Hey everyone! Thanks for the support on the video 💙

Also thank you for correcting me on how the shrine of winter thing works, as well as the ring of whispers not enabling voice chat (I was lied to my bad LOL). Feel free to keep the comments rolling. I might not respond to all of them but I definitely try to read as many as I can to try and make the content better. Hope you all have a wonderful day!

Dark Souls 2 lovers are the true scholars.

GLAZING DARK SOULS 2 IS THE REASON THIS HEART STILL BEATS

"Or do you do none of that!"

Masterpiece.

I think my favorite part about ds2 is the level design, it's packed with secrets and splits from the main path and it just feel so dungeon crawly I love it. I think what helps it even more is the fact you can't just run through everything staight to the boss like the other games.

opening the shrine of winter without beating all 4 of the great soul bosses has nothing to do with beating the same one four times, its just about getting 1 million souls total

Probably the most sound argument I've heard for this game on the internet. I think a lot of the philosophies in how DSII guides the player don't align with my own, but game design is not easy as people seem to think it is. We really need more discussions like this in the current online environment.

The DS2 PvP scene was a special time. All the prepatch jank and OP builds. Peak fashion souls. The fight clubs. Arena duels. Soloing gank squads. I think I moved on with over 5k hours played, all PvP. Thinking about it hits right in the feels.

Adaptability up to 99 for this video

TFW you realize that DS2 is actually KF5, not DeS3 :D

Dark Souls is a dish best served 2.

Big reason why DS2 is the best game in the trilogy: the Happy Souls video

The Devs were tapped in with PvP. In DS2 you can cancel start ups of animations with roll/backstep and there was a time where you could cancel the parry animation and still get full parry frames. You know what they did? They made it so you could no longer animation cancel parrys, but they kept attacks cancels in. They didnt need to do that, since it was just a PvP thing, but it they did.

Also note abut the theme of the game, I understand how you feel. My favorite quote from the game is from Vendrick "Seek strength, the rest will follow."

5:55 "This is not a perfect video game, and no other FromSoft game is".Very well said and actually I was recently thinking, the obsession with the perfect video game might kill what makes games great. Because what people nowdays think as perfect, everybody is gonna nitpick the minimal thing, and usually it's the minimal player inconvenience. For some, perfect means, there is nothing that wastes the player's time and everything is super safe, stream-lined, super clean and sanitized, super linear flow, you go from epic to more epic and nothing ever inconveniences the player. Non perfect could be having to collect your souls when you die, traps you couldn't have known first time (dragon bridge fire, first mimic chest, etc), bosses that are mid (everyone must be Slave Knight Gael? That would be boring), little extra interesting ideas that games added but there is always a player who doesn't like these, so the goal to find the perfect game would mean a very clean sanitized and boring game that will not incovenience any player but also will be too empty and uninteresting.

Otherwise, give me FromSoft experimental Jank and I am happy ;)

I just started a new playthrough with a friend who's never played it.
He's been constantly blown away by the strange and unique mechanics, as well as the exploration

36:00 It happened to me also on first playthrough, joined the covenant of champions very first thing in Majula without even fighting some enemies in the first areas after the tutorials so that I even realize something changed, then had very bad times also because I didn't know about ADP, my weapons not reaching enemies, getting stun locked, so many things different. But I accept this and I don't expect the game to tell me that. It's part of the magic. When someone told me early on about this covenant, I was face palming myself, but it also felt like a breath of fresh air that I will abandon it and now everything I've toughened myself in hard mode will disappear and things will feel more light at least before reaching the later parts of the game. I was like, wow this game is not as hard as I thought, but only early on after recovering from my mistake. Also, I was playing vanilla back then by accident. Didn't know there was SOTFS.

I played this game when I needed it the most back then it holds a special place in my heart thank you for talking about it

As a King's Field lover, I always felt like DS2 felt so much like a KF game. Good to know I'm not crazy! Great video!

5:03 bro seriously went through the same proccess as me, completed the game and thought it's okay and when i realized i had created more than 5 charactes and played with them.

I wish I could get over the fact that it simply (to me) doesn’t FEEL good.

I am genuinely happy that so many people love it, I just wish I could love it that way too. It just feels sluggish as hell to me.

I do respect it and have studied it as a dev and designer, and that’s enough for me.

Excellent video!