unreliable until you've sufficiently pumped enough points into it. the game not giving you a shield for most starting classes is basically lying to you about how the game actually works.
That's a pretty reductive reading of Nashandra. Like with Mr.Matosis and 'The Old Lady', you've just said 'Evil Queen Cliche' in order to avoid actually reading the story.
Her goal, to put out the first flame, lines her goals up with Kaathe - neither are objectively evil, but rather have a specific philosophy about how the world should be. Her stance on the world, that it should be allowed to die so the next one can take its place, is the closest to a positive moral stance in the story - but then again, I think walking out is the good ending in DS1.
The alternative, such as the queen in burnt ivory, is merely preserving everything in a form of living death, frozen in undeath for all time, until something briefly rejuvenates it.
Nashandra's goal is literally to kill the age of fire so that the age of man, or 'dark souls', can start.
i'm genuinely confused, when does nashandra ever mention wanting to put out the first flame? however, regardless of her motivations, my point is that The Lore (TM) treats her as an abyss creature who only lusts for power, and not really as a "human" element like vendrick. i think having the climactic encounter be someone who has completely lost themselves to the maze of light and dark is a much more poignant moment to the themes you were exploring in this video, and how the game stumbles on after that moment is kind of weak. i'd argue that aldia as the final boss is actually reflective of the game's themes since he, y'know, actually asks the player if they really know what they're doing before they make the final decision. nashandra just shows up and says "ok i am dark, time to die!" and it's kind of lame!!!! (also dark souls 2 is my least favorite of all 5 games but i will admit that it least tried something new with its story unlike ds3)
Lmao good point, the dude completely avoided Nashandra
I can totally get behind this defense of DS2, except that it seems like a lot of the criticisms of DS1 are kind of _reaching_ to try and artificially make DS2 look _so much better_ by comparison. Not saying DS1 was perfect or that I don't have criticisms of it, but I didn't really get a lot of the ones hbomberguy has.
totally agree, it started out neatly but I'm halfway through the clip now and a lot of these argument feels like he's reaching a lot.
The mental gymnastics are astounding.
Not to mention the hypocrisy.
It's an hour long video about why dark souls 2 is good. He was reaching at the 5 minute mark, lol. Though don't get me wrong, I like Dark Souls 2... But it's not as good as Dark Souls I. Just so much more beautiful and creative, if you ask me.
TheDogSays you do realize that these comments are based on our OPINION right? You get over it.
TheDogSays so, why is he obviously stating a lot of his opinions as objective fact then? most of his arguments why ds1 has a lot of bad aspects and ds2 is objectively better are solely backed by his preferences... i mean, come on, the whole "why all souls games need more dudes in armour" segment is just fucking ridiculous
23:25
Come on, you know that's extremely disingenuous and you know it, he was using the turtle knights as an example of an enemy that has an in-built anti-cheesing method
He literally says when that clip plays "These enemies have a built-in counter measure for any player who gets behind them."
you know Matthew wasn't too happy about that and you know that.
Silver Stein What? They have a built in measure for players getting behind them, and they have very strong forward facing attacks, so the challenge should be staying on the side of them where they are weak. He's complaining that despite this, they have stupid accurate tracking that makes it so that even if you understand the enemy and what the challenge is intended to be, they are almost always facing towards you or you're behind them, nullifying any interesting challenge and making it just like every other "roll through the attacks then smash face" enemy.
Yeah, but he framed that as a bad thing and in this context Hbomb was saying that it wasn't inherently so.
Except the point matthew was making with that clip was in regards to the insane tracking the enemies do, the discussion wasn't even about the anti-cheesing method
Anyone remember the Master of Tracking in front of the Executioner's Chariot door?
I know this is an ancient video at this point but I feel I have to comment on why dudes in armor isn’t a bad thing but the overuse of them is. Throughout dark souls 1, bosses are big monstrosities and weaker enemies, especially in the beginning, are just hollows. You fight a bunch of hollows in the undead burg, and then just before the boss you find a little side path with a knight in black armor facing away from you. So you do what you’ve learned to do with enemies who have their backs to you and you backstab them, only to do very little damage and now you have a pissed off black knight chasing you. Then you work through, encountering enemies that are dudes in armor here and there, the iron knight in the undead parish, the Havel knight below the Taurus Demon. And then you get to Anor Londo and those guys who were giving you so much trouble are now in silver armor and the place is crawling with them. And then Ornstein and Smough happen. In DS1 it’s used very sparingly but to great effect. I think the pursuer is a great example of the effect in DS2, but they overuse the effect until it loses the awe that it inspired in the first game. I think that DS3 is superior in this (and many other) ways to both its predecessors with Gundyr. You start out fighting another dude in armor until he explodes into a black gooey mass in the shape of a dragon. Then Vordt who is more beast than man, and then you fight monstrosities again until you reach the Abyss Watchers. And I don’t think I even need to talk about how awesome the Abyss Watchers are. DS3 takes the effect and really plays it up to the best of its ability.
