Since each of these pieces on Fromsoftware games are ballooning in length, I decided that it would make the most sense to publish them smaller chunks more frequently. I know from reading newsletters that it can be hard to finish a really long piece, so hopefully these shorter pieces will be more readable to my subscribers. Plus it stops me having to wait months to publish anything
Before going into the story of “Dark Souls II”, it seems that the better the “Dark Souls” games are as games, the more confused the story is. Compare the tightness of the narrative of “Demon Souls” with the sloppiness of the story of “Dark Souls III” and then compare how much more playable “Dark Souls III” is.
This narrative sloppiness is partially because both “Dark Souls II” and “Dark Souls III” were rushed out in the same period when Fromsoftware was also making “Bloodborne” and developing “Elden Ring”. But the ridiculous amounts of crunch also guaranteed that Fromsoftware was technically iterating at a startling pace.
On an overall story level, “Dark Souls II” shares with “Dark Souls III” a confused story and one feeling even more rushed, relying on tired plot points of misogyny at times. King Vendrick being seduced by the daughter of Manus, Nashandra is the kind of story that is rote even in a fairy tale. Fromsoftware are usually smarter, and while there are similar analogues in their games, they are usually presented with more nuance.
Nashandra convinces Vendrick to go to war with the giants and steal their golem magic, however when the giants counterattack; they reduce his kingdom to a pile of rubble. Vendrick, becoming aware of Nashandra’s abyssal nature goes into hiding and we seek him out, partially because we are lead on to think this will help with the undead curse.
That is not to say the way this plot is realized is boring. But it does feel that Vendrick’s ignominious end could have been his own responsibility rather than brought about by a scheming harlot.
The various DLCs here thankfully adds some depth to the characterization of the daughters of Manus who otherwise would be boringly satanic. The daughter of Manus; Alsanna, whom we encounter in the “Crown of the Ivory King” DLC ,talks movingly about her loneliness. It seems she was drawn to the Ivory King to ease this loneliness and their relationship was one of love. Not every daughter of Manus is moticated by guile, thankfully. But the only depth we get from Nashandra is abyssal.
It should be said in favor of the story that “Dark Souls II” also has a daring moment at the core of its story, it deliberately leads you from upsetting anticlimax to upsetting anticlimax. This begins when you arrive at Drangleic castle, the throne is empty and the only one there is a confused ghost who is trying to make sense about what is happened.
You discover that Vendrick is hidden in the Undead Crypt past the hellish Shrine of Amana. You go to battle with Velstadt, the Royal Aegis and the fight has all the pomp that you would expect from this point in the endgame. But when Velstadt is slain, you simply find the king wandering naked in circles completely hollowed. The creepy piano music adds disquiet to this scene. The king’s ring has to be picked up from his discarded robes in the corner.
Unfortunately I feel a bit silly writing about this startling image given that it’s well-trod in terms of interpretation but the image speaks to the horror of hollowing as well as the endless cycle of fire. And obviously there’s the existential dread the whole game has been about, that all the power and riches in the world can’t save you from the levelling of death.
Much like your character, Vendrick thought that gaining the throne would banish the undead curse. But Vendrick fled his responsibility of sacrificing himself to the flame. Whether because Nashandra wanted to usurp the fire or whether he balked at the sacrifice, he ultimately hid in isolation and went hollow.
This is actually only part of the endgame and the rest of it has some strange but mostly digressive turns, as you travel through time and collect the souls of the giants. This leads to slaying Vendrick and confronting Nashandra in an underwhelming final boss battle.
The first time I beat the game, the ending inspired a despairing feeling as you see your character being sealed in the oven of the first flame. You are told by voiceover that your decision of whether to continue the cycle or abandon it to the dark is up to you but everything implies imprisonment and death. Maybe it was just being in the middle of the pandemic, but as I watched my hollow character taking the throne inside a giant kiln, I felt real existential dread.This story is bleak but still left open ended, partially because the one ending had to accommodate different player choices.
Much like “Dark Souls III” which also had an overall story that was confused, “Dark Souls II” has many great short stories inside the more confused epic narrative. Ultimately, the story of Fromsoft games usually becomes less important than the story that is told by the player in collaboration with the game.
