Dark Souls 2 In-Depth Lorethrough - Part 1

very warm welcome to the fellow bearers of the curse this is the first part of my dark souls 2 in-depth lore 3 mini-series there will be a total of three episodes of the next releasing on christmas day and the last releasing on boxing day if you are new to the channel then you can expect detailed discussions ranging from the characters the themes the items the environments the development and of course the law please remember to like and if you are new subscribe without wasting any more time let's begin our journey into drang lake perhaps you've seen it maybe in a dream a murky forgotten land a place where souls may mend your ailing mind you will lose everything once branded the symbol of the curse an orbia of darkness your past your future your very light [Music] none will have meaning and you won't even care by then you'll be something other than human a thing that feeds on souls are hollow [Music] long ago in a walled off land far to the north a great king built a great kingdom i believe they called it drang lake perhaps you're familiar no how could you be but one day you will stand before its decrepit gate without really knowing why [Music] [Music] like a moth drawn to a flame your wings will burn in anguish time after time for that is your fate the fate of the cursed foreign before we explore and discuss the things that can be found within the things betwixt let's go back over the intro cinematic and talk about what we saw and what we heard during our time with it perhaps you've seen it maybe in a dream instantly the game hits you with the concept of dreams dreams and memories are an especially important topic when discussing dark souls 2. many players describe dark souls 2 as being dreamlike and if you have played you'll know that you are able to travel to the past via memories of the fallen giants for those of you who have played other dark souls games you'll know that once someone is marked with one death their memories start to slip they start to become alien to themselves and others around them and we see this slipping of mind and memories in the intro cinematic of dark souls 2 our faces of loved ones begun to crumble in our mind and we can no longer remember who they were and what they meant to us dark souls 2 very much focuses on the human side of the curse and it's because of this that many players can personally relate to the stories found within this game as they have unfortunately had family members who may have suffered from dementia inside of the old woman's cabin can be seen spiders on their webs she's also spindling thread both of these things i believe to represent fate the old woman is also blind her lack of sight may aid her in for seeing the future many believe this woman to be a firekeeper and that topic we will continue in the things betwixt when we are given the name of the kingdom in which we seek players will know that this is not drangleic castle drangleic castle is relatively new as it was commissioned by the king for his wife nashandra perhaps this location was the former capital for those who have not played this place is known as the dragon airy the topic of many kingdoms rising and falling on the same spot is commonly discussed when interacting with the npcs this means that many kingdoms simply reused the same structures of the previous rulers drangleic was also known for its dragon riders so it would make sense if this place was once under the king's control and perhaps his permanent residence after all this place can only be accessed by his brother's estate she then goes on to ask if we are familiar with the kingdom nade drang lake but then just as quickly she dismisses it this then ties in with people's theories that she is the missing fire keeper from the things betwixt however this dialogue can also tie in with the theme of dreams and memories we sail upon some lakeside ruins and are met with a lone standing tree covered in fireflies upon the floor can be seen many human remains perhaps this tree was once a giant perhaps the ruins are a graveyard of an ancient and forgotten battle next we see a blood-red moon accompanied with a wailing cry the fireflies are quick to react to this and the lake can be seen the ruins in their full form for those who have played bloodborne a red moon upon a lake should be familiar in the waters reflection specters spill out of the opening door perhaps these are the spirits of the remains seen earlier in the water the spirits form a vortex and the fireflies are attracted to it here we see creatures of light being attracted to dark [Music] we see a quick flash of the same black vortex that could be seen earlier on the protagonist's back our pupils widen searching for light within the dark in dark souls 1 oolacile sorceries deal in light light is time however light can only ever move forwards and never back in dark souls the being that drags us into the past is manus the father of the abyss a being a pure dark in dark souls 2 it is my theory that we are yet again traveling to the past and it is not light that enables this it is only dark here we awaken in the things betwixt a limbo between the once was and the what will be we stand beneath a gazebo and the style reminds me of oolacile these white pillars encased in green ivy ivy and vines very much being a symbol of illusio the grass crest shield is an example of that and again if you're familiar with my an undead pilgrimage i've talked about with the seal a lot in that series so if you've not watched that please do so now what's very interesting is we use similar structures such as this to dark dive is a covenant that can be found in dark souls 2 and there you can go into the abyss and like sconces and one of them if done if you do them all the last one will hold a boss but we won't get onto that boss more importantly we'll just talk about what's in the middle of this gazebo and that is a reflective surface a shiny metal or perhaps a worn and tarnished mirror now what did we see in the lake's reflection from the intro we saw the ruins there's a player just standing in the way thank you mr player enjoy your game sir we saw the reflection of the ruins in the water now mirrors is something we'll come across in dark souls 2 probably not within this mini series but if you've played dark souls 2 you'll know mirrors are pretty important now we know mirrors from our real world and and the occult mirrors can spawn or summon demons mirrors can be an opposite of the real world and not a very nice one but also mirrors can be seen as a gateway into new lands and new places so is this how we traveled into the past using a reflection from the future if this is a mirror if you're familiar with dark souls 2 this may make more sense because i said mirrors are pretty important in this game but something to think about i mean it is just a shiny surface but this is unique to this area i'm not familiar with this being seen anywhere else you know there could be something there or i could just be wearing a tinfoil hat what isn't tin fall hat territory is these now people there's two ways of speculating these and what i like to believe them is is they are stalactites oh did you hear my stomach then apparently i'm pretty hungry they are stalagmites and stalactites that have formed together over many hundred thousand years millions years however long it takes and they now form these solid pillars but of course these are very reminiscent to the stone arch trees that can be seen in the intro of dark souls 1 and arch trees are what the ancient dragons nested in they called them their home and the witch of izalith under daughters of chaos burn them down and the war with the ancient dragons now these could be petrified trees they could be stone trees but they look more stone than trees so i've always thought they were stalactites and stalagmites as we can see stalagmites on the roof between these pillars and if i've got that wrong forgive me because i always forget stalagmites no sorry static types fall down nostalgia my static mites go up i believe so whichever ones these are you can see them between the pillars of rock so that's why i don't believe these are trees but we do see trees further on this area the first one we see is in the distance there by the break in the cliff wall sorry in the cave wall and this many people believe to represent rebirth fertility sex and its themes is often found within dark souls and is very obvious in bloodborne people don't really like talking about it in the souls games but it is there um like many themes found throughout the souls games if it's in one it was probably in the rest um so please apply that knowledge from themes found in bloodborne or sakiro because they might appear in older games or newer games are from and you may be surprised what you find and can speculate from those points and observations so as i said we've woken into things with twix this is a limbo so whether or not this is real is to be debated we see these kobolds i believe the enemies are called and this is where they can be found but if you've played the game you'll know that this isn't the only area that they can be found in as they are later found in an area called aldi or aldia's keep aldi is the brother of king bendrick and he has his own estate and that estate connects to the dragon area now the dragon airy sits atop tall stone pillars very reminiscent to the ones we see in this cave as i mentioned stone arch trees are the home of the dragons and it seems in dark souls 2 the drakes live atop a structure placed upon these tall stone pillars so is aldi aware of this place is this where you got the kobolds from could this place be connected to aldi in any way i'm not too sure but we see human remains spewed across this place and presumably the cobalts have attacked and eaten them i believe if you stay in this area too long they will actually attack you so be pretty fast through here and don't stop and talk like i'm doing we also get to see that the structure the gazebo was much taller but due to time it is crumbled resulting in what we see before us it's a really really cool area we see fallen trees hollow trees and trees being hollow is something we will enter and explore in a short second as we go through this area that's also an interesting observation that the trees are hollow in this location or mostly hollow we find a corpse and on it is a rusted coin and a good old-fashioned style of the dark souls lure throughs we shall read the items we find in our inventory the first will be of the dark side of course it reads an accursed mark the dark sign includes death sorry induces death returning the player to the last bonfire rest of that at the cost of all souls held do what you must to gather the pieces scraping them into a semblance of a hole before the will to do so fades the rusted coin as you can see the rusted coin depicts a winged figure is this an angel is this a deity we cannot tell did they hold something in their arms i'm not too sure but as we know if you're familiar with the coins found in dark souls 1 there's the copper coin and on the copper coin can be seen old man mclife there's the silver coin and on that coin is the night king rendell and there's the gold coin and on that coin is old known old man mcloy sorry is all father lloyd but here this coin doesn't look similar to that because as we'll find out dark souls 2 is set way in the future from dark souls 1. many ages of fire have been and gone many kingdoms have risen and fallen on the very same spot so deities their names have changed they are known by many names two deities may be the same deity but due to time and differences in belief they become separated and belief and miracles is something we may get into through this mini-series as the stories of the gods it's really brought into question whether they happened and it seems miracles new miracles have been made and it all depends on one's faith if they believe in it then it will come true and you'll be able to act out the miracle and use it to your benefit so i think that's a really interesting concept that dark souls 2 goes into kind of questioning did these things happen and are these people real from the perspective of the recent age of fire you have the black separation crystal a returning item from dark souls one we see is yet again a black crystal wrapped in white cloth now what this symbolizes i think i speculated in my an under pilgrimage but i'm not too sure cause the black represent velka and the white represent i don't know anor londo in some way belka gwyndolin i don't think so i'm just throwing those out there but something to consider as crystals and soapstones are pretty important and are also wrapped in fabric found within dark souls 1. anyway the black separation crystal a symbol of farewells that has been passed down since time immemorial the crystal sends phantoms back to their homes or sends you back to yours whether ending in hope or despair encounters our valuable experiences beware fickle use of this item it's rather interesting and here we see bone of order a bone wrapped in red thread tried to get out then there's a bit of a tongue twister red red thread or it is for me because i'm severely dyslexic if this is your first time watching this i should warn you i'm dyslexic i will miss read i will miss say things i forgive me it's more annoying for me than it is for you i assure you i have to live with it and i hate it especially when trying to write a script and read a script to create a lore video it gets in the way massively anyway this red thread and we will see on other items relating to invasions and but interestingly found on the bone of order which restores the link to other worlds is an online play item you will be punished for fleeing from other worlds by disconnecting unjustly however this charm will disperse the ayah directed at you both sins are not easily buried and there's no telling if you will be let off so easily next time each encounter in life is a precious turn of fate and fate will not be cheated so really really cool but since they're not easily buried and there's no telling if you'll be left off next time so again this theme of sin i took i referenced velcro in the black separation crystal and now we have the mention and and gwyndolin sorry and we have the mention of sin in this item which also relates to invasions you know connections to be made things to consider but really cool and the mention of course that fate fate cannot be cheated so also the fact that fate is determined potentially by a deity who deems you a sinner and then sends people after to punish you for your sins so that's really interesting concept i guess to think about and we shall read the armor imported hud hemp hood that fully covers the face provides protection from the elements and little more the cursed souls who wander the lands have a strange way of ending up here as if drawn from afar by some force and this theme of people ending up in dragon lake and especially majula is something we will experience and explore as we go on in this game and this mini series as people don't know why they're here um much likely well the old woman in the cabin explained in the intro we will stand before his decrepit gates without really knowing why and this theme of not really knowing why as i said is common in dark souls 2. people are drawn to dragon lake for some reason and they forget that reason and yet they still remain something is pulling them here we have the imported tunic travelers tunic won't provide much in the way protection the cursed souls who wander the lands have a strange way mainly up here as if drawn by some uh afar by some force and it basically reads the same for the rest of the armor and i think that is all yeah so you can hear the kobolds growling they're getting a bit unrestless well restless should i say so we shall leave this area we will explore this in a short while but first we shall head to this structure get away from the water because water the sound of water is extremely loud in all souls games it's so absurdly loud above all the other sounds so i never like to talk over it anyway as i said we'll talk more about what's over there and especially what's behind there but for now we'll focus on this we can see this tree is inhabited with the door and windows but you also see bones hung to dry presumably and interesting why there's bones here are they human bones we've seen human remains over there so they could be human remains and what purpose do they serve is this a warning are they drying out um this is some kind of to be a part of a ritual but as we know bones are used to fuel the bonfire so are these undead because this direct if they are on dead bones and this relates to the people inside as there is a bonfire very near here and bonfires being needed to be refueled isn't something we re we really explore in dark souls um other than i suppose when you defeat udex gundyr and um put the fire poker let's just say in the in the basin and the flamer lights in dark souls 3 allows you to fast travel to the high wall of lothric but you know if how long did the fl how long do bones burn for they bone to the undead presumably a very very long time but maybe they eventually you know burn away and use themselves up so you have to keep it fueled i guess i'm just trying to think of why a reason why these bones are here if they're warning if it's just some part of some shaman worship i'm not too sure maybe i'm reading a bit too much into it it's easy to do in these games anyway let's open this door and see who waits inside what seems to be the ruckus oh my your face the face of the curse it's an undead an undead has come to play [Music] they all end up here all the ones like you you spoke to that kind of deer didn't you you're finished you'll go hollow yes you'll become one of them hollows prey upon men feast upon their souls this is the fate of the cursed [Laughter] [Music] what is your name so they are familiar with travelers seemingly open their front door and they seem not so serious about this event like it's happened too many times for them to take seriously there are three very old women and they are familiar with the old deer that must be the woman in the cabin that we