"Dark Souls II" Part 2

Because I publish these essays serially due to the page limits of these newsletter formats, it can be a problem when an essay starts out as negatively as the last one did. If I was certain that people were able to read the whole essay, they would know that the conclusion is not as negative as the opening may have sounded.

In the first part of this essay; I worry that I might have overstressed the janky nature of ”Dark Souls II”. Yes the jank should be acknowledged. But we should also acknowledge how Dark Souls II” is the last game in the “Dark Souls” series to have the kind of strategic and slow-paced combat which initially made Fromsoftware stand out from other 3^rd person action games. Many people now prefer the faster style of the later Fromsoftware, but I personally am enamored of the first two “Dark Souls” games because I miss the kind of realism that Fromsoftware has lost interest in.

I’m definitely not one of the grognards who dislike “Elden Ring” but I do think that “Dark Souls II” represents the last step in a particular path, one which Fromsoftware abandoned. I am hopeful that someday indie developers will pick up this path and lead it to another conclusion.

I have written a bit about the experimental nature of “Dark Souls II”. But, if the game only took risks with the mechanics, it wouldn’t be as daring as what the game risks emotionally. A particularly dour feeling comes from this particular game in the series . This might seem hyperbolic given that the world of the “Dark Souls” series is a half-dead thing.   

But has it ever felt as personal as the opening cutscene in “Dark Souls II”, where your nameless protagonist watches a representation of his past die? In a part of the lengthy opening cutscene; his wife and child melt away like a wax figures. This representation of the hollowing curse has to be one of the more upsetting things in any Fromsoftware game. And the Fromsoftware catalog is not short on horrors.

The opening cutscene of “Dark Souls II” is long and it is unusual in that it is bisected with short gameplay. This is odd because you have to play before character creation, until a cutscene that allows you to create your character. Your hollow and faceless protagonist emerges at a hut populated by cruel elderly firekeepers who mock you and your whole reason for playing.  

After a bit of this, you are handed a human effigy and allowed to create your character, “your true self”. It’s after this that the cutscene continues with further mockery from the crones;

"All people come here for the same reason. To break the curse. 
You're no different, I should think? 
Hmm… doesn't stand a chance. Well, you never know! 
Go through the door and trot along to the kingdom. But remember, hold on to your souls. 
They're all that keep you from going Hollow. Oh, I'll fool you no longer… 
You'll lose your souls…All of them. Over and over again." 

The women treat you as an unwanted urchin that must be guided but not without mocking laughter at your predicament. This mood is not entirely novel, the Souls series is often the opposite of a traditional fantasy heroism but this feels especially dark. Your mission seems doomed from the beginning.  

From the moment you arrive at Madjulla, the relaxing seaside atmosphere also cloaks a sense of unease. Everyone you speak to has the dreamlike cadence of “Dark Souls II” where every sentence is murmured with unusually long pauses.  These characters are not only hesitant in speech, each is hesitant and unsure of who they are . Each of the major NPCS are wasting away in the ruined paradise of Madjulla as they gradually hollow.

The exception is the firekeeper, The Emerald Herald is as inscrutable as the firekeepers in the rest of the series but with more human warmth. She has an Irish accent and also indulges in oddly childlike gestures such as sitting on a rock and letting her legs swing back and forth. While she is mysterious, she does have a purpose in that she is looking for people to relight the first flame.  

Saulden, is one of the familiar “crestfallen” characters who have been in every Fromsoftware game since Kings Field IV. The character even uses the same voice actor as “Dark Souls 1” but is a lot gentler than he was in that game. He’s also more philosophical which is a mixed success as he baldy states what the theme of the game is going to be : 

I'm told that the soul is the essence of life itself. Anything living, sentient or no, supposedly has one. 
What we call the curse is traceable to the soul. Do you see what that means? 
To be alive…to walk this earth… That's the real curse right there. 
We Undead will never die. And that's quite a predicament, really… 

“Dark Souls 2” perhaps makes the existential connection between the undead curse and the human condition too explicit, but it is interesting that the game felt bold enough to do so. This boldness extends to its treatment of hollowing. It not only treats hollowing as an existential metaphor but it shows how it affects the characters psychologically. 

In “Dark Souls 2” you see this affliction strip away different characters sense of self. We see this through one of the more developed NPC storylines; Lucatiel of Mirrah. Lucatiel, like your character, is searching for a cure to the undead curse. She wears an odd mask of an old man to hide the black curse mark on her face.