Can't agree more. Also, dark souls as a whole is supposed to be about overcoming impossible odds as a weak nobody, and 2 just doesn't really scratch that for me? Like there was zero truly challenging boss fights outside the dlc. As someone who started playing through the series a month ago, that's the biggest takeaway for me. There just isn't that O&S type of mastering a fight and learning it inside out only to get that "holy fuck i did it" moment.
It's a matter of preference to be honest, yes ds is about beating unbearable odds and feeling amazed by how far you have grown as a player but similar to bloodborne ds2 focuses on the growth of an unbeatable odd, that unbeatable odd being YOU this time around which is a neat concept (again this is all preference).
The Abyss Watchers is the worst boss in the series. They do half the work for you. The only good thing is the cool fire effect which you can't appreciate because you can finish them off in about 2 mins.
@@meepmeepvroom2200 hmm, looks like someone can’t appreciate good boss design from any angle except difficulty. Sad for you. The Abyss Watchers is one of the best bosses in the series because of the weight they hold narratively, the design of their moveset, and how the fight evolves as you go. If you power level before them then yeah sure they’re easy. I don’t think I’ve had trouble with them since the first time I played the game. Same goes for Soul of Cinder and I still think that’s a fantastic boss too.
@@TheKingsPride i don't buy it. I beat them with ease on a virgin play with zero help. They're all sizzle and no steak. Didn't even realise I'd done anything special until I got a prompt in firelink climbing down
He doesn't even mention that enemies can be permanently gone from killing them enough times; Well he does once, in a positive light of making the world empty.
What?
yeah and about making the game even more bullshit
Asura R-R Well that's funny. I thought those fuckers could only come back with bonfire authentics. I developed OCD after knowing they would be gone after killing them 15 times... yeah you know what happened next... My first playthrough took me ages...
Good for PvP. Unquestionably
Garl Vinland OMG!!! IS GARL FUCKING VINLAND!!! I'm a big fan of you!!! Please kill me 20 freaking times (again) just like when I was a casual scrub
*churns head and looks down at you in disgust*
Does he ever address of the hit-box issues or ADP in this?
SirJay not once. He avoids discussing legitimate problems like those, and avoids talking about the actual good features (armor / weapon variety, better inventory, interesting challenges in ng+).
It's just bizarre.
ADP is my least favourite thing in this entire game, but to be fair about the hit-boxes they are bs in all souls games.
Come on though, are we really going to pretend that the hitboxes in dark souls 2 and the way they're managed is in any way comparable to the rest of the series?
not pretending the hit-boxes in souls games have always been dodgy.
I'm not asking a question of presence. I'm asking a question of magnitude.
The Beatles slander here is unforgivable
I love Dark Souls 2, a lot. Incredibly fun game that doesn’t deserve all it’s criticism. Many of your points I’d agree with.
Though I heavily disagree with some of points against 1 in this video, almost all of them really. I maybe even enjoyed 2 more than 1 myself, but it’s very hard to make a case against DS1 when it comes to game design. It’s just better than 2 in a number of ways and almost all of your attempts to poke holes in what it’s known for are kinda weird. Certainly that are issues with it’s world structure but most of it’s praise is very well deserved.
Then also one last thing, I feel Souls fans usually extrapolate way too much meaning from simple things in the games. There’s a number of examples of that here, but one that struck me in particular is the NG+ point. Not immediately thrusting you into NG+ was almost certainly just a QOL change, nothing more. There’s very very likely no extra intended meaning to that. It’s entertaining to think one up, and I even agree that the potential symbolism there is plausible, but there’s no way Fromsoftware intended that.
I think the reverence to which some Souls fans hold these games up to is a bit worrying. This behavior is what leads to these made up hidden meanings. Many things, like that NG+ option, are just simply what they are and nothing more.
Definitely agree, some things are just the devs saying "You know, we shouldn't have done this in the last game, let's just fix it here". Not much else to it besides practicality
both games have issues, sadly not all has been fixed or new problems have been created (even in DS3 :( ).
The existence of a stat dedicated for i frames when you roll, and the fact that the default i frames for the said roll is about the same as a fat roll is reason enough to call it the worst souls game.
I live in a constant state of fear, a constant looking over my shoulder. Always on the run.