spoke of as i mentioned people believe her to be the fire keeper and i too do believe her to be the fire keeper that is missing and she would have been sat in that empty chair now our name to respect the og the man who started the law the man who made me fall in love with this game after i originally dropped it out of rage enb epic name bro marcus this goes to you at least you know your own name here's your reward for sharing it's a human effigy take a closer look who do you think it's supposed to be think back deep into your past yes it's an effigy of you [Music] now [Music] how are we able to see ourselves in the effigy that's really interesting if you'll notice the effigy held a black swirl in the center and that black swirl to me is very reminiscent of their fire keeper soul it kind of takes the same passing that can be seen in those souls in dark souls one and fire keepers are a breed of humanity or for humanity beneath their skin riles uncountable amounts of humanity that swarm and bite their very being and that humanity causes mutations and that's something we may get into as we continue with dark souls 2 but for now we will select we will select probably a night our gift shall be a petrified something as we can use this to potentially gain better items and that is how we'll look we may change our hair i forgot on how you move in this in this character creation how do we move okay after a bit of fiddling i've now selected what my guy should look like not much of a looker i didn't do too much customization what it will do i mean he's soon to have a helmet on his head so it doesn't really matter and even though i named him ian b i didn't make him look like e and b as again i don't have much time to mess around in the character customization and that is not the point of this series we are focused on law and the nitty-gritty detail should i say not our personal character and what they look like so just to go over we selected the knights for our gift we selected the petrified something and we shall now finalize our creation this is my true self all people come here for the same reason to break the curse you're no different i should think um doesn't stand a chance well you never know [Laughter] 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 lose your souls all of them over and over again [Laughter] and here we are we stand in the ghost of another player we are vibrant very white have not seen the sun in a while but speaking of the sun it is a ball of fire and fire is what these old women keep or they once did important detail though is to note there are three flames on this table the fourth flame is the fire which the old woman sits next to and of course there is a fire keeper missing so each fire keeper used to look after a flame do these flames represent something does this symbolize something i'll see if you believe the woman in the beginning intro to be the fire keeper and of course this is where she would have once sat but the robes that she wore in the intro have faded and kind of muddied again that is either due to her living conditions or time [Music] if we are indeed being sent to the past and of course the robes that she wore well she she wears have faded you to time it's a really interesting thing about as i mentioned the old woman what these old women don't seem too serious about curing the curse and why we've come here to cure our ailing mind they tell us about souls and they tell us we will go hollow they tell us to trust along to the kingdom as if it's all one big joke as if they've been here as i said too many times for too long of a time and i've seen it all and nothing is new they have given up hope [Music] but how much how much time have these fire keepers sat within this tree telling people to trust along to the kingdom well this npc might give us an idea of just how long they've been here so let's speak to her name is milibeth i believe this is a limbo a link between drangleic and the outer world fair traveler i know that you must have a story why else would you visit such a place this lost decayed kingdom that kingdom of course is drunk like she's referring to i also want to make notes the woman who sent us here the woman in the cabin spindling the thread she said that the kingdom far off to the north the walled kingdom she said it has now drank not drunk lake lordran it has walls yes of the berg and even the city of anor londo has walls of one side the other side is not fully encased with walls the city of the gods although you may be led to believe that if you're looking up from the berg but my point being lordran has natural walls it sits high above the lands below it you know so it's got that natural fortification and lordran rising and being above the lands the other lands out in the world is a point i've made in my another pilgrimage lothric rising is a topic that is discussed in dark souls 3 and of course lothric is the capital and kind of mirrors lordran and anor londo in that way so i suggested my own in an undead pilgrimage if they introduced that idea of a kingdom rising in a very similar fashion to what lordran looks like then perhaps lordran 2 also rose from the ground on purpose or by accident there is a arch tree that grows through the mountain with its branches jutting out and covering filing shrines so perhaps that ties in with why it why the part of the world rose from the ground as the tree sprouted it took a bit of the earth with it perhaps i'm not too sure but just interesting to think about maybe that was an early idea that they didn't know how to implement in the first game and then why by the time the third game came around they found a way uh to integrate it and to form a story around that event and that event occurring but anyway interest my point being is drang lake is referred to as a walled kingdom almost and the reason why it's walled could because of many reasons but potentially this ties in with the giants as fortifications were made to fend off the giants and to stoke fear into the giants huge statues of men on the coastal line we'll see in the forest of fallen giants so maybe there are walls similar to those found all throughout jungle lake in places we the player don't get to see i don't know it's just an interesting thing to think about i went on a bit of a long tangent there but it's me you guys know what i'm like all right we'll re-speak to middlebury i'm pretty sure her name's miller beth my name is yes it is thank you love the old women wants fire keepers i am here to look after them it is what my mother did and her mother before her and so on so there we go i've suggested how long they've been here inside this cozy little cottage this wooden cottage um and a long time miller best family for generations have served the fire keepers now as i mentioned fire keepers beneath their skin writhe untold amounts of humanity and humanity is life humanity is what humans carry within while all carry all humans carries the dark side humanity humanity is used to fuel the fire hence why they're fire keepers if sat hats in dark souls won a bonfire which is being looked after by a fire keeper is naturally set to 10. we can restore the form of a fire keeper by returning the soul to the body um anastasia anastasia should say is example of that where she wants lay beneath fire keep well fire link we give back her soul and she takes back her form so that might explain why these women have been alive for so long due to the humanity and the powers that can be used with it another form of undeath yes but not like hollowing they retain their mind and are still sharp and witty even where they're even with their age and their age is also brought into question with another npc and that npc can be found in medulla and is rather fury and quite feline so speak to millibeth again the old women were keepers of the fire but now the fire shows signs of fading and the kingdom is beset by hollows the fire shows signs of fading now i would say the fire is not only showing signs but it's almost fully faded for those who completed the game we see no evidence of fire of a flame still smoldering in embers like we see in dark souls 1 that we then relight we have a kiln and a throne which you sit upon almost like we are yet to gain fuel for the fire but we never see that example of fire being re-lit if you choose to link the fire that is if you do if you choose dark ending you'll see flame being snuffed out has to be expected but really interesting uh milibeth will give you an item called the ladle depending i've forgotten the what's required to do that you have to advance through the game and return here and she will give you the ladle uh many people have done challenge challenge runs with that weapon i believe lobos junior did one lobos junior also did a challenge run way back in the day before school of the first sin i believe in the vanilla dark souls 2. he did a run where he held a torch and he could not let it go out so that meant he couldn't roll in certain sections especially the shrine of armana and if you've never seen or heard of lobos jr definitely check him out he's a twitch streamer and does dark souls challenge runs and very entertaining great guy anyway above the room we see storage we see tables we see sacks we see pots it's definitely seen better days and i'm not sure what the fire keepers live off but as i mentioned about humanity perhaps they don't need to eat to stay alive perhaps eating is just a pastime or something that one can enjoy but if one doesn't need it one could untrain themselves to enjoy it you know what i mean so any provisions left up here is probably for milibeth because she's very much human and due to the dialogue about her family serving the fire keepers you know she she can die anyway in this chest which is a wooden chest compared to dark souls 1. um you can break chests in this game if they are wooden and any item within that chest if not picked up before it's broken will turn into rubbish so don't be smashing any chests in fear of mimics as mimics can only occur in i believe it's mostly metallic chests if not all metallic chests anyway we will read the human effigy which of course takes the silhouette of a human and as i mentioned there's that spiral in the center very reminiscent of the spiral that can be seen on the fire keeper's soul at least to me it is a warm soft shadow-like effigy use this item to reverse hollowing it also weakens the link to other worlds preventing invasions and most cooperation appear closely at an effigy and one begins to perceive a human form but those who form but but whose form it depends sorry butchering this but whose form it takes depends on the person looking so this isn't unique to us as i mentioned all humans carry the dark soul all the wants carries of the dark soul we know the dark soul could be gifted it could be held it could be taken in dark souls 1 so does the same still apply here it seems the humanity has been replaced by the human effigy it's not only an effigy of the person who looks upon it but it's also an effigy of its former self this kind of burnt up husk is a reminder of what humanity used to be kind of similar to humans so really really interesting you make an effigy in the image of something and of course effigies are then burnt and depending on who looks on it as said by the description it will change which i think is really cool again humans we all had one common ancestor the furtive pygmy so this could explain why any human can look upon this object and see themselves within it because we are all linked we are all a part of one family you know um we'll read the sword actually it won't say anything new the broadsword is a very good weapon i believe this was marcus's favorite um and the dark souls two days he used this a lot i believe the straight sword is sufficient in most respects and effective in most situations if wielded properly those who aspire to master the sword are certain to wield this at some point during their journey and the set we wear actually is the falcon asset armor worn by the volgan falconers domestic vulgar soldiers are infamously timid so it is no wonder that the fierce band of mercenary falconers was hired to compensate so the vulgar soldiers could be a reflection of the society there's no need for violence for war in volgan and we'll get more on volgan and we'll find more people from volgan when we go to medulla but really really interesting um so due to that culture in that society being interested in other things that aren't revolving around war its soldiers became weak and the powers that be had to hire mercenaries to fill that role of intimidation if you've watched attack on titan you'll be familiar with the soldiers kind of becoming complacent with their duties gambling drinking you know there's no threat due to the wall it keeps out the titans until of course that fateful day the wall comes down and then they have to defend themselves and their people and they run away they hide the coward in fear and they are useless they're not up to the task because they become complacent with their easy lives anyway in practice they serve as bodyguards for the affluent elites and they serve well such that nobody dares scrutinize their backgrounds now the falconer is the falcon has set um you will actually encounter phantoms i don't think the phantoms actually i just think they're normal looking enemies anyway in new game plus when you spawn into things betwixt you'll be attacked by falconers and their falcons but they are a reference to the band of the hawk or it's a fan favorite theory that they are reference to the band of the hawk and of course the band of the hawk is from berserk and we're not going to get too much into the inspirations taken from berserk in the soul series because there's many many many videos out there for you to watch if you're not familiar with berserk that is if you if you aren't please go watch berserk the 97 anime is the pinnacle of all animes in my opinion it's my favorite anime and if you've got the money do you buy the manga um and if you've got the extra money definitely by the special edition leather bound books that i've been releasing over the past few years i think there's probably about eight of them uh each edition holds three or four volumes i forget i've got three of them myself they are beautiful books and definitely the best way to get into the manga as they provide bigger pages bigger images of the scenes and yeah they're beautiful usually about 30 to 50 quid depending where you go they're usually on sale on amazon for 32 pounds in the uk that is i can't speak for anywhere else if you want to get into berserk but the 97 anime will suffice if you're not into your manga and even the golden arc three movies that released in 2012 they are pretty good um but don't watch 2016 2017 berserk we don't talk about that anyway what we do talk about and talk to is the woman in red or the women in red fire keepers most of them do laugh but some of them do give us juicy information and we if we do return here they will give us some items you must go on a journey without rest well i suppose if you find yourself at an arm pass but if your will is yet unbroken then you may return here to start again with a clean slate [Music] now what she's referring to is the soul vessel now the soul vessel is a stone containing soul or multiple souls i can't remember the description of it but the soul vessel allows you to redistribute your attributes and change how you want your character to be um so it's great way to respec you find some in your adventures in drang lake but also this lady gives you one i can't remember the total that can be found but you can respec as many times as you want depending uh how many soul vessels you do have speak to this one [Laughter] she just finds it hilarious again could be a reflection of their age could be going a bit senile but again could be a reflection as i said they've just seen it too many times and now they find it hilarious you know it's a fool's hope to stop the spread of the curse and relight the age of fire because presumably these being fire keepers it's safe to say that they wish to see the fire continue and not fade [Laughter] perhaps because they were once fire keepers they've already given up their duty so perhaps they no longer believe in the age of fire and no longer see it as a necessity they've left their duties and now they just act as shepherds and we are the lambs getting led to slaughter except for we don't only die once we die again and again and again and with each death we lose our mind and if we lose hope we hollow we shall leave this horrible place and we shall talk about this area now i mentioned aldia earlier due to the cobalt and the static stalactite stalagmites or petrified trees if you want to think of it that way obviously i mentioned in dragon airy uh there's a structure built atop tall rock pillars stone pillars and that's where the wyverns live and a certain ancient dragon but we won't talk about that because that's a whole another can of worms my point being is aldia he does have implements over this area because we will find another creature belonging to him just off and up to the right here and also the fact that there's signs of fortifications of structures again was this once inhabited rather interesting we see broken trees snapped completely destroyed again they are hollow could this be a result of whatever left these footprints i believe to be so now what we see is a thick hided one-eyed cyclops hippo creature now i've forgotten the actual name of these things but they are god awful i do own the collector's edition of dark souls 2 i brought it way back when it released as dark souls 2 released in march i believe march early april i can't remember the uk release date anyway i saved my birthday money from the months prior and purchased it and it only cost 80 pounds it came with the faram knight statue a cloth map the art book uh the steel case and some other goodies as well um so i do know i do own the collector's edition and i also brought the the guy the official guy to go with it but it's rather interesting they never released a updated guide to consider scholar of the first sin so a scholar of her sin offered or inserted a lot of new things