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

"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

“He roll and dodge like normal people “

Artorias: Does a frontflip and jump 15 feet high

"I like having friends"
- shows footage of an NPC summon
Forever Alonne.

"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

"Let's say there was no healing at all"
As someone who missed the Estus Flask in DS1 I can imagine that quite easily.

The poison dart guys in Blight Town felt like a mini boss.  I was relieved they didn't respawn.  Killing them felt like an achievement.

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

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.

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.

12:09 "he never comes off as ridiculous"
front flip 1-hand greatsword slam 3 times in a row

"Dark Souls 2 doesn't place roadblocks in the most obvious gateways of progression"
laughs in statue

"If you look at Jimmy's pants, it tells you how bad he was when he was a kid"

That got me so good

I just love hearing you gush about "honorable duel" kind of fights vs enemies on equal footing knowing 2 years later Sekiro would come out being essentially a whole game about that.

Dark Souls 1 doens't need to be bad for Dark souls 2 to be good.

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.

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.

the geography of dark souls 2 makes no sense!!

me (bad memory, no sense of direction): huh?

"Humanity is a rare resource in dark souls 1" Laughs in darkwraith

I can’t believe how uncontroversial this video is! No dislikes!