Upon encountering her, Lucatiel is unfriendly but pretty much warms to you immediately. Her opening statement; “I don’t know you and you don’t know me, things are better that way.” would be good advice to follow when trying to get Fromsoftware NPCS to survive to the endgame. Unrealistically but luckily for us, Lucatiel immediately is charmed by our protagonist. She reveals herself to be a tough but kind knight eager to offer us assistance.

But despite her bravery, she gradually hollows more and more . At first, this seems to manifest in the loss of hope, a depression entering into her adventurous spirit:.

Still on the road, are you? Sorry to have burdened you so. 

She gradually explains that she is beginning to feel the effects of the hollowing curse;

^{I've found my thoughts growing hazy. My memories are fading, oldest first. The curse is doing its work upon me. I am frightened…Terribly so… If everything should fade…What will be left of me…}  

Lucatiel’s fears are well-warranted. For the next time you encounter her, she has begun a more severe degradation. Her first words are given an excellent line reading as if she had forgotten how to speak;

^{Oh…You… My thoughts…are very…scattered… What is this curse? The question rings in my mind, but I haven't the focus to answer it. Loss frightens me no end. Loss of memory, loss of self. 
If I were told that by killing you, I would be freed of this curse… Then I would draw my sword without hesitation. I don't want to die, I want to exist. I would sacrifice anything, anything at all for this. 
It shames me, but it is the truth.} 

Even though it’s ridiculous that Lucatiel should put such weight on the thought of killing us as we barely know her, it speaks to a true rot that is erasing the code of chivalry she once followed.

^{Sometimes, I feel obsessed… with this insignificant thing called "self". 
But even so, I am compelled to preserve it. Am I wrong to feel so? Surely you'd do the same, in my shoes? 
… Maybe we're all cursed… From the moment we're born…} 

This repeats a motif that Saulden says:

To be alive…to walk this earth… That's the real curse right there.

But this abjectly terrified but still philosophically questioning Lucatiel does not last, and in your final encounter she has forgotten everything. She has even lost the mask she used to conceal her curse mark;

Lucatiel gives embodiment to the horror of the hollowing curse.  Hollowing was spoken of in the original Dark Souls, but we never saw the actual process of hollowing. You would see characters winding up hollow after facing something which was more than they could bear, but you only saw the before and after, never the actual process. 

Dark Souls 2 helps us understand the idea of hollowing making it more real to us, as something that a lot of people are unfortunate enough to experience; a loved one losing their identity to dementia. The memories fade, the person becomes afraid by their inability to remember, something is wrong but they won’t acknowledge what it is. 

I’ve never played another game that has a character arc as heartbreaking as that of Lucatiel. Only “Soma”, the Frictional Studios game has moments as bleak as “Dark Souls 2”. In contrast to the pop existentialism of “Dark Souls 3” where the characters are all striving to fulfill their telos, “Dark Souls 2” shows the characters lose their sense of purpose and die in an unedifying way.  

Hollowing is also more of a game mechanic than it was in any other entry in the series. Your character in “Dark Souls 1” started out hollow but by using humanity would look human again. Having your humanity (which needed to be activated at a bonfire) was more of a buff to your default state of being hollow. You could use humanity to increase your damage, look good and get better item discovery. Or you could spend it to get more heals from your Estus Flask by kindling the bonfire with it. In “Dark Souls 2”, your humanity is a dwindling resource. Your character progressively hollow with each death, looking more ghastly and losing max HP.  

This is a more mixed bag than how effectively it is explored in nearly every character. While we do feel the pain of our lost HP, there’s no real way for the gameplay to make us experience what the other characters are experiencing. And unfortunately since Fromsoftware was on a budget crunch, the hollowing effect we see on our character is gruesome but universally the same on every character. So your character ends up with the same bald corpse face regardless of what they initially looked like.

So we can see why this mechanic had always been a controversial one. There was some idea that “Dark Souls” never punished the player for dying and “Dark Souls 2” did,seemingly in violation of the idea of tough but fair gameplay. But Fromsoftware had started out with “Demon Souls” which did punish you for dying while human with it’s world tendency system.

While there are many ways around the issue, (a ring that was patched in makes you lose much less max hp.) but it still feels frustrating. Much like farming bloodvials and bullets in “Bloodborne”, it’s a mechanic that is  painful in the early game and then becomes inconsequential in the late game. In the beginning of “Dark Souls 2”, Human effigies are pretty rare and when your health is already very low, you have to cope with reduced health. By the end of the game, you have hundreds of human effigies and even the option to have your hollowing reversed at the Shrine of Amana.