changed some things around so that guide for playing this version of the game is kind of redundant in a lot of cases but anyway scholar the first sin people love it but some people don't um they have some issues with it mostly due to enemy placement as it became a gank fest and i do completely agree with them in the old iron forge area the old iron keep should i say iron forge is from world of warcraft um the old iron keep there's many many certain type of enemies and it's just ridiculous to get through but enough about that let's fight this one enemy huge huge creature pounces if it grabs you it will bite your head off and this isn't the only one we shall find in this area the concentration is real yeah just bait out those attacks get him to roll down do the one two and it's rather simple you can go behind him and he will d he will do a butt stomp dart source 2 added a lot in terms of animations and how enemies attack and their animations rather interesting many enemies will have an attack that will surprise you if you try and get them at the rear um these are an example of that also the ironclad knights will roll on their back if you try and backstab them or approach from the back oh god that source dead i'm pretty sure yeah we're dead you see how he oh you see how he truly chews on your head but yeah dark souls 2 really went into and tried to invent the wheel in terms of animations um the parry animation the backstab animation and i like it i really like it for that and of course dark souls 3 kind of returned to the old format and how dark souls wanted things and due to these changes and other changes people don't really like dark souls 2 amongst many other reasons oh god we look terrible we look horrendous now i will admit dark souls 2 is the least polished dark souls game but as someone who's been around the community for a very long time for 10 years and was involved in the hype and the community when dart souls 2 was announced or when it was just a rumor and as i was following the development and just can sympathize with the team that was left with making dart souls 2 a complete package i've come to appreciate it and i've always appreciate it dark souls 2 definitely needs to be remade it definitely needs to get the demon souls treatment we need to have a dark souls 2 2 100 but will we ever get that i don't know but i always thought the demasol's remake was a fool's hope but we got that in the end so never say never basically never say never um i do advise if you weren't around the community at the time definitely go back and watch the dark souls 2 reveal trailers gameplay trailers and the best trailer to date hands down in the soulsborne franchise is the dark souls 2 announcement trailer now it is a cgi trailer it does not reflect the final product at all but as i said as someone who has been around since the beginning thought we were going to get the the product that we eventually didn't get due to many reasons complications lighting systems project beast and internal problems with from software that trailer makes me excited but also sad and it's just such a cool trailer it gives me chills and it makes me a bit emotional till this day so if you've watched that trailer you can hopefully relate if you haven't it's the announcement trailer uploaded on the 10th of december 2012 again so many years now nearly soon to be 10 years ago as of next year so that's a scary thought i've been playing these games for two too many years oh but they never get old does what does get old though is this thing so we're gonna take him out or attempt to i'll try and show off his there we go his butt stump and due to our low adaptability which is something we will talk about when we come to leveling up we kind of move slow we do things slow and adaptability is another thing that people don't like um i will completely agree that the inclusion of soul memory was a bad idea and they tried to mitigate this problem by introducing certain items um so players wouldn't be affected by soul memory and again i've referenced it i think i've referenced it illusory walls is video on dark souls 2 dissected he's made three i believe he talks about souls memory in the first episode so if you're unfamiliar with the mechanic and the system or maybe you are familiar with it you just don't understand it which is perfectly reasonable because dark souls the series isn't alien to having obscure and quirky mechanics definitely watch illusory walls video and definitely just watch his channel as he's excellent content creator and has been around and digging into the game's files for years now um for many many years so i can't have enough high price to say about illusion wall because his content is fantastic and i always enjoy it anyway the cyclops hippo thing forgotten the name dropped a stone ring the stone ring reads the beloved ring of the gallant shieldless lothian formless formerly of furosa hits greatly reduces enemy poise the effect may seem trivial but for those who can comprehend how critical it is to exploit the hole in enemy defense the significance of this ring will be clear now shieldless luthien i believe there are other items that reference him and the land known as feroza the falling kingdom is also something that is widely referenced uh through the many i'm descriptions in this game again the faram knights are knights of ferocious or former knights of ferocious when feroza fell many of its knights became mercenaries which then got hired by different kingdoms and we will see hopefully we may get to a headless mercenary um a bit later on he has some excellent dialogue and an excellent voice actor and we shall be uh so we shall equip it there we go again sometimes can't get me words out i hate it as i specialize in content that has to discuss you know and the pronunciation of names and areas is especially important in law and sometimes i can't do it and it angers people and i'm sorry i can't say words sometimes as i said it's more annoying for me than it is for you but yeah here we see that crack like crevice in the cave as i said it looks like a certain something that we were all born from so no more on that unless i get demonetized by youtube we will be getting the binoculars because if you're familiar with me you do know the binoculars are the best item i think um in all the souls games that enables me to look at the nitty-gritty details so we'll be getting them shortly as we enter as we exit the tree we are still encased inside of what seems to be a cave but if you look closely you'll see that the walls behind the tree are yet again wood so trees within trees if you're familiar with dark souls 1 you know about the great hollow this isn't anything new that we're seeing so really interesting we see this stone tablet bonfires are placed places of respite you may also like torches on them again this mechanic of torches light and dark the lighting engine was scrapped i believe i've already referenced this or i could be incorrect if i haven't but crobats video comparing the game we never got from the e3 gameplay compared to the final product definitely go watch that video i will leave it linked in the description and yeah the light mechanic had to be scrapped because the game was unplayable in certain areas and they couldn't get a consistent frame rate they also had other things like um physics different physics engine i believe and this is also evident in that gameplay reveal from all those years ago so yeah really sad when you compare the two but you know there's pros and cons to both versions of the game we get a torch and a lost soul of undead and this this part in it just teaches you the player that hey environments are destructible and they may take one or two more hits um so just just be careful if you see an item you might be able to break the object that obstructs it rather than just roll through it because dark souls 1 you'll be familiar with just rolling through everything this one in dark souls 2 you have to hit things most of the time the effect of light in the bonfire i absolutely love as the embers kind of flutter out in a circle in a dome encompassing the fire it's just brilliant we shall light a torch and we shall head on and we see the light shining down upon us from the questionable crack in the cave's wall we also see there are many many other trees that we can enter and there are sconces that we can light now in school of the first sin i believe they added this in i didn't mean that to rhyme but it did if you like all the sconces you'll be invaded by an npc now i don't think this was in the original again because i played so much of scholar the first sin some of my memory between the original and scholar the first sin has been affected so i often get mixed up between the two i'll claim or think that one was in this game when it isn't and it was actually in the original game and vice versa so if i get items or enemy placements mixed up forgive me i've played too much of both versions of the game and i've been around for a long time and my mind's cracked due to just how much these games are played and they all merged into one same problem with the dark souls one remaster although nothing really changed in that remaster and you can't really call it a remaster just to kind of [ __ ] on it again um i often get sometimes confused between the two because there were some subtle changes between the original anyway we shall enter these trees and we will see what lies in weight we see there's more stone tablets again these serve as the tutorial messages instead of being placed on the ground like dark souls 1 they are now on these nicely squared off pieces of stone and we see this this texture this writing now if you want to call them runes this lettering is not seen elsewhere in dark souls i don't know what i don't want to say that but it's not the kind of nordic runes you've seen on titanite and dark souls 1 this is a new language and i don't think this can be deciphered in any way it's just um gibberish essentially but the sigil above the right the writing and the writing itself can be seen on the victor stone i believe in the jeweler and that we will explore in a sec well after we finished the things were twixed you can see the hollows where the same imported tunic that we did so presumably these are other travelers to the past who've gone hollow pretty quickly and now the an obstacle to those who come after so just really interesting detail that we are fighting those who failed on their quest they fell at the first hurdle so to speak again me talking about aldia for those who are familiar with this game we see yet another hippo ogre thing and it is overlooking a coffin now that coughing is excellent again it's everyone knows what it does now but in the beginning um it was hilarious to hear people's stories hours after they've hopped out of this coffin they take off their helmets they take off their armor and they realize their sex has changed as that is the sex-changing coughing you can turn male or female depending what you originally started with and yeah it will mostly keep your features the same um your hairstyle and whatnot for the most part but you may have certain assets that you once didn't really really cool you can see that we can obviously go there with the fog wall and we just get to see the size and scale of these trees very reminiscent of course of the arch trees found within ash lake and of course the arch trees are offsprings of the original arch uh the stone arch trees that were destroyed by the witch and her daughters of chaos and out of the ashes grew the wooden versions and again forest fires and controlled forest fires are often well are a thing because the ash kind of rejuvenates the soil and then life can spring from the ash again familiar with harry potter phoenix is rising from the ash life being born from death as i mentioned certain crack within the wall life being born is an example of that this production these this reproduction cycle all things to consider there's a lot of oh my torch right now um that's what that's what happens when you talk too much a lot of symbolism within dark souls has built around that so it makes great for kind of comparing and you know you may not get something on your first playthrough and you learn something a new about symbolism or history when you play souls again and guess what you have a new perspective on life and you have something to compare to and if you start viewing things differently when you play these games and it's great we can see there i presume that i'm unsure if that um that phantom is oh he hit us is a character or is an npc phantom mpc phantoms aren't unique to dark souls and i can't remember if they appear in dark souls 1 but in demon souls when you're in the forlorn outpost or that's what it was named in the remake there is a npc phantom that kind of shows you the way it runs up some stairs and again illusion wall kind of plays with this and shows this off into his demon souls compare through the episode 2 is currently out time of recording so definitely go watch that um and when you spawn in the things betwixt there's a phantom that instantly runs ahead through the tall grass so i'm not too sure if that phantom was that same phantom kind of showing us through the level again illusory war may have shown this off in his dark souls 2 dissected videos but i can't remember it's been a while since i've watched them projectiles pretty good bow builds are very viable in this game i will say more so than the first so it's excellent to try and try and do i didn't i've never done one personally but i will say definitely invest in the bow or think about a bow because there's a certain area in the game called shrine of a mana i've already referenced it when talking about lobos junior you give us um you'll need a bow for that area yes that's all i'll say now this is the crows again something reoccurring from dark souls 1 um however they work a bit better um we're a bit more refined in dark souls 2 as you don't have to quit the game in order to get your item you can just make sure you leave your item not discard it discard it or delete it you drop your item [Music] yeah yeah i didn't actually read the petrified something description so forgive me yes but we will get more hopefully oh when we were gifted a titanic slab that is excellent i'll stand a bit further away i don't want those crows squawking in my ear oh what am i doing forgive me i'm terrible with menus in these games even after playing them so long they change every game they slightly change and it always throws me off anyway i was talking about runes and we can see on the tutorial um stones there that it isn't the same that can be found on the titanized slabs these are nordic runes and again i did do a video if if this is your first time watching on the runes on time tonight and what they mean and the title of that video is tied tonight is the story of creation and that's all i'll say for that so please go watch it for yourself there's a lot many other connections i make with titanite the titanic slab used to reinforce equipment yeah god i've butchered that type knight's lab used to reinforce equipment reinforces equip reinforces equipment up to plus 10 so plus 10 is the max that you can take a weapon in this game there's no plus 15. type knight was discovered in an ancient layer of earth it is said to be a gift of the gods one of the original slabs that provided provided the world with all forms of titanite titanite slabs were created to smith the weapons of the gods or so the legends say so tarzanite was discovered in an ancient layer as i've discussed dark souls 2 and its theme of kingdoms being built on top of kingdoms rising and falling rising and falling of course the further down you go into the earth the further back in history you will also go so go down further off and there's a motorbike that's now passed ruining ruining my recording thank you mr motorbike um further down you go you'll eventually reach the a of the the layer of the ancients and that's where titanite was discovered we've also just gained 200 souls there thank you game so yeah just really really cool and as we know the blacksmith deity smith weapons for other gods and the titanic slabs when peeled could receive special enchantment special elements but you could also get different slabs infused with different elements you know the magic uh the blue tine ice slab the red tie knight slab and the white tie knight slab so again please watch my video on titanite as i go more into that anyway we'll kick down this no stop talking to me stop it they're very irritating in this game i find oh we don't need to do that we can jump down there we go i'm a nameless soldier now as i mentioned aldia is the brother of king bendrick king vendrick was and technically supposedly i suppose you could think he still is the rule of zhang lake although he is absent and we find a soldier here so could this have been a man of vendrick as we do find things belonging to his brother aldia and they do work independently of each other but they did once work together so could that could this course be a result of that could this be just another corpse of a soldier from another land could it be a falconer could it be a man from volgan we don't know could it be a ferocious knight could be anyone we'll go in this one again you don't have to do this you can just strut on a head but it is sometimes fun to do these because i don't always do these um my i use a wired nintendo switch controller cost me 20 quid from game game is the retailer we have in the uk although not for very long i don't think they have they got recently 30 the company was sold to a company called sports direct which which sells sports gear and sports equipment and everything and anything to do with sports as well as big mugs that if you knock over will drench your living room but anyway um so you'll often find some game shops inside of sports direct so i don't think game has got many years ahead of it as it already has had um a lot of reductions and size down quite considerably as we used to have two we used to have game and we used to have game station um both were owned by the same person i believe until game station was kind of merged with game and