One of the themes of these short narratives is how different rulers dealt with the curse of the undead. We travel through 4 different spokes each housing a different lord soul. The Rotten, the Iron King, the Lost Sinner and the Duke's Dear Freya, each house a different lord soul from the original “Dark Souls”.
It's unclear who was locking the undead up in prison in the lost bastille. The Lost Sinner who you fight is herself a seeming prisoner although imprisoned by choice to do penance for an unnamed sin. In a great cutscene, you see she is infected by the chaos bug that infected the witch of Izalith. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely she could be running the prison, as decrepit as it is.
It might have been Vendrick who was in charge, but it's never stated. But it's clear that the undead were imprisoned due to the social stigma that they hold.
As one of my favorite characters, Straid of Ophails is an evil wizard you unpetrify at the end of lost bastille. (“Dark Souls II” has a glut of evil wizards.) Straid says;
The cursed ones were imprisoned within this land. Of course, you came of your own free will. Heh heh…
The people feared the cursed ones like a plague. Some people would rather keep dreadful things out of sight, out of mind.
In the end they swept them up and corralled them here. So very typical of meek minds, don't you think?
Maybe I'm being corny, or attempting to comment on something to serious for an essay on a Dark Souls game. But I've thought about Straid's line “so typical of meek minds, don't you think” a lot in our present era of indefinite detention for undesirables. It's these same “meek minds” who congratulate themselves on their own kindness yet are so cruel to any life they don't understand.
Once people became aware of their own frailty…They seized anybody they found undesirable, cursed or no, and impounded them here. Whoever posed even the slightest threat, was removed. All so that they could sleep better at night.
Whoever created the Lost Bastille is not only warehousing the victims of the curse, but developing them into biological weapons who explode when facing their enemies.
The Iron King seems to be more of a classic tyrant than Vendrick although the only evidence we see of his tyranny is the huntsman's copse. The undead who are sent to the Huntsman's copse by the Iron King to be hunted for sport indefinitely. The undead cannot die so the copse is a place of unending torture, where the jailers are just as hollow as the captives. We finally arrive at his iron fort which symbolic of the weight of his military pomposity, is gradually sinking into an active volcano.
In a classicly ironic Fromsoftware twist, the lord soul portrayed in lore as the most benevolent, Pharros, has himself turned into a grotesque monster. Everywhere in the world, we encounter Pharros's traps and contraptions designed to protect despised groups such as the dwarfs and the rats. But the gutter itself is a poisonous collection of shacks, this games Blightown shielded by automatic states that spit poison onto anyone who enters.
When we find Pharros, he has become a Hobbesian caricature of society, a giant made up of linked bodies. Even power used beneficiently ends up corrupting its owner. Much like Fromsoftware characters such as Maiden Astrea or Miquella, his haven for the forlorn is as hellish as the prisons they are confined in.
The odd one out is the lord soul housed by the Duke's dear Freya, where the ruler of the mercantile desert kingdom decides to give his power to his pet spider. The desert kingdom becomes ruled by arachnids but the story is less interesting than the level as we can't really figure out the motivations for any of it.
You also have the mysterious character of Aldia who has been seeking to banish the undead curse, but has ended up as some kind of misshapen tree monster. His dialogue has to be some of the most poetic Fromsoftware has used in a video game
Life is brilliant. Beautiful. It enchants us, to the point of obsession.
Some are true to their purpose, though they are but shells, flesh and mind.
Others chase the charms of love, however elusive. What is it that drives you? Once, the Lord of Light banished Dark, and all that stemmed from humanity. And men assumed a fleeting form. These are the roots of our world.
Men are props on the stage of life, and no matter how tender, how exquisite...
A lie will remain a lie.
Aldia thought to banish the undead curse with knowledge rather than martial means but has also ended up at a similar impasse as those who tried to crush the undead with their greater power.
Of course, in Aldia's case we can say that his story is not entirely complete. In fact, many of the stories outside of Lucatiel's remain fascinating fragments. But these fragments remain a lot more interesting than games with fully rendered narratives. And as I have remarked, the true narrative of any Fromsoftware game is the one the player creates in collaboration with the game.
That is part of why “Dark Souls II” is my favorite the Dark Souls series because no other game in the series allowed players so much freedom in how they collaborate with it.
