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by valvar 1096 days ago
>It’s in a lot of way like the original Dark Soul whose last half is so aweful I’m not sure the awesome first one is enough to redeem the game.

What are you talking about? I've never heard this take before. I found it fantastic all the way through. Maybe introducing the lord vessel was a poor design choice, but it's a minor fault.
2 comments
WastingMyTime89 1096 days ago
It’s a fairly common opinion even amongst fans of the Soul games. Basically everything after Anor Londo was rushed through as the budget dwindled and the game had to be released.

The catacombs are just a smudgy mess with a couple of uninteresting ennemies and a mid-boss without any worthwhile patterns. The depth is just reskinned old ennemies you have to plod through one after the other before what’s probably the worst boss in the soul games. Even the better areas like Duke’s Archive, Crystal Cave or New Londo are inferiorly designed retread of previous ideas. The true genius of the game - the looping-on-itself level design - is over and you spend your time in this very bland linear areas wishing it was over already.

Honestly if the game stopped after fighting Orstein and Smough, it would be a better game overall.

The DLC is good again however. You can tell FromSoft got additional budget for it.

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iamacyborg 1096 days ago
If you want to see what rushed looks like, compare Revenant[1] before and after the major underground section.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenant_(video_game)

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tmtvl 1096 days ago
Yeah, East Ahkuilon is pretty decent, the caves kinda outstay their welcome, West Ahkuilon tries to hang in there, but after you defeat Teleporty McFireball things really take a nosedive.
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iamacyborg 1095 days ago
It’s a shame, it seemed to me at the time that the game had a lot of potential and the core systems were quite fun.
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bee_rider 1096 days ago
There’s lots of praise for the connected, looping level design, and I see claims that the lord vessel ruins that… but most of their subsequent games featured easy teleportation, right? Walking around gets old, IMO.
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tmtvl 1096 days ago
The original Souls game, Demon's Souls also featured easy teleportation. It's kinda like the difference between Morrowind and Oblivion: in one game you're running around everywhere until you get the means to fast travel and in the other you can zip to and from discovered locations from the start of the game.
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