yeah sad times i preferred game station right over to game i don't know it had something a bit more to it anyway enough about uk game retail history no one cares about that nobody cares well maybe you can relate again amber herb now i'll jump back over this jump used to be worth doing in the original and i can't remember what the item held but it was a pretty good item and in the in school of the first sin as i mentioned changes were made to items and enemies um this jump is now basically useless if you don't require amber herb because i believe it enables you to use miracles oh no oh god why was i holding a not b it enables you to use miracles or sorceries uh at a much lower level but the side effect of that is the side effect is that they're weaker for it of course as you're kind of bringing down the requirements the damage suffers greatly but you know it enables you to make lower level builds kind of based around that is this the way we went i can't remember yeah we can try and parry oh we can't parry a jumping attack i do need a new controller that's why i brought up the fact that i well that's not what i want to do okay so see just how slow the jumping attack is or for that attack anyway do something i'm really rubbish at parrying in this game i need the buckler which i think is slight well it bucklers give you a larger parry window i'm used to dark souls 2 parry times dark souls 2 but come on i can't parry bare handed you know what sort of parry that you filthy casual i'm talking about pvp um me clearly sucking at basic mechanics like parrying um which is not something not many people i've noticed this over the years not many people in dark souls 2 do parry um they often just go for the rolling but people who do parry of course are the kings of pvp and combat because parry is just king um and talking about parry kings are borrow recently returned to drang lake after many years and that was a great sight to see i've recently watched that so if you're familiar with oroboro that should ring a bell if you're a fan of the souls games as he's a legend in the pvp scenes his quest to hate mail is iconic and got many people into pvp back in the day the plunging mechanic is not something that you will often use because again to quote another creator saint right he's recently in the past few months been doing a lot of law throughs um where he's he's done dark souls one he's done demon souls he's done dark souls 2 he's done bloodborne and um not familiar with dark souls 3 but he became popular due to his pvp videos on dark souls 3 and i've watched it for many years now and yeah he's a great guy i find him hilarious point being is um when he played dark souls 2 he discusses how useless the plunging attack is and he's right the plunging attack you barely use it in this game and there's barely any reasons to use it because it's just it's just awful in this game i find it useless anyway someone may disagree with me on that we have an unusual instance where there is an actual door in the tree so i think that's pretty cool um again so perhaps indicating that this place may have been inhabited on a larger scale not just where the fire keepers reside but perhaps that as i said there's more people here once maybe for this door to exist you know and over time people have left and it's been forgotten and now it's inhabited with uh the people who've gone hollow on that quest to enter drang lake i'm not too sure um behind the door more importantly though is we find a cracked red-eye orb defeat the master of the world you have invaded to acquire a token of spite the residual sins of those who have succumbed to dark temptations are contained in the form of the cracked red eye orb so really really interesting there and again invasions and stuff is something we may be able to talk more about when we meet a certain npc inside the huntsman cops but we may not get there due to this only being a mini-series which does sadden me i wish i could play more this game but with my release schedule timer recording and the time of this release another pilgrimage which my dark souls one law three won't be complete um and elder brings release date is too close you know once elden ring is out of the way and i'm sick of playing it which is hard to even comprehend that i'll be sick of playing it but you know it probably will happen i'll need something different we may return to dark souls 2 and do a law three for this game if the demand is there of course because i plan to make many many content failed and ring and presumably it's future dlcs and here a really cheeky glimpse into what you can face we have basically i said that weird basilisks uh returning enemy from dark souls one and again where did we find them in dark souls one we found them in the depths yes but we also found them from uh the great hollow that was where they called home and the basilisks in the great hollow were different to the ones in the depths as when they cursed you the ones being in the great hollow um the form you would take if you would curse was different to the ones in the depths it had like a reddish crystallization while the ones in the depths were black and i believe the ones in the in the great hollow uh were more mean more tougher and their curse build up is quicker than the ones found in the depths i could be wrong on that but again just interesting that we find them and yet again more hollow trees and this tree is obstructed by a petrified corpse and in order to break this petrification we need a fragrant branch of your and you know a branch trees you're you're you're as a giant from dark souls 3. so i don't know if there's any connections to be made from there and the sense of smell as well is something that is also well it's a theme that can also be found in this game and if you play bloodborne you'll be familiar with the kind of theme around smell as many people address you as oh you have the scent of a hunter and in this game too uh we've already i've already referenced a certain furry mpc and she discusses our smell um the fragrant branch of your the smell the sweetest smell um petrifies you um which is just really cool uh these reoccurring themes throughout the games as the games broadcast beast which then became bloodborne well was later known as bloodborne dark souls 3 and dark souls 2 and all the dlcs were made very close together those three years 2014 2015 2016 it was a good time to be a souls player we were having content back to back it was it was fabulous um it really was and you know we've been on such a long drought for elder ring of course people are thirsty for that game and some have even gone hollow as we know so in here through this crevice through this crack we see more trees uh but yet we see the sky so we've left kind of the limbo and we are starting to now reach into the real world we see many player messages many points of death i don't know how people have died if this involves the summon the phantom that spawns in if you like all the sconces i can't remember um you will often find a illusory wall ahead message as this one beware of pointless now there's usually one knocking around here and i can tell you if any new time players there is not illusory wall in here do not believe their lies be wary of beware of lyre ahead should i say praise the son praise the son indeed so out of the dark we are given lights and we bear witness to majula now again this theme of reproduction and sex where do we come out of a questionable crack and what is the first thing we see an obelisk a very questionable looking obelisk um yeah i'm gonna leave that to you i don't need to say that to what i'm implying there but uh you know one goes in the other that's all i'll say youtube don't demonetize me and medulla is just beautiful it is absolutely beautiful and again this lends to people calling this game very dreamlike as it is you see the music tripling well you can hear the music trickling it's beautiful we love medjula but before we venture too far we shall jump here because i need to get my favorite item in the game if i don't die we get the morning star and cleric chime we'll read those in a second and we get the binoculars now the binoculars can't be equipped in your usual items in this game they can only be equipped in your hands which is rather unusual and we can see there the rocks jutting out the water and once we go up into majula a bit more we'll be able to see what is lying over there and that is the forest of the fallen giants binoculars are used to appear at distant sites equipped in place of a weapon to use a rare tool crafted in vulgar these won't help you in battle but with a little creativity can be put to good use i believe the original description from the first game states that they are well were crafted in astoria i think or maybe xena i can't remember but definitely a rare and valuable item we find the well we picked up the clerics sacred chime and again chimes have replaced um talismans in this game i've forgotten if you do get talismans instead of chimes but chimes obviously they hold bells bells is an important theme again that can be found without the souls games if you're familiar with bloodborne i shouldn't need to say more on that but we ring the bells of awakening dark souls 1. bell the bells chime and uses a instrument to cast miracles and then demon sorry not demon souls in bloodborne bells can be found on the on the lamps that enable us to go to the hunter's dream and also bells are found on many enemies either around their neck or waist and bells as i mentioned in my now unlisted um play through well semi-law through kind of halloween special of bloodborne um which i will do another for that definitely as i was streaming from the playstation 5 and it wasn't up to quality i liked so i unlisted it i'm afraid anyway i made the point of bells i kind of used to put people in trances and the theme of dreams and realms of reality stacked on top of each other is especially important bloodborne so i made ties to bells and reality and dreams and that but anyway enough about bloodborne um sega triumph reads most clerks receive this as their first sacred chime a catalyst for miracles and hexes again we get a mention of hexes now hexes are basically what we found in the chasm of the abyss in dark souls 1 so hexes have become their own thing and have become outright banned and forbidden in many lands and we will read that as we go on if we get to those points but there's a new type of magic that you can practice in dark souls 2 and hexes are overpowered much like the dark sorceries are in dark souls 1. anyway to use miracles equip the sacred chime and to tune a miracle as a bonfire the strength of most miracles is affected by the caster's faith and as i mentioned many miracles and their their roots and where they can be traced back to him their legitimacy has been is great questions a lot in this game and really cool thing but again it all depends on your faith if you believe it to be true you can cast that miracle depend not it doesn't matter if it was real if you think it was if you think it happened it can happen and this is where we go to the forest of the fallen giants but first we shall discuss a jeweler and again on the point of forest of fallen giants um from software love to use a light as an indication of progress or where to go and here we see a sconce already lit and we've kind of become familiar with that in the things betwixt um so yeah that should pull most players down here but often it doesn't many players go to heist tower of flame in other scots of assault a much bigger one and we'll talk about that when we get there as i do plan to get there as that's usually the second area many people go but we will start kind of around the outside and work our way into the obelisk so this leads to the the forest the shady woods and stuff we won't be going that way um i do want to mention though if we stand can we stand on this rock yes we can hello fellow player that's obsidian tower is not barrodu it is drangleic castle and it's beautiful and it's very rainy and wet over there and that is somewhere where we won't get in this series but that is where the throne of want lives and our eventual destination lies we also see ruins again very reminiscent really of oolacile you know i made the connection with the gazebo in things with twix and we kind of see these colosseums again that got me excited when i first played the game i was like my mind raced with possibilities and then i panned my camera to this which is an aqueduct now this model of aqueduct vati video ref uh brought this into made this a topic in one of his videos discussing the reuse of this model as it's seen all throughout the dark souls games and they've implemented it in many places and i can't remember the exact video but it's very true if you play the souls you you know this model will seem familiar to you and me being a dark souls one player of course when i played dark souls 2 i thought an aqueduct i wonder if that's the way to go and i got excited with the thought of having to go there and walk on top of it or through it you know because walking through aqueducts uh was a common thing in dark souls one and we see more ruins there on the hilltops and we see again the great mansion which we'll explore and yeah these kind of shunt it's a shanty town really medulla repairs have been made with the wooden roofs and such but you can probably lead to well it's ev i don't know if the mansion was ever finished or it's just been left to ruin but we could see structures over there they once had stone roofs so if they could do it over there then perhaps these structures once held those you know similar stone roofs but due to time and erosion they've worn away and crumbled away and got kind of hastily replaced with wood and yeah medulla what purpose it served its history is to be speculated about but we can see due to the entrance to the forest of the fallen giants and the side entrance there and the archway we would have had to initially originally walked under you know it seems this town was walled off and protected for the most part but again due to time it's eroded away and the ruins have crumbled and collapsed on top of one in one another was this attacked by giants or as i said just attacked by time the sea breeze and currents and salt water does erode many things if you live near a sea town your car will get rusty quicker i believe um due to the sea air so again this all factors in probably to deteriorate deterio did i can't even say that word the deterioration is that how you say it deterioration whatever you know what i mean uh in medjula i'm still laughing about the obelisk and internally laughing obviously you've not heard me laugh um the breach in the cave yeah yeah i don't need to say any more on that anyway we won't talk about um the pit just yet we'll talk about who's in here now he sat on the floor and when we speak to him we kind of get the notion that he's fallen on hard times and you know him being sat on the floor does that represent the whole fallen on hard times thing because you know the the floor is hard maybe maybe not maybe i'm reading too much into that but we'll speak to him in a minute we'll open this chest as we will be gifted a thai's knight shard now titanite chunks are especially rare in this game this game throws titanic slabs at you you know pretty frequently to be honest it's just chunks that are the biggest worry um so don't get too excited if you're first playing this game and thinking well i'm getting those slabs because chunks is where you'll spend most of your time now the books we see strewn about some are opened falling off sorry part of me falling off the shelf to use the time or someone been through here and kind of runs up the place not too sure but this book this white book is an actual a real book that can be found in real world and it exists and they implemented this in the game and we see many copies of it not just in this room and the structure will see it throughout the game and i believe i was talking about the whole reproduction and the theme of sex and fertility i think this book relates to that in some way i can't remember um but it's definitely a real book that you can find and buy for yourselves presumably it's still able to be bought but yeah this was once a place where we've seen a lot of trade it was a blacksmith's quarters we see um a wooden shield kind of very reminiscent of the [Music] dr i've gotten the exact title but the wooden shield that we found in the berg um that depicts a white dragon um except for this one has a white lion and i think that relates to furosa i think i can't exactly remember we see the leather shield that can be found in the forest fallen giants again we'll get that later i won't be using it and yeah of course we see the the busts uh [Music] containing armor and coast just levitating up the ladder but yeah really really cool but this man is no blacksmith he's a simple trader who sells armor for souls his name is mulligan i believe uh oh hello there welcome to my shop i'm mulling never mind not mulligan oh sorry i please do have a look at my waist i could really use the business if you'd be so kind so mauling the armorer again he really needs the business doesn't see many customers he sells what we already have that being the falconer set i mean we don't have the falcons helm so we shall purchase that we won't be using a shield well we will but it will be a a buckler as i do want to get into the parrying and we shall talk to him i came from the west from vulgar have you been there it's a lively place vibrant with trade very competitive of course and you have to grease the wheels to get anywhere but i didn't have the funding for that so i left home in hopes of striking gold it's been years since then i've i've made very little headway i don't even know why i'm still here everything's all run down and dying it was terrible for business really again this theme of people not knowing why they're here even though the place has left the room and it's crumbling as he says it's dying and yet they still remain in the carcass of this once former kingdom and they don't really know why they're still here a group calling themselves the blue sentinels have gained