You see, I’m a person who enjoyed Dark Souls II more than Dark Souls. I remember telling many of my friends that this game is “what a sequel should be…”
They remembered too.
i relate, dark souls 1 is good but the end brings it down so hard for me
"I live in a constant state of fear"
Were you talking about the game or your life bruh
@@colecrosier2271 Ok but the ending is amazing, you can just kick Gwyn's ass cuz ur a parry god (unless ur one of those casuals, then ur still a god bc u played an beat DS) and just absolutely style on him, then leave, be like cool that was rad, cya, and just dip
@@chaoticdetectivepeach lost izalath is probably the least fun ive had playing games
@@chaoticdetectivepeach I think he means the part where they ran out of money/time and many of the last areas were basically linear and unimaginative for the most part, especially in relation to the first majority of the game.
"I think the Emerald Herald is a better waifu than Gwynevere."
Phew okay we're good. I almost thought you were going to say Gwyndolin. Then we would've had a problem..
Why?
i have crippling depression lol because gwyndolin is the king waifu. yes, king, not queen.
i don't know what you are smoking but Gwynevere is best waifu
lol
i actually played with lock on in dark souls 2 because i played a mage type character and I had no problem because i learned to space ennemies attacks and i trained to use the camera correctly.
rafael de sa adegas I used lock on when necessary, but I mostly free aimed my spells. Got really good at it
@@Jutleyfication i feel like it would be hard to free aim the magic arrows on smaller ennemies but if you do it easily then gg
38:42
I know Dark Souls can be challenging, but who the hell stops at getting the Estus Flasks.
Who'd have thought that a video that's just under 1 ½ hours would spawn a response series that decimates the arguments over a ridiculous 9 hour span.
sometimes he also got a some stuff wrong about the game and any time he said the word “objective” it would piss me off so bad because that’s the most condescending thing ever.
@@ryan43816 psst...
objective...
That moment when you realize the just under an hour and a half video decimates the arguments of a 9 hour long video of someone yapping. Really shows you the importance of "saying more with less".
@@Yagmur-nf6yh Still waiting for that moment to happen
I’ve been having lots of fun with DS2 lately but I don’t particularly like the graphics or how ‘plasticy’ it feels compared to DS1. DS1 had a better visual style and lighting imo.
Yeah, I think that's one of the things that eventually turned me off of it. It's not a dreadful game on its own, but a lot of why I like souls games is the exploration and immersion. DS II always felt ... washed out. Like in Majula, which instead of looking like a peaceful evening yellow, feels almost sickly, like it's all lit by a single old lightbulb.
nah, dark souls 2 beats every souls and bloodborn game in its environments
@@memeteam8274 Some places look amazing, then some others look dreadful. Compare the poison tower, with its flat surfaces and shit textures, to the entrance of alida's keep with the dragon skeleton, which looks intimidating, almost like in a movie.
This. DS2 was my first Souls game. But after playing DS1 and DS3, DS1's graphics is even a lot better than 1 together with the gameplay. I could also feel the RPG vibe too.
texture wise? you can say so, lighting though? that's ds2's thing, no other souls game has better lighting than it.
Dark Souls 2 SOTFS was my first game in the series - and I loved it
Dark Souls 2 SOTFS was my last game in the series - and I loved it
My first game in the series too
SAME. It's why I played every other title.
"I ate a turd before I ever had cake, so turds taste good to me."
- you
My last game and overall a 4.5/10, with dlc, without it's a 3
I disagree with so much in this video. I agree with most things you argue that dark souls 2 does right. However, most of the points you use are used again as criticisms of dark souls 1. 90% of those points against the first game are either nitpicks, preferences, or are also present in ds2.
And you also dismiss lots of things ds1 does right. I mean, honestly, “the best they could do was put sad music over the final boss”? The whole point of Gwyn is that he is used as a set piece to show how far he’s fallen, which is exactly the same as how Vendrick is used in ds2 (which you praised?). I appreciate the argument, but this is a clearly biased take.
I’ll agree that hbomb glosses over the setting for that final Gwyn fight, going to the dark Kiln below the earth to kill the god of the sun.
BUT, It’s definitely less impactful narratively. Gwyn isn’t optional, and if you don’t pay very close attention, you aren’t going to get most of that context. Meanwhile Vendrick is passive until provoked and unlike Gwyn, his behavior clearly demonstrates, on its own, Vendrick’s tragic fate.
@@henrysmith8163 I'm actually doing a project in school on this very track and I think the idea that it is less narratively impactful is not quite right. I think the opinion that if you didn't payclose attention you won't get the context is true, but I think that's what makes it so genius. You get to the final boss, you hear this somber music and you wonder, "Wow, why is it so sad?" It is supposed to make those players who weren't paying attention want to do another play through and pay attention, or perhaps think about the plot of this game which was so masterfully set in the background.