Fromsoftware’s games are among other things, about creating builds for your characters , that’s the RPG in the Action-RPG that these games stem from. As much as a lot of the fanbase makes the games seem like they are about the skill of beating a boss at level one with a club or something, these games are not about difficulty so much as creative play.
For example, while replaying “Elden Ring”, I was having a hard time with Mohg. On my second time fighting him solo; I could chunk him down through his first phase, however I wasn’t able to close the gap in his frenetic second phase.
I used the Darkmoon Greatsword which was powerful in his first phase when his attacks gave me time to charge up. But as soon as he began gliding over the arena, splattering every surface with flames that caused a bleed buildup, my character would generally die when Mohg still had a fourth of his health. Again and again, I would learn his attacks better and get closer to beating him but I was pretty stuck on his second phase.
I looked on Reddit and found suggestions to improve the damage of the beam attack of the Moonlight Greatsword, by just switching talismans and physics. This upgrade was enough that I was able to vaporize Mohg second try and then move onto destroy Maliketh a few attempts later. What started out as a Herculian effort became a total cakewalk.
I was fighting these bosses solo to try to improve my skills and get better at the combat, which I think I did partially. But in reality, part of the skill is learning how to master a broken build. “Git gud” is a fan-created approach to these games but Fromsoftware is about letting players experiment beyond just learning movesets
Similarly“Dark Souls II” is really a game about player builds and there are a ridiculous amount of options unique to that game such as power-stancing, hex builds and many others.
To go over these options briefly:
Power-stancing is equipping a weapon in each hand and switching your moveset so you attack with both at once. In “Dark Souls II” you have to invest 1.5 x the strength and dexterity in order to do this, the requirement being removed to its benefit in “Elden Ring”. This gives you a ridiculous amount of different movesets as the weapon in the right hand dictates the movement in the left hand. This is even more disparate than “Elden Ring” as you can power-stance two entirely different weapons creating some pretty odd looking attacks.And since you can hold a button to switch between power-stancing and attacking with two weapons individually, you could in theory end up with twice the amount of moves as a normal character by switching between the two.
An even odder mechanic than power-stancing is hiding a class inside the game.While really a subclass of sorcery, the Hexer class of magic acts almost as a hidden class due to its obscure requirements and discovering it. The game has a hexer character accessible fairly early who seems genuinely unwell as befits someone who specializes in dark magic. When you have 20 points in both Intelligence and Faith, he will give you a starting set of gear and access to some of the most broken spells in the game. This also ameliorates the difficulty as starting as a caster as trying to play as caster in “Dark Souls 2” without hexes would be a challenge run into pretty late.
Hexes spend souls as currency to power-up your attacks, an unusal mechanic that makes it neccesary to earn greater amounts of souls to lay waste to enemies. Eventually you can acquire a cow skull mask which gives you extra souls to help pay for your hexes. Hexing is a wholly unique mechanic that was only used in “Dark Souls II”, Dark magic has returned in subsequent games but never as broken as it was here nor did it spend souls to use it.
The level investment in either of these builds might seem difficult but “Dark Souls II” gives levels away at a much cheaper price than any other game of Fromsoftware. This adds to the overall lack of balancing in the game, because with well-spent points you can quickly get on the other side of the power curve.
Another factor in the power curve is the ability to upgrade your weapons much higher than you were allowed in the original “Dark Souls” . “Scholar of the First Sin” made it you finds the Steady-hand McDuff, the second blacksmith, from the second area of the game.
Wheras in the original game, you could find McDuff quite early on but you weren’t able to give him the dull ember until you got to the mid-game area of Iron Keep. This meant in the original game you weren't able to buy his powerful stock or access infinite large titanite shards until much later. This original restriction feels more in keeping with Fromsoftware, who usually tightly control weapon upgrades son that players can't completely steamroll the game. Being able to find Mcduff so early in the game means being able to upgrade a weapon up to +6 by the time players reach the second area. This can result in overpowered characters.
Of course, “Dark Souls II” has a reputation of being the easiest souls game in terms of bosses, but that is partially because it is so seemingly disinterested in being balanced. Whether this lack of balance is a decision made by Fromsoftware or carelessness due to a rush to completion, will be hard to definitively say. But we can see this as another way that “Dark Souls II” anticipates “Elden Ring” as being a game of unbalanced builds