much power in vulgar you can't even run a shop without their blessing they claim to be working for the greater good place absolute hogwash [Music] so the blue sentinels is the name we'll find and something we can actually well depending on the item if we get it we can actually join them um blue sentinels have a big [Music] what's the word they have a big presence within hyde so really interesting it seems if you're not on the right side of them they can make your life difficult uh mauling said you need money to grease the wheels if you haven't got those funds as an up-and-coming starting business you'll be pushed out by the bigger the bigger fish so people who can't afford to live that life or don't want their fingers and toes chopped off i guess um [Music] they leave in search of business elsewhere in outward lands but yeah volgan is a very it's great to imagine volgan um rich bustling with life and trade many people from different walks of life but of course it's all just a facade you know deep below well not even that deep it's all skin deep if one just pays attention you'll see that it's probably riddled with corruption and backstabbing and everything i know everything and everything that goes along with that you know paying the guards paying the falconers to go and ruffle up your rivals i can imagine it's not a very nice place to live if you were born there but for a traveler it probably seems quite a pleasant place an exciting place but of course as i said there are dangers that lie in the many alley alleys and corners of that city i can only um imagine again this is nowhere in the game i just like doing this with these games imagining things that don't really matter but it's what makes these games so good so you can do that oh by the gods why the hell am i here thanks very much and do please come again [Music] so the more money you spend on uh maulin the larger his inventory yeah the larger the larger his inventory so he will sell you boss gear so again always come back here um i think the amount to get him to open up more is what like two or four thousand souls i believe um so we may have to spend a bit more money on him to see more items um in his inventory but yeah always check back with him check if he's got boss items and stuff some of them are pretty cool or but very heavy it's part of me very heavy usually right my voice is going um i need under the drink drink god i can't speak i need another drink to lubricate my vocal cords so be back in a flash [Music] okay guys i'm back got a drink pint of vimto to be precise gotta love him so it's just too good so we'll leave mullen or mulligan as i named him um and his little shack there and we'll explore what else can be found so we will try the door of this mansion but yet we find it's locked so we'll come back to that much later as the npc who holds the key can be found in forests of the fallen giants and here we start to see kind of interesting in interesting ways to interact with the environment if the stone is hit a corp shall appear and on it holds an ester shard [Music] now we shall read it over here because i don't want to aggro what's around that corner and we'll get to them when we get to them uh where's this it's uh it's it's right there never mind so in dark souls 2 you don't need a fire keeper's soul in order to reinforce justice flasks you just need a shard now of course esther's flasks were we haven't got one yet actually we'll be given one in them well shortly when we eventually go over there esther's flags were created from fire keepers souls so from the shards of flasks that were made from fire keepers souls we are able to reinforce our own flask the shard of an estus flask shards are deeply soaked in estus graft the shard to an ester's flask to increase flask uses over the ages countless souls rested their bones as they drank from the original flask and now this shard remains serving as a vestige of their hopes and dreams so again rather interesting fire keepers and their use seems to have phased out i can't speak for vendrick's reign and rule and time during the age of fire but you know we've speculated of how long the fire keepers within the things betwixt have been around for during were they are well were they born if they can be born if you think of fire keepers like that way but yeah i think they are human um up until their power is discovered and then they are used to something else but anyway massive tangent do the old women predate king vendrick's reign is my point how old are these fire keepers what age of fire did they come from as i've mentioned many kingdoms of risen have fallen many ages of fire have been snuffed out and then rekindled so which one do they come from and this um this description of the original flask is interesting so our flasks handed down those three fire keepers over there are they a dying breed any more fire keepers found or could be found theoretically in drang lake or maybe other parts of the world but they usually inhabit you know the realm of the lords or former lords as that's where things keep re-happening and where life first emerged and flame first appeared and that's where the souls um find new masters and such and such anyway so these flasks there may not be very many of them about there may be a limited number uh through the ages of course many uses they've cracked and broke and now shards only remain of the original flasks and if you're lucky enough to find these shards and you are even even more lucky enough to actually own an sslask of your own you can graft these shards to a flask so you can drink more esters which is basically liquidated fire isn't it so really interesting to think about if i keep as being a dying breed esther's flask be made from a fire keeper's soul and how that may affect the use of estus as we know in dark souls 1 estus flasks are used you know quite regularly uh by the hollows many lords and soldiers use them of course the undead has one and other npcs i think yeah the um the hollow thieves i think also use them in lauren de burgh i could be wrong with that but anyway a lot of people have them so a lot of fire keepers were either killed or sacrificed or you know naturally died and then their souls were repurposed in order to make a flask uh of course that was many ages ago and thousands of thousands of thousands of years ago so it's really cool to think about [Music] anyway what lies in weight down here [Music] are three little piggies now very unusual um enemy to find in the jeweler in one of the gameplay trailers as i've been watching him again today so it's fresh on the mind there are larger piggies that attack the no actually in crobats video where you can play he could he compares the e3 gameplay of the version of the game we never got the character in the old gameplays hit off um presumably the wall of the forest and fallen giants into the ocean below and the pigs that hit them off are much larger but there is three of them i think and i forgot on i've forgotten if yeah i think in certain new game cycles maybe new game seven maybe less maybe more these pigs grow to be bigger and there's also another pig that can be found and that pig can be used to dig up a special well fairly special item the pickaxe uh but again you have to lead them down and to that location it can be very finicky i've only ever done it once but yeah just again quirky mechanic interesting uh just another example of dark souls being dark souls kind of absurd and a bit weird and these pigs hit like a truck they do a lot of damage and there's no real point of killing about anything i mean we'll kill one just to see how many souls it gives us yeah 20 20 souls you get so it's really not worth the effort if you really want to kill them you can kite them well like the bonfire we'll talk about the bonfire in a minute i just need to reset myself if you really want to kill them you can kite them so they fall into the pits but again for 20 souls it's not really worth the effort now this pit there is dialogue surrounding this pit from two characters one which eventually sits here um and one which resides near the obelisk um it's basically where people throw their unwanted items wherever that may be we see corpses down here now does that mean people got thrown downhill did they fall down here it's up to you to speculate but we also see these carved statues these figures of a woman a hooded woman now this woman has caused many a fan favorite theory um some wild some you know fairly tame of who this could be people um one that really sticks in my mind doesn't mean i think it's true but i just remember this from back in the day people believe this to represent the emerald herald which is situated just over there we'll talk to her in a sec um due to the poison that they can spit again these ones don't spit poison but that can be interpreted as you know telling lies and kind of the the quest given to the bearers of the curse you know so remember that there's many other connections people make to this being the emerald herald uh there's also due to the person who can be seen attempting to create one if we want to call that or repair one people believe the woman who's debated to be related to that individual that individual being the rotten yeah i don't know to be honest um but it could also represent um because the the dlc shoulder the sunken city again we unfortunately won't be able to get to experience that in this mini series but there are certain npcs in there who this could also represent and again for a first time player i don't like jumping the gun and mentioning names that many people won't be able to familiarize themselves with if they haven't played dark souls 2 or haven't you know completed it or not that familiar with it so i will be mostly talking about law that we are encountered but there are some instances where some instances where our obviously references reference things that we may not get to reach for ourselves in this mini-series but for the children stuff i'll just leave it there uh please go play the game shoulder the sunken city is my favorite dlc of dark souls 2. i love that dlc to death it's fantastic anyway inside this shack we find a cat a cat sitting on a stool again quite um disturbing really if you saw your real cat do this it's a huge cat so presumably it's a maine [ __ ] if you know the maine [ __ ] breed of cats they are massive bigger than most small breed of dog and they're lovely they're lovely type of cats i've had some myself my family has anyway anyway we will talk to this this eyed cat oh i'm dead are we and one without much time remaining just about ready to fall apart i'd say not exactly the time to be chatting with a cat well suit yourself oh yes you may call me anchante so what did you want anyway oh you smell wonderful [Music] again there's that theme of smell that mention of smell as i said and she's called sweet shalqua or shaliqua however however you say her name it's very um yeah she's very interesting character um sweet could also reference you know smell or sweet kind of being sarcastic because she's not really sweet is she she's kind of her compliments are like uh double-edged swords you know she's been a while she's been around for a while i saw we'll say we'll get more on this character when we speak to the fight well not the fire keeper sorry the emerald herald she does have some dialogue about this furry individual the item she sells is rings now the first one is the ring of the evil eye eyes again being an especially important theme found throughout the souls games especially in demon souls and especially in dark souls and even in dots well dark souls sorry and especially in bloodborne that's what i meant to say but it can be found in dark souls we use red eye orbs we use blue ios we use black eye orbs the abyss when someone is what's the word when they are exposed well when they are in the presence of abyss for too long they grow many eyes which relates to the people of who the seal the sorcerers and the normal folk the abyss mutated them their heads became these wooden balls these kind of rooty wooden balls the sorcerers have wheat and plants growing out their face again these are observations i made in my undead pilgrimage so please go watch that which my law three for dark souls one again it's a sign that even though dark even though it is dark it can breed life it can form life which also links into other themes surrounding dark and it being a creator of life anyway not to get on too much into the abyss but the ring of the evil eye the abyss again cause people to grow many eyes manus also has many eyes although they are red eyes and this eye isn't mentioned to be red but there is a ring that is a called the red eye ring but we'll talk about that in a minute but is a slitted eye much like a cat much like a serpent the primordial serpents also have slitted eyes we will read the description a modest but in explicit uh inexplicable inexplicably disturbing ring absorb hp for each enemy defeated appear too closely at the rare stone that forms the eye of this ring and things that writhe and stir may come into focus so is this rare stone is it humanity in a sense [Music] you know has it been influenced by humanity is it made of pure humanity and by peering into its eye things rather than stir so presumably again the humanity inside of the user is um [Music] what's the word and what i don't want to say unlocked but [Music] yeah basically it's well there it's stirred that's basically the best way to put it much like manus he was tested upon by the sorcerers of oolacile and his humanity became uncontrollable it consumed him and create and turned him into the father of the abyss and he took the form of manus that we know him as so the same can happen to potentially the same can happen to those who appear to this eye this eye is also found in the depths in dark souls 1 and it's in an area that is surrounded by basilisks basilisks dropped the eye of death the eye of death is an item used to level up and well yeah level up in the gravelord covenant in dark souls 1 that's neato's coven and in dark souls 1 this item has the description that a terrible beast attacked a storer so from that description and from this description in this game we can determine that a human so it happened in the time of humans the time of the dark soul well when the dark soul um because humans existed due to the fertile pygmy splitting this dark soul throughout humanity anyway someone peed into this ring and their humanity inside them arrived and stirred and turned them into a terrible beast which then attacked the store and in dark souls 3 rings and pontiff sullivan and people staring into rings and becoming beasts is also a theme that is continued so just really interesting topic long tangent there i know as i said as i've mentioned in my own day pilgrimage the longer i talk the less sense i make so forgive me if i just speak gibberish and it comes out as nonsensical just rambles forgive me i've got too much information on all the games these sometimes get molded into one anyway silver ring depicted a leaping feline reduces damage from falling legend has it that when cats grow old a force brews within them and they are born and they are reborn as something new now is that something new a new entity or is that something new a new cat you know they take another form of a cat so again the the age of shaliqua is also mentioned and she's extremely old she's potentially and i believe us to be older than the fire keepers shaliqua also has uh commentary on the fire keepers themselves anyway we know cats you know cats have nine lives and such so is that also factored into this kind of rebirth maybe she can only be reborn nine times so yeah we can see the ring is very very expensive we also have pants of the feline i forgot if they're not called that but i don't know they might be called that but they also produce falling damage i've forgotten where you acquire them in this game anyway we have the red eye ring again another another mention of eyes a cursed ring depicting a demon eye now demons and the use of the word demon is um it changed a lot in development i talked about this in an undead pilgrimage um we have demon foliage found in dark red garden again demon foliage who wants the the caretakers um i've forgotten the the serfs i believe is their correct enemy name found in the dlc anyway they were once the caretakers of the royal garden of illusion and then they became the demon foliage we have demon titanites and of course we have the actual race of demons came about by the chaos flame and the bed of chaos and people of izalith embracing demon culture and here we have the red eye ring a curse ring depicting a demon eye so what when this is a demon eye what does it mean does it mean you know the demons that we mostly think about the demons from the first game or does it mean something else in this instance anyway we don't know becomes easier to be detected by enemies if it is tranquility that you seek then you should never have left your home if you seek strife then fair enough but no need to overdo it so easier to be detected by enemies um i think this just means you get aggroed if you support this ring and you were co-op in enemies would aggro on you more than they would your partner speaking of demons though the reason why i brought this up is because the next ring is the named engraved ring now i'll just hover over it because when you when you hover over it it flashes it's hard to see what's actually going on but the name engraved ring the runes etched onto its face and the overall shape is very reminiscent to the demon ties knight now the demon titanite spawned from the titanized slabs from the blacksmith deity passed and this is the named engraved ring easy to connect to players who choose the same god who choose same god now the blacksmith made weapons for all the gods he also is theorized in my belief he's also involved potentially with many other gods his identity is definitely fun to think about and i believe he has connections to izalith and of course the city of the gods and he created the stone tablets which are also the titanite slabs and on those slab on those slabs of runes which tell a story for those who haven't yet watched my entire