What I dislike about Vendrick's from a pure sound system point is that the music that is playing is very sparse which is great musically, however it is often muddled behind loud stomps of vendrick wandering around his chamber. When in the room, you can sometimes barely hear the music in the background. Also, Vendrick is a shit boss design-wise. He is so unnecessarily hard, and bars one of the endings of the game. While Gwyn is also difficult, he feels like a culmination of the game up to that point, if you've leveled and learned the gameplay, you can do it! It will be difficult but you can overcome it. For Vendrick, the first time you see him, if you try and provoke him, you will basically do no damage. Trying to beat him is like an ant trying to nip at a human, it does nothing.
@@henrysmith8163 It's very obvious though? Here is the final boss, king of the gods, and he is the only boss in the game who can be parries, quite easily so in fact, he is barely a shell now weakened beyond belief.
Why are you shocked by an opinion piece having opinions in it
I personally disagree with the dudes in armor take. Not entirely. There needs to be a balance between dudes and armor and monsters. Because the rarity of other strong dudes in armor makes those fights shine far more compared to if they were spammed.
I've never seen someone look at Dark Souls II as a postmodern work (as you seem to suggest in your conclusion). I find your perspective on some of the game's aspects rather neglectful of the game's development. The developers themselves said they had to scrap a lot of the work, but there were some areas they really wanted to keep (this would explain this "mystifying" lack of cohesion).
You can't criticize Matthew for being harsh on the game, it's a critique, not a full fledged review. He even begun the video by saying it's still a pretty good game and he would rather play it than most games that came out in the past few years.
defaultfallout yea he can.
Also the DLC's reinforce your point about the inevitable cycles. Each one is about a king who almost lost their throne to a queen who was a descendant of Manus. They all mirror Vendric's story
Too bad DS1 did the same thing, but didn't sledgehammer it into your face like you were a child.
The DLC are where the narrative and gameplay really shine (like in DS1 btw), it's a shame they weren't discussed more. Probably because they aren't criticized so much.
@@fafofafinfridgid outskirts
While I disagree with a lot of this, I'm glad this game has defenders. It's the worst dark souls game, but that doesn't mean it's really a bad game.
I do want to say though, the lifegems are a problem. You don't really need to use estus later in the game. Just pop a couple lifegems and keep moving. If you're good at dodging, it's vastly more efficient. You also end up being able to buy an infinite number and just always have 99 on you.
I also think there's a lot of value in making players navigate the world in DS1. It makes the hopelessness you mentioned about not making it to the next bonfire that much more valuable. To the point where, when you hear a blacksmith hammer or the Fire link Shrine music, you're excited and relieved to have a safe haven.
Zero Lenny made a video recently that I think you'd be interested in watching. He talks about some points you make here from another perspective.
I actually liked fighting beings much bigger and stronger than my character in DS1. They were the main reason I felt the need to progress and strengthen my character to meet the required strength and items for defeating the enemy.
it is more grandiose but in the end it almost always comes down to hitting the big monster in the leg 73 times until it dies. they are still very memorable for their implications
I like fighting the bosses of both. The large bosses with the epic music is an exiting and great experience and the one on one fights of Ds2 is intense and adrenaline fueled.
Bed of Chaos sucks dick
@@Stynze yeah, and big boys in armor just comes down to rolling through strong attack and swiping twice, what’s ur point
@@PoorEdward no need to get defensive, you can still like things
Holy fuck the new intro caught me off guard
I liked it, but I know what you mean.
Reminder that this is more controversial than the video titled "Pewdiepie is a nazi"
I don't think is "more controversial", just easier to debunk. I mean, in this video most of Dark souls II criticisms aren't even taken into account. There are way deeper analysis on youtube.
Man I just saw the guy who made the 10 hour response videos and all the comments there are so horrible. I did not know that opinions on a video game would make people this mad? What is wrong with them do they need help?
well I mean there are some people who blindly hate on Dark Souls 2
But part of my issue with the video is that, for example, he’ll talk about how he doesnt like something in dark souls 1, and then go and act like that exact thing is a positive for DS2.
and also he sort of has a “my word is gospel” attitude in this video, or at least seems that way to me
@@sal_ad he's not really saying "x mechanic" is bad in 1 but good in 2, he's more saying that the way some mechanics are employed in 1 is arguably less enjoyable than the way they're employed in 2
@@effenberg2532 I binged the entire 10 hour thing, and read the comments on every video. 90% of them refer to the length of the series, praise the creator who made them (Mauler), make fair criticism against Harris's video and just talk about the subject in general. I have no idea what you're talking about.