By looking at specific review scores, or even at Metacritic, you’ll get the idea thatDark Souls 2, either in its original or in theScholar Of The First Siniteration, is a well-liked title. By and large, that’s true. That’s not, however, the case among die-hard fans, as many seeDark Souls 2as the absolute black sheep of the franchise.
Living up to the originalDark Soulsis no easy task, but a very vocal group of fans claim thatDark Souls 2failed to clear that high bar by too long a distance. In an attempt to solve that problem, FromSoftware releasedDark Souls 2: Scholar Of The First Sin, a revamped version of the originalDS2.Despite an improvement in most aspects,SOTFSstill didn’t clear that high bar.
Dark Souls creator Hidetaka Miyazaki lovesDark Souls 2
While series creator and overlord Hidetaka Miyazaki was doing interviews to promoteElden Ring’s Shadow of the ErdtreeDLC, he surprised fans by taking the time to explainDark Souls 2’sinfluence in the biggest game in FromSoft’s history.
To give you some context,Dark Souls 2is the only game in the series not directed by Miyazaki. He could’ve just thrown the two directors and the team behind the very troubled sequel under the bus and claimed he’d have done better, which we’ve seen some once-big-namedevs do in the pastagain andagain.
Miyazaki isn’t that guy. He told reporters that there was no way to predict how Elden Ring and all of his other games would have turned out withoutDark Souls 2.
To IGN, he said, “In regards to Dark Souls 2, I actually personally think this was a really great project for us, and I think without it, we wouldn’t have had a lot of the connections and a lot of the ideas that went forward and carried the rest of the series.”
Dark Souls 2deserves some love
If the experience provided byDark Souls 2being so different from the originalDark Soulsdisappointed you, then I believe that you — and I, admittedly — have gotten it wrong.
The nature ofSoulslike games isn’t just repeatingDark Souls, but repeating experimentation itself. Sometimes experimenting with a crappy game will give you gold, like when Miyazaki tinkered with a dead project called Demon’s Souls, and sometimes it just doesn’t work altogether. Miyazaki’s greatest strength here seems to be not a magical ability to come up with masterworks out of the blue but to learn from what doesn’t work.
Dark Souls 2 really isbaby Elden Ring
What irks me the most aboutDark Souls 2is the absence of the extraordinary interconnected world and the emphasis on verticality in the level design of the first one.Dark Souls 2traded that for a more wide-open world approach. The result is a game that feels huge from left to right but also far shallower. It prevented us from experiencing all the magical moments we had exploring the depths and the heights ofDS1, and that was tough.
I don’t want to undersell it.Elden Ringis one of the greatest games ever made, and it did way more than just this. ButElden Ring‘s big selling point was giving us the wide world ofDark Souls 2, filling it with huge and smaller setpieces that are on par with the quality of the level design seen in the first game and adding a double-jumping horse to make navigating it all fun.
Oh, and by the way,Dark Souls 2’sPVP still absolutely owns. In fact, it might be the best in the series.
Elden Ring Shadow Of The Erdtreewill be released on June 21 for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