night the story of creation i won't spoil it but please go watch that gives you more context into i believe the titanite deity to be in his history and his past and his uh his death i have much more to talk about on that topic in that um deity because he ties in with other areas that i mentioned and demons and isaac being one of them anyway description a special ring that can be engraved with the name of a god becomes easier to connect to worlds of players who choose the same god there are countless vestiges of long-lost gods in the ruins of drang lake or perhaps they are the very same gods as ours only known by different names and again as i talked about so much time has passed kingdoms are risen and fallen gods may take multiple names even though they are the same deity and this may be many different reasons they've purposely decided to take different identities or their worshipers have disagreed on the scriptures belief systems and name the different things or again just just time and the amnesia of humanity playing a part into that and we get the ring of whispers ring worn by roy the explorer hear the inner voices of surrounding foes useful for locating hidden enemies and perhaps for a few other things as well this ring is vital if you want to communicate with a certain um certain scorpion let's just say that many people believe to be black guy antarcus from dark souls 1 yeah we won't talk much more about that because as i said i don't want to mention too many things if new players are introduced to this game via my series i want you to explore and discover it on your own she sells home with bone a white ashen bone returned to last bonfire wrestler bonfires burn on the bones of undead and this bone belonging to one whose journey was cut short has the power to travel to bonfires as if it years to resume its futile quest we have the prism stones a slightly warm rock emits a beautiful phasing aura of seven colours with very rare eighth the prism stone does nothing special but if you feel you may lose your way you can serve it can serve as a path marker we have the alluring skull now this is pretty useless i think in this game um i can't remember but i've never really used that much in this game i used it a few times in dark souls 1 but i think it's more useless in this game than previous games anyway a skull of unknown ownership smash it to release traces of souls which attract nearby foes does not work on all enemies but can prov can prove useful in unexpected ways and the lawyer's talisman talisman used by cleric knights blocked esther's recovery within a limited area it is said that the cleric knights used these talismans to hunt down a cursed undead clarity knights fight with pride and block and by blocking recovery of undead they can also fight with impunity so almost the same as the description that we found in dark souls 1 and nothing it doesn't really add much more the lloyd lloyd is still mentioned whether he's seen as a god and the uncle of gwyn i can't remember if his heritage is referenced his lineage is referenced in this game or not in dark souls 3 he's thought to be a con man a con artist a fake um a fake false prophet many item descriptions go into people questioning and outright just uh denying his existence actually the denying of existence links him with an item nothing suited you i presume in this game and that's by the academy of melfia they outright deny guineveres existence which i think is really cool who are you again no i'm not serious you do have a rather pleasant scent why thank you i'm quite fond of you know why is that what's our scent does she used to just you does he wish to feast on our face as we sleep because you know cats eat meat and we're like undead meats i don't i don't know um we have not joined any comments this place is already dead everything will crumble and waste away so that something new may be born isn't it wonderful again this theme of rebirth every cycle rising from the ashes this place is fascinating we receive only the most peculiar visitors folk like yourself it's enough to keep even a cat [Music] amused are you going to see the old ones those four who have grown so incredibly ancient they must have sprouted quite a thick coat of moss by now the heavens sake no one even knows their names anymore imagine that yes nothing like yourself for you have a most pleasant scent that grows nicer with each passing day yeah very strange but important dialogue there as i mentioned earlier that i referenced earlier that we will get some revolving around the fire keepers they are referred to as ancient so incredibly ancient she referenced them as the old ones and that they are so old their names have all been all been but forgotten so presumably they might be even older than shaliqua which is just fascinating again as i said at the older than king vendrick's reign [Music] and his kingdom drung lake how far back do these ancient ones go as the term ancient in dark souls can really vary depending on the subject and person ancient could imply thousands of years or ancient could imply a couple of years not a couple years a couple you know several hundred years um it really depends and it makes it kind of annoying when trying to decipher the law and form a timeline as it can be quite inconsistent from my personal experience trying to piece things together have you made friends with the man by the sea he's lost everything absolutely everything the only thing he's good for now is a few tidbits on covenants covenants are a type of well contract you might say you give something to gain something that's the way humans like it right it might be just the thing you need but what does a cat know you know she refers to you know humans so of course she isn't human because she's a cat but was she ever human uh the talking cats this isn't the first time we've seen one in the souls game if you familiar if you're familiar with dark souls 1 you'll know alvina however that cat speaks with a much more of a purring tongue you know she's much more cat-like than than this one so it's just it's rather interesting perhaps sweet uh shaliqua however you say a name is a reincarnation of alvina you know all these times [Music] all this time passed you know she's like the doctor she just regenerates after every season after every uh cycle of the fire she regenerates and takes on a new identity while forgetting her old identity i don't know this is i'm completely making this up as you can probably tell nothing suited you i presume well that's dismay yeah yeah yeah yeah you find a life gem don't give up don't give up skeleton and again more ruins except for we see stairs leading down into the into the rock and that is where we can find hide if we follow that path but we shall not be doing that now here is the victor's stone pick up a homewood bone or five of them and as i mentioned um early in the tutorial area it's the exact same texture um as what can be seen from the tutorial slabs so just really really cool except for this one has been encased by roots essentially the the wood has bent over the stone very strange the shape that it's taken you know but it has a beautiful view of medjula and again the obelisk can we see the npc there head in his hands it's great so the victor's stone enter the covenant this will set you upon an artist's path do you wish to join are you prepared to join join the confidant see how it gives you many messages you know just double checking you want to join as this covenant makes the game a little bit harder chaplin's tablets show the name of the greatest victors of the company of champions covenant this tablet chiseled from the victor's stone is engraved with the names of the brave warriors who have offered the most or stones as if they were epitaphs honoring their lives so we use this item and we shall get a list so there we go if any of you are these names congratulations well done on your your many stones oh god nearly backspaced off the edge then so yeah perhaps these etchings oh i didn't mean to do that perhaps these actions are names you know of former victors champions of the covenant i will probably leave this comment in a short second because we'll have to join another one in order to get an item again the medulla music it's just it's so tranquil it's beautiful i remember in the early days as well when dark souls 2 just came out i obviously people like to um upload the music you know create half an hour or one hour full loops but the medulla music and i believe cole cole ross from the bonfire side chat podcast talks about this um due to how the theme from julia is composed it's not so easy to loop um i remember him just having some commentary on that and yeah if you find very early loops of medjool on youtube from like 2014 you'll kind of see this that they're not um they're not as clean as precise as as fluid as other loops you know use this bit of tidbit you know useless information there no you're not going to do anything with that but just if anyone can relate to that then yeah that one's for you i guess and we see leningrad now oh my god it's because of dark souls 1. right there we go i'm going to keep wasting life gems now leningrad he's a blacksmith on top of his head is a kind of circular some sort or maybe just a fastened band i'm not too sure he's sat here rocking looking rather glum twiddling his his fingers and you can see in his beard um there was a gold i don't want to call that gold ring i don't know a bit of a bit of fashion bit of got a bit of that dwarf and lot going on um and he's locked out he can't get in and again um he can't get in because someone's locked it but you know he could easily just kind of hop the wall and get him but his dark souls npcs don't like that and he's not rather pleased who are you oh it doesn't matter just help me open this door i packed my tools in here seeing it was vacant but now somebody's gone and locked the door so leningrads he's fairly recent he's not been here for a while more than he could you know i i think he's out been here longer than lenon grass i'm not too sure what npc's been here the longest as shaliqua that's what i'm going to keep calling her because if that's not a proper name how you say a name you know what i'm like it'll never happen um she has some dialogue when she spoke about how this place is dying kind of implying that she's new to the area do you know what i mean like it's a surprise to her or a recent observation so she seems pretty recent maulin seems recent yes but i think he's been here for a while because he said he set off years ago from volgan that doesn't mean he's been in drunk lake for years we don't know how far away vulgan is and how long of a travel travel that would be um kale spoilers which is the npc which holds the key to the mansion or has also been and comes to me jeweller pretty recently londongrass of course pretty recent we have the npc up there solden and again he could have been here for a while as he has dialogue yeah i think he's been here the longest honestly um except for the emerald herald of course because she's she's been here forever um oh wow do you see how that texture kind of popped in then i don't know if that was just a trick actually yeah i think i think that's happening yeah anyway whatever stop messing with things so we'll free um london grass well we'll open a gas shop soon because there's an npc that holds it the key for that an opportunist and that npc has interesting hands that's all i'll say so sat at the base of the obelisk is in arbyn knight he wears the knight or elite knight set kind of very very reminiscent of the not the same set that we found in dark souls one if it's not the same exactly the same it's definitely you know looks it um and that that set was worn by a store and nobles if i'm getting my law correct on that one now this tells you the deaths worldwide if you play offline it won't tell you this of course so that's a lot of death for this version of the game and on it we see more runes scratched on the surface some of them are nordic runes yes as i recognize some of them that one especially kind of second one down on the second row second one up should i say um but most of them to me are pretty alien and may just be made up but some of them are real from my short time like this roon this rune at the top left um that kind of zed that z if you're american that symbol that's a rune can either mean um savilo or it's uh bruin which which means sun or it means the u tree and connects with that gigger cell and stuff anyway point being again more language that we can't decipher from an age long gone from a people that are no longer here and on the rear of the obelisk the letters are worn beyond recognition now the structuring of this faded lettering to me looks very similar to what can be found on the victor stone over there and the tutorial messages now this it has no purpose in scholarly first sin but in dark souls 2 for those you remember and were around at the time before the release of the dlc or right at the release this would read a kind of little hint where to go to find the entrance into the dlc and i just thought that was really really cool like it was such a small thing but i just love that that was actually a thing it got me excited and i didn't um read anywhere how to gain access to the dlc i uh all i all i read about was that this told you something new so i instantly checked it you know and i forgotten exactly what it was worded for um for the first dlc the shulver the sunken city but yeah i made it my quest to find the entrance and i eventually did which of course um again spoilers but uh it will help any new players it's near the the rotten that's all i'll say the the gulch so yeah that no longer serves a purpose because obviously no dlc is coming out and this is the full final version of the game the skull of the first sin so just kind of a relic of old ideas um in the distance we see high towers of flame hide towers of flame should i say now hide as you can see it's fallen it's ruined but it's very reminiscent of a certain capital in keep that could be found in dark souls 1 that being anor londo and gwynski presiding in the city of the gods and the tower hides tower of flame if you remember guinevere is said to have left anor londo and married a flame a god flan and many people believe that this is where she um she went she called this place home because of the architecture and other things that can be found within heid and the flaming tower i also subscribed to that theory at the time and part of me still believes that may have been the original tent in very early drafts because dark souls 2 suffers the most from concepts and early ideas not being fully formed and never getting completed and these concepts and ideas kind of living in the final products and meaning different things but if you look deep enough and understand that the development of the game they could have implied many other things if the game took a different direction as i said the development was not smooth to say the least and things were patched together scrambled together to form a full product it was a miracle that we managed to get dark souls to in my opinion and the two directors which i've forgotten the name of who were in charge of dark souls 2. one of them left the company i believe one of them is still with from software massive respect for them and the team that worked on dark souls 2 because they were definitely dealt the shorthand because everyone's attention was on project beast for the most part and uh kind of dark souls 3 was in the pipeline so prom software was very much spread thin between the dlcs and the and the main and new titles but bloodborne definitely took the cake especially for as we know uh miazaki he loves creating new ips he says in the past he doesn't like creating sequels and it is my opinion and will always be my opinion that from software shine at creating new ips not adding to existing ips um and that's evident with the existence of dart souls 2 and dark souls 3. again we know my opinion on dark souls 3 and i'm not going to mention it in this episode i'm going to try not to anyway anyway um all right solden you glum looking fellow what's wrong with you undead aren't you you have that distinct scent the smell of irreversible fate again this another another mention of our scent and smell it is a kind of settlement a place where life is almost normal and in drang lake these days there are very few places like that not very not very many normal places and i agree with him um yeah it's almost normal and there's a huge comfort in medjooler but yeah solden as i said i believe he's been here for a very long time um much like the crestfallen characters um in other souls games he has attempted um to embark on the quest that we now found ourselves on but he's fallen a certain hurdle and given up all faith in himself and the quest and the wider world in general so now he offers partial sound advice to any newcomers um but you can tell he doesn't really have faith in them because he doesn't have faith in anything he's a broken man he is crestfallen anyway far off into the distance we see a huge figure uh facing away from us and that is that is a soldier or heavily armored man that was constructed in order to keep the giants away to stop them invading drang lake and that's something we'll discuss when we get over there but just really cool i made reference to this when in things with twix and i mentioned that drang lake is called well it stated that it's a walled off kingdom far to the north and i just kind of referenced where are the walls you know this is some form of fortification and um deterrent from invaders but we don't see any actual high walls you know that we can look down upon do you know what i mean like it has a natural wall yes i mean the texture is really rare that ugly head from this angle when using the binoculars you can see the outline there um but yeah it's beautiful it is beautiful for gold first sin did a great job anyway solden i am solden and like you i lost everything and now i'm here you probably heard that it was possible to break the curse here well that's not true at all there's nothing here for you mean or anybody do you know much about souls even i'm not