The problem is that when discussing the game, more seasoned players will act as if the HP loss or farming human effigies is a non-issue. This is because they remember the end of the game when it doesn’t matter. But for people struggling for the first time, it very much matters that human effigies are rare and expensive. Sometimes, it’s hard not to wish that Fromsoftware had thought of a better way to deal with the hollowing mechanic.

It does seem that whenever Fromsoftware looks back fondly on “Demon Souls”, they create systems that are frustrating to deal with. Both “Bloodborne” and “Dark Souls 2” go back to the expedition style design of “Demon Souls”, where you would load up on healing grasses and antidotes before entering one of the worlds. While many of these consumables are interesting, they lack the efficiency of the other Dark Souls games where you have much more limited consumables.

Lucatiel is one of the best NPCs Fromsoftware created, but this praise should be contrasted with the fact that “Dark Souls 2” has some of the slightest NPC queslines in the series. No doubt this is one of the results of the game having a deeply troubled production and being behind schedule. But the result is that a majority of the questlines are just finding an NPC in the world and then having them appear as a vendor.  

That’s not to say that these aren’t fun characters but there isn’t much to them on a story level. Maughlin the armorer starts out shy, stammering and broke. He’s ultimately pretty confused about his life in Madjulla. Gradually if you invest in his armor shop, he becomes arrogant and unfriendly but remains confused. His newfound wealth has acted as a baum for the pain of going hollow but it’s never enough.

A more multifaced character is Leningrast the blacksmith. Every kind of action rpg has to have a blacksmith, but the souls games generally have some of their best characters in the role. Although it should be said that until Hewg from Elden Ring, they didn’t figure out how to have any story progression to their blacksmith characters.

Leningrast is a lot more prickly than the loveable Andre from the first game but is ultimately a likeable sort. While he is hollowed in appearance, he somehow keeps his faculties intact. There’s a humor to his grumpiness where he constantly is surprised that you’re still alive and seems quite affable about the prospect of you meeting your demise.

“I’ll be around, if...you make it back.”

Nevertheless, despite his outward stuffiness, he seems to like your character and even gives you a blacksmith’s hammer if you visit his shop enough. He is concerned that you aren’t going to settle down;

Don't spend your whole life in transit, you hear?

Leningrast has complaints about travelers thinking that

A man ought to labour with his feet planted firmly in the earth.Not roam around like you flirtatious vagabonds.

This begins to make sense when you realize he’s in Drangleic trying to find his daughter Chloanne who is a traveller and something of a flirt.

The only development to this story when Chloanne returns to Madjulla. But this reunion is very anticlimactic in that he only says a few lines:

“My witless daughter finally came home.
Just as oblivious as she's always been. Well, at least now I can keep an eye on her.”

Although sadly Chloanne doesn’t seem to recognize him as he has physically hollowed so much.

Chloanne even though she is kind of cool and bohemian is maybe the worst character in that some of her lines seem to just be for a horny male audience.

Well, I’ve only one thing to provide and we both know what that is.

Fromsoftware is usually good at treating their female characters with some humanity and they fail with Chloanne. She does have some interesting lines about stones and speculating that Drangleic is simply built over the Lordrain of the first game, but she mostly seems to be there as eye candy.

I could talk about more characters in Madjulla but they generally only have one point where their story changes and then this change doesn’t amount to much. Generally, you encounter characters who move back to Madjullah so they can sell you things.

The NPCS of “Dark Souls 2” are not without individual charm, but they lack an inflection point where they become interesting stories. You could argue that it’s intentional that they remain static but I do think this is reflective of reused assets and little time. Lucatiel was originally intended to be a Don Quixote like figure with a dwarf squire so we can assume that many of these other NPCS might have had different storylines in the original game.

Still, these characters mostly express the dread at the heart of “Dark Souls II”, they are all slowly hollowing. They have increasing uncertainty of who they are and why they are wasting away in Drangleic. Oddly, Leningrast for his greenish corpselike appearance is the most rational and content in his purpose as any of them.

In a way the staticness of the majority of the NPCS in “Dark Souls II” is not unusual for a Fromsoft game, but it actually seems to work better given the dreamlike feeling of Madjullah.

I’m starting to wonder if this essay will be more than 4 parts as I spent so long talking about the NPCS and the introduction. The next part will attempt to focus more on the story, the world and bosses of the game.