Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin (2015)
I finally decided to move on from
Dark Souls one and onto it's sequel. The whole "Scholar of the First Sin" thing is sort of a fancy "Game of the Year" edition however it was made for the new consoles in mind so the game received a bit of a facelift and apparently they have changed up enemy spawn locations and added new ones to different areas. As far as I'm concerned that's the way to do a Game of the Year edition, all the DLC and enough new stuff to keep things interesting.
As far as the game itself, well after coming off 200+ hours in
Dark Souls I had to laugh that my first death was because they remapped the jump button to the left analog stick which is somehow worse than when it was just the B button. Control issues aside it's pretty much identical and the differences come down mainly to a couple of things. It's actually kind of interesting how they varied things up for the sequel because it seems like for every thing they've "fixed" something else has gone away in return. So your weapons and armor now get repaired every time you rest at a bon fire yet now they degrade even faster. Another change they've added is that you lose 5% of your maximum health when you die and go hollow and can only get it back by going human, yet the items you need to do that can be a little rare so it adds this feeling of immediacy when you're stuck grinding in an area or going up against a hard boss. This is kind of helped by the fact that enemies won't spawn if you grind an area too much, which I find of a patronizing but I do see the purpose of it. For example I was getting stuck at this area called "No-Man's Wharf" where I had to fight my way through a decent amount of baddies just to get to the boss room and along the way probably used up half my estus flasks (oh you don't get 10 charges off the bat, only one and you have to upgrade it with estus shards) so having some of the enemies not spawn does make that a little easier but still does feel a little patronizing, like the game is taking pity on me.
The game definitely feels a little easier than its predecessor because in my 2 hour session last night I managed to beat 2 boss battles with very little difficulty. In fact the hardest area I've been in so far is this really tight corridor with three enemies all with fast attack knives. That said though, I don't think the game has abandoned the core players that loved the original and I do think there's a good balance in this to make it a challenging experience for me.