certain but i am 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 so he says anything living living or sentient or no supposedly possesses a soul and things possessing souls whether they be made of stone or flesh is something that has continued in dark souls 2 um a lot giants being one of them and the golems that were created from the giants that kind of technology of how stone could be animated again we're kind of getting into spoilers and that kind of ties in with the emerald heralds dialogue when she references that the king appeared into the essence of the soul [Music] but i remember to mention it i've not mentioned it yet um but in the playable in the network test which took place in the huntsman cops um or corpse cops however you want to say i say cops um a certain npc which we are yet to find she sits there and she's stolen in grass key she she is actually or was found there she has a little camp and you could speak to her within the network test and she has dialogue that states she goes when the giants crossed the seas now what she was in reference to of course is the giants type enemies found in this game but at the time because we knew next to nothing about the game uh when the network test was taking place i believe it was in the network test it may have been in a trailer a playable gameplay that got people excited because as i mentioned guinevere left with flame guard flan and before even people before people even knew that hyde was a thing people speculated that that dialogue said by the npc which we are yet to meet is in reference to guinevere and the other gods leaving anor londo and finding a new place to live so that got the community all riled up and got me riled up i was so excited i thought there was a new continent taking place uh you know just near dark souls one timeline wise as i've mentioned in my duke's archives episode of my undead pilgrimage i wish dark souls would have explored the continents named in dark souls one you know i wanted to learn more about katarina especially xena you get so little on z and i want to know more about that you know a story we get so many characters um from there i want to know more about the world from dark souls 1 rather than coming away from that but i liked i love the direction dark souls 2 went they detached itself um from dark souls 2 i focused on the human side of things while of course still tying back to the first game they really tried to separate it's separate and make it something new and that did work in areas but it also didn't work in areas and because as i mentioned it wasn't what people wanted and due to the development cycle and the downgrades people hated dark souls 2 and because it wasn't dark souls 1.5 because it was so different because it looked so different because it wasn't the game we eventually got there were many reasons to hate dark souls 2 and this hate i believe festered as hate does it manifest itself and then upon the release of dark souls 3 and you know well even the pre-release when we get the traders uh the network test and all that good stuff in the hype towards dark souls 3 people were realizing that dark souls 3 was what they always wanted the dark souls 1.5 essentially so that hate kind of read its ugly head again and it spread into the community and anyone who would be new to the souls community for dark souls 3 would then you know question dark souls 2 should i play the the previous games and then it would instantly get dismissed you know no don't play dark souls 2 it's rubbish it's the worst souls and that is true it is the worst souls um but it's still a fantastic souls game because it's it's from software it is a souls game it's just not the best one because as i said it had a short hand it wasn't this version isn't the version we were supposed to get if we got dark souls 2 it would it would have been incredible but we didn't we got this version and i'm happy for that and i love this version of the game i love the vanilla version of the game i love scholar the first sin version of the game i can't wait or if the day ever comes we get a dart souls 2 2 we get a remake um so never say never but yeah my point being is that i believe the hate spread into dark souls 3 and it still lingers there today you see many reddit posts you see many people in other communities you know surely to play dark souls 2. i've heard it's rubbish and i hate that i hate seeing that um yeah i hate it because it's not true everyone should give this game a chance and if you haven't played this game and watching this thank you for watching i hope i've enticed you to play it even though i haven't been playing it much i've been talking a lot about it but that's because i focus on the lore in these games but hopefully you'll be purchasing this game for christmas or the new year before elder ring kind of get this completed and then you can move on to elder ring but anyway that's olden complete tangent uh spawning from a character's dialogue aside let's speak to this crestfallen there are four beings in this land with giant souls and wherever you go from here you'll sooner or later come up against them each has a powerful soul and a terrible curse if that frightens you then you want to just give up right now like i have i'm simply crestfallen i love crest fallen the first one dart souls one's the best obviously he's uh first appeared in demon souls but uh dart souls one's crestfallen i find him hilarious like he's unironically so funny especially when if you're cursed and you speak to him he has a dialogue that essentially goes oh woe is the undead that's cursed on top of it all like i just that's the sarcasm from that man is just hilarious um and this one not so much i think this is my least favorite crestfallen because i don't know he's just not got much personality in this one and after you speak within the first time because he's kind of out the out of the way in an obelisk that you don't really you know once you've kind of been here you don't go here again it means that many people don't speak to him but of course if you unfortunately ignore him you do miss out on his goodies because he does give you some stuff um as you kind of populate with jeweler as he's and he's his mood does actually um he does chirping up a bit and he's the only one out the crestfallens actually um that doesn't end up dead he remains alive i think if i've got that right cry out for help the journey of an undead is long and treacherous you'll face invaders from other worlds at every turn if you need help why not proclaim faith in the blue sentinels when you face danger the blue sentinels will come to your aid protection is yours if you wish you need only accept their kind embrace so this mention of blue sentinels i believe uh mauling also mentioned their name and he wasn't really fond of them um if i'm getting that correct because the blue sentinels um volgan and heist tower of flame all connect and relate to each other but here we have the way of the blue so upon joining this covenant and equipping this ring if we are invaded we will get a blue phantom because this is like the junior covenant the uh the big brother covenant resides in heart in high style of flame but to join that we need a token of fidelity um to join that as evidence of defeating an invader so this is like the baby covenant if you still want to play online but don't want to get invaded there are many ways to avoid getting invaded of course i think does it give burning humanity the fire reduces invasions or your chances of invasions but anyway this is also another kind of barrier to help new players i will say i never really equipped this ring but when i have i i think a blue has only ever come and helped me probably i could fit it on one hand like i've not really been not really been very fortunate with people come and help me from the blue side but it is what it is we get the blue seal that is a wise decision people are weak but the blue sentinels watch over us in their benevolence let the sentinels cradle you in their embrace do you feel lonely here it suits me just fine it will grow on you this place it's jester welcome do you see the way beyond the bonfire that will take you to the forest of the giants there was once a great fort but little of it remains you may just find something there that will be of use on your journey but don't venture too far inside or you might not come back and this fort was built as i've kind of hinted at for the giants the giants invaded as again spoilers i have to give some context if you've not played the game um vendrick stole something from them um and he did this because his wife nachandra kind of goaded him into doing it she kind of pointed across the seas and goes you know they've got something you want and off he went you know again vendrick being a big boy that he was the almighty conqueror and he did conquer them he took something from them and came home with it and as i've as i mentioned this technology was how stone can be um animated through souls i believe it to be anyway um or i yeah i think i think it is due to indrang lake you see these golems that can be animated via souls um and very giant-esque you know and the topic of what vendrick stole was a big um discussion in the early days i remember it being it was more interesting than it actually turned out to be in the very early days upon the release of the game you know because um emerald emerald herald has some dialogue which you'll get where she says um vendrick appeared into the essence of the soul and it just seemed more fascinating to me than actually what it was which is the golem technology um but yeah anyway my point for this was what i can't remember oh yeah the war with the giants wasn't just kind of like a 15 minute thing it was many generations and we'll get to experience that or you will get to experience that should i say when you pass taking giant memories so yeah really really cool um again more evidence of more time and the downfall of drunk lake and just what the people went through constant war for generations your family or your grandfather served the war your dad served the war and now you you're up and being trained to fight the giants this unrelenting force fueled on just fierce hate is great and you know giants and the lore of giants i don't like what they did with dark souls 3 they gave your face but they did it in such such a sly way in the reveal trailer the dark souls 3 reveal trailer where you're um stands out of his coffin and then you know screams in his very deep voice due to his kind of headpiece and his chainmail it looks like he has no face which again is very reminiscent to the dark souls 2 giants but he does have a face um and i just don't like what they did with the giant law in that aspect because i already i love giants as i mentioned in my indo pilgrimage i think giants are one of the coolest points of law and stories within these games for me i just think giants are just dead fascinating whether it be in mythology or or this game's law but anyway solden i've got another tangent mate sorry hades tower of flame lies beyond the far gate there it is over there the apostles of blue gather but the road leading there is perilous the gate is rigged with some contraption [Music] but how it works i just don't know and this contraption links in with an npc that can be found in haze tower of flame as they hold the key have you seen that pit that gaping hole in the earth you mean that one over there i don't know what it's like down below but i wouldn't suggest trying to find out besides you will never make it down there not without a ladder of some sort well we're well we probably won't find the npc but talking about giants in yorm um there's a certain dead uh reference sprawled out on the floor within the capital and he's the master of ladders the flames found in dark souls 3. they exist all across the land beacons to we undead if you are tired try resting beside the flame the flame heals us long ago a woman called the fire keeper watched over each bonfire she kept the flame lit and guarded it from those who would extinguish it i wonder where the fire keepers went yeah just really really interesting you know the old ones though uh so incredibly ancient referenced by shaliqua uh obviously the fire keepers that we know as i mentioned they no longer are at bonfires they are no longer keeping fire because they're all shacked up in that little hook they've got inside the tree and milibeth's family have been serving them for generations their reference of ancients and called the old ones so how long as i said that they've been m.i.a from their fires is just really fun to think about but here yet we see another fire with no fire keeper but the emerald herald she basically replaces that role but she's not your traditional fire keeper and she's got she's got other motives and how she was conceived is also really interesting did you notice any letters on the ground on the way here these are messages that have jumped the fissures between worlds in trang lake the flow of time is convoluted things shift and waver twist and turn poignant wishes dash dreams the messages convey our very inner thoughts if you're will to sold your own falters so yeah here we go we get the um we get the dialogue of timey wyminus first giving us given to us by celeb astora in uh just before the bridge leading into the parish and now scholden gives us here and he refers to drang lake being the place where time is convoluted so again drang lake is um where lordran used to sit um there was a people made some brilliant maps um where they believe kind of jang lake and lordran are situated kind of on top of each other and i believe giant lake is larger than lordran but it also does contain lordran jung lake is massive vendrick took over as i've said many other former rulers um structures and keeps and such but the the law on when certain rulers existed alongside other rulers and kingdoms is something i need to get more clued up on because there's a lot of as there's venn and there's a alkene if i've got those right and there's a lot to do with them there's the old iron king and there's the prince and there's and there's vendrick yeah there's a lot going on um but it's really really cool to dissect and get your head stuck in anyway solden may you find peace on your journey thank you um i'm kind of sick of talking to you now mate so i'm gonna leave [Music] you're getting me down son right well finally we'll wrap up at this conversation i'm not ending the episode so don't worry um finish by talking to the emerald herald now the emerald herald we see a feather that feather is important in the later game she also has red tied around her now as mentioned in the bone of order we see this red thread tied around this bone you will be punished for fleeing from other worlds by disconnecting them just the however this charm will disperse the eye directed at you but sins are not easily buried and there's no telling if you will be let off so easily next time each encounter in life is a precious turn of fate and fate will not be cheated and fate also ties in with the emerald herald as you kind of have some dialogue around that subject i just think that's interesting you know when i assume with red thread she also oh i can't get it right oh no [Laughter] dark souls anyway um gg game as i was saying she also has red fabric whatever you want to call it wrapped around her and i just think it's an interesting thing to make connections with the theme of fate what fate means inside of this game and us as the bear of the curse you know are we another monarch or simply you know another stone in the road whatever she says we'll find out now she also actually has two different coloured eyes if i remember that correctly you can see this by manipulating your camera and peering into a skull i probably won't be able to do it i think she has a brown and green eye oh brown and purple eye there you go and we kind of see the uh melaner in elder ring again not to spoil any too much um just to give some context melanoma an nbc can be found in elder ring she also does she have different colored eyes if i got that wrong you know she has one eyes closed doesn't she i don't think she opens her other eye where am i getting this npc with two color eyes from there's another character in dark souls or the soul series or souls born series that has two different colored eyes and i've forgotten or i might be just making that up ignore that point moving on are you the next manner or merely a pawn of fate bearer of the curse i will remain by your side till this frail hope shatters take this with you may it ease your journey are we a pawn of fate that's what i was kind of referencing there when between the bone of the bone of order whatever it's named the emerald herald he who made drangleic what it once was he who peered at the essence of the soul what it once was and no longer is king vendrick king vendrick so that is who we must seek you may have looked by the power of the emerald herald of the curse seek misery okay for misery will lead you to greater stronger souls you will never meet the king with a soul so frail and palate yeah she's um she's not very nice but she does tell truth we have much we have no experience and this ties in with soul memory as you need to have a certain amount of souls in order to progress to dragon like well to drawing lake castle uh because you need a foul well no sorry you need a million souls and you can acquire this by many different ways you just need a million souls as i said so you could do that however which way you want you can play the normal game or you can kind of bonfire bonfire aesthetic um kind of farm the same boss um i forgot on the main way in order i think you can actually do the shine of shrine of winter skip can't you maybe that's in the vanilla game because you used to be able to parry yeah there was a there was a complete tangent we're going on now but there was a a glitch that could still be performed i believe in the original game and maybe even in scholar if you parry an enemy and then roll on them you'll essentially um walk on thin air and you can use this to manipulate and get into areas that of course you won't be able to and that was used in the shrine of winter skip and speedrunning to kind of ignore the whole song everything but anyway when she says we need more powerful souls she literally needs means we do need a more powerful soul yes like we need to become stronger but we do sneak we just need more souls in general or else we won't be able to access the shrine of winter seek those whose names are unutterable the four endowed with immense souls their souls will serve as beacons once you have found them return here to me so that hope will not fade away is that a shard you found yes it is seek bear bearer sexy glass see it so that i may help you to see light however yeah yeah yeah um emerald herald sorry for skipping a dialogue but i've just heard it so many times the meme the well-known meme by now um bear a secretary is hilarious when that first was a thing i i just couldn't stop laughing at it um it's one of the best memes to come from dark souls i believe anyway we'll upgrade our shaft shaft we won't be doing that um our flask with the shard that's what i meant to say uh we made level have i got enough to level up no i need eight 948 never mind over the hill and past the forest is the king's castle she's mentioning that over there where a man peered straight into the essence of the soul but what came of it but whatever came of it i don't know those who come to drangleic seeking salvation soon lose hope and turn hollow it happens to them all sooner or later that blue knight at the base of the tower his spirit is already broken although he does offer sound advice he does indeed pepsi is a foreshadowing of your own future have faith in me that tiny thing inside the ruins she's talking about the cat an ancient being that will mock your very existence she imparts sound wisdom provided you find her on a good day the sign you bear will drain your very souls and without souls you will turn hollow stay strong do not lose hope even when you have precious little time again all this dialogue just indicates that this isn't the first time emerald herald has kind of had to humor a bearer of the curse you know a potential king or just a um a fool she also has other details and she has this dagger kind of dangling rather freely not very safe there my love i'm going to try not kill myself again yeah she's just it's really really interesting and for those of you who know the emerald herald and her origins and her name i shan't say too much her colours kind of the green her accent her red hair she is it does she have the irish kind of twang oh am i just making that up and she has a bandaged arm as well again that ties into her history um and her creation but yeah i've heard many people talk about her appearance in a garb but i've never really heard anyone connect the red um fabric with the other red fabric that can be found other items and this theme a mention of fate because it's mentioned in here and she also mentions fate you know right we are ready to leave this place i'm so sorry that took ages but you know i'm like the far fire again each bonfire has its own name um which is something that dark souls want didn't you could only obviously walk to select bonfires and we now enter this well it's just this route isn't rather unusual structure you'll see the typical you know it loses your wall ahead usually um this one yeah visual leisure wall even though that one's not the usual message safe zone ahead now this you see there's many with this guy get gobbled no you'll see there's many blood stains now we actually opened it without interacting with it interacting the blood stain uh we have another rusty coin and this is because this is because that chest is a mimic in new game plus i believe it was a mimic in the original game and the change to make it mimic a new game plus was a skull of the first sin edition although i could be wrong on that we see our path our progression is blocked by a barred door there but here we can also gain access if by this mechanism you'll come familiar with mechanisms such as these kind of lifting up doors in a similar fashion and they do take some of them take absolutely ages and you can't pass under them until it's cleared oh god he can't pass under them until it's cleared for some considerable way i'll tell you what we haven't done um go back and join the champions covenant as i knew i would forget to do that after joining um the way of the blue the uh the baby boy covenant oh the stamina let me run some more you can't run until your stamina is fully regened i mean if you let it if you let your stamina fully deplete um you then have to wait till it's um back up to 100 before you can run again but if you stop running just before it runs out you can then continue to run so just keep that in mind for stamina management ah i've joined again okay off we go and you know the kind of shape of uh i guess medulla well where the obelisk is how it kind of juts out it's kind of very reminiscent of how fire keep filing why don't you see fire keep of how firelink shrine is shaped and how it's supported off the cliff side in dark souls 3. you know it kind of takes a similar similar shape i guess but other than that there's nothing connecting majula with filing shrine from dark souls 3. put these specks away get me sword back out right and let's try this mechanism again and that's not let's not be fooled by it because you can use mechanisms like this to defeat enemies i'm not sure if this one will kill you here i i'm going to wage you yes it probably will do so just be careful i guess it doesn't collapse on your head because there's uh areas in the game as i said that you can kind of lure enemies and then wait for it to drop on their head and it'll kill him in one shot it's great now here in this chasm we find a wooden rickety bridge with two slim slim logs so we can reach that chest and we found a humanity within it uh we'll do the jump in order to access this area for this item home with bone and a lost soul of undead we see the stream flowing down river and we see yet more of these cyclops hippo things these very annoying enemies and here we find oh god i've got stuck on a rock find a soldier of drang lake an infantryman you notice how they are very fireman-esque wielding axes well that is because we are within the forest of the fallen giants and when giants are felled they turn into trees and we discuss trees and the things betwixt and what are trees well they are they were originally stone when burned and destroyed from the ash the new trees formed the new arch trees but they were made of wood giants are entities of stone that then become trees so again this theme of stone wood stone being a vessel for life i mentioned this in my titanite lore video to give you a bit more context on that kind of topic please go watch that as it definitely ties in with dark souls 3 as stone being a vessel for life is greatly continued in this game for those who haven't played and we probably i'll go human why not can i not use it there we go just in case i do get invaded because it'll be it'll be fun too so yeah these firemen type infantrymen wielded axes of course to defeat the giants the fort was overrun by giants although they were defeated they still conquer it in death as they are everywhere their roots and branches buried into the structure crumbling it and making ways of access difficult uh due to they basically just reshape the whole location i love that theme the kind of repurposing of navigation and travel is something through through trees and roots should i say is something we saw in isla lost izalith oh we got this we got the sword excellent lost iceland upon the bed of chaos but upon the witch being engulfed and then the slow engulfment of of the witch as she as the bed of chaos and the parasite took more from her and the roots resemble that kind of engulfment and um kind of growth of the chaos flame the the roots as we've seen buried their way through all the structures they broke through the kiln which is basically the lid on top of izalith which we use um as a way to gain access into iceland and other instances of kind of the walkways into the main city main part of izalith where we fight the boss the bed of chaos kind of being replaced by roots we have to use roots in order to actually get up over the wall so again this theme of trees and roots and life a different form of life kind of conquering the terrain and becoming a new uh method of access is continued in this area and i think that's a really cool theme to consider and uh remember if you've never noticed that before or you may not have noticed eyes with kind of working in that way if you haven't already please watch my idealist episode 24 i believe i've lost idolist which is my undead pilgrimage law through in that video i go in depth of how kind of wood and roots have replaced uh the structures um navigation of izalith showing this change of culture this change of power there is a visual representation of how isil has changed upon the witches engulfment not only the birth of pyromancy um fire arts and fire sorceries were lost upon the birth of pyromancy um we are out with the old and in with the new but uh like culturally and visually eyes of the chained changed should say not chained anyway more on that subject if you watched episode 24 of my lore through and under pilgrimage dark souls 1 it'll make more sense what i'm saying if you haven't watched that of course you'll be like what is this man what is the man talking about now for those who played the original this will be this area this instance will be engraved in your mind because here was the place the resting place of a high night now hide knights of course they come from hyde and we've seen the state of hyde from a distance it's fallen to ruin into the into the ocean and in the original game you found them scattered all throughout and presumably they were traveling due to the destruction of their kingdom in scholar the first sin that decision was uh was reversed and they can all be found within height now i believe actually there may be some exceptions where they're not found in hyde although no i don't think there is i think they're all found in hide from my from my memory if i'm wrong i'm wrong forgive me but they are not all now living in hide which makes it again a bit more of a gank fest but they kind of resemble and replicate what from software wanted to do with black knights in dark souls one uh they wanted dark souls one to travel the area and the world but they didn't have the resources and technology to do that so you find them at fixed points throughout the game and of course they then altered the law and you know the story to um match that decision and their locations within found within dark souls you know they're not gonna from software do if they can't make something work they will then make it fit in a way that makes sense they won't just leave it in there and be like well hey we didn't get it we didn't get it to work the other way so uh screw it we'll just shove them in this way no they don't do that it means from software we're talking about they are masters of their craft but anyway hide knights were basically the black knights of dark souls one because you'd find them in different locations kind of just chilling um and were like they were like a mini boss really especially this one that used to stump where this uh this this corpse is now i think he wa he held the high knight sword and the high night weapons from an early not even really an early early game like they could see through the whole game um in the original game they're really good they're really good and they still are really good in scholar first in i believe so yeah if you were lucky enough in other balls and skilled enough to defeat the high knight in this area you've got a weapon that would see you through for a while um but of course it it required attributes that you've not yet achieved so you would have to level it up a bit you know very uh very black knight-esque if you've got if you're looking to get the black knight sword in the berg or the black ultra great sword you'd of course have to pump some strength into your character before you're able to wield it and the ultra great sword and the black knight weapon so the black knights ultra great sword is just unreal i do like the the standard black knight sword but the ultra great sword i just think is incredible um i think it's so cool and unfortunately the black knight weapons they suck in this game um i think they do anyway i've never really i've used them a few times but uh there's no incentive for me in this game to kind of get a black knight weapon you know having one drop in the first game is it's just so cool and dead rewarding and obviously it was based on look random r g because i think it's a one percent drop right obviously they don't respawn the only time you get to see black knights again is in the kill so if you're lucky enough it'll see through the whole game when they're overpowered as hell because of that anyway um ultimate great uh yeah ultra great swords not ultimate great souls ultra great swords in this game or just great swords in general i don't like how they attack they have like this twirly attack type like it's not your standard kind of heavy heavy slashes they've got kind of like this as i said yeah flick of the wrist that's kind of twirl and i don't like what they did with it and i think the black knight weapons if i remember they're a bit more a bit skinnier in this version in in sorry in dark souls 2. uh where in dark souls 1 they're obviously bit bulky and in dark souls 2 they require faith to wield so if you're not rolling a faith build i'm afraid you're screwed but anyway um the roots you see how the roots sprout out of the fort and just completely encase it they bury and dig through the foundations destroying the wall completely changing how one is to access this place again the moss and just nature's also taking over i just think visually it's really cool you've got these um ember particles again making it very dream like and back there is uh where our bonfire is with the uh the typical 2d birds which if you play souls birds acting in this way will be familiar to you because they can be seen in the painted world in dark souls 1 dark souls 3 i think in the same painted world obviously here and other instances and even in demon souls remake again if you watch uh illusory walls latest compare through of the demon souls and themselves remake um he shows off how these well he shows the birds off and how they do and don't work how they kind of render it because they are just 2d textures of course i nearly nearly ruined it for myself then we get the short swords again the short sword pretty good weapon uh deserves a bit more love very weak but uh again you don't need a lot of attributes points to use it so it's any weapon in dark souls is good you can make any weapon work you just got to be skilled enough and have the uh preservation bread present preservation i can't say it you gotta have the uh the determination to carry on using it even if it does appear over this wall and we see a later area which we will drop down into um i'm trying to think where the last giant boss fight is so it's through there you take it take the stairs down and then you fall back on yourself but not too much and they take an elevator down yeah i was trying to see if the the roots here line up with the boss fight of the last giant but they don't i don't think they do anyway uh without having to having to run to run through it um which we'll do in short well we might not do this episode but because i never look at looked at the map editor for dark souls 2. so i'm not sure how it kind of pieces together anyway anyway look at this you can see the capital the castle drangleic castle there peering its head over the fort the obsidian tower barodoo and here we have another example of as i said how the wood and roots and giants have kind of reshaped the fort you know they haven't blocked this way but you wouldn't think that was probably there was one stone behind this roots it's kind of created this hollow walkway isn't it it's just really cool how it's encased not only the outside of the structures but also the inside completely taken over oh my god the jump attacks in this game by enemies are just ridiculous how did he get me round a corner got the throwing knives which is which is a good drop actually because we'll need to use them we see rusted armor um we also see actually didn't point this out rusted armor weaponry you know remains of the fallen soldiers you can see their blood splattered from the fallen knights if i if i call them lord lordran knightsbox didn't forgive me i feel like i'm going to do that or i may have already done that but the jungle lake nights have fallen and you can see their remains mixed up in the rubble here of course so just just really cool little details uh i want to see if that the shield bash would move the box but it didn't now these guys you know they are the knights they hit a bit more the two hand long swords and they're a bit more of a nuisance but their arm is pretty cool hello fellow and our weapons gonna break soon because durability in this game is horrendous but that's because you play the game differently the levels act differently so the durability has to reflect that because if it was dark souls 1 durability you could literally play the whole game without the weapon ever breaking nothing so your weapons are basically made of butter in dark souls 2 so definitely always have repair powder um on in your on your person when venturing around and for this bit always use a throwing knife sometimes it will dislodge him or just aggro him enough to get him moving there we go right the old classic hollow oh no we don't want to do that the classic hollow um mad the mad attack gets many new players we've got the foot soldier shield we'll read all these when we find a safe haven but this is really what i'm going for which is the buckler uh we'll get the practice those parries and the bucklers the small shields are very light and easy to use but have low stability when attacked the center of a booklet is convex designed to brush attacks aside making parrying easier oh we can't actually use it uh what stats does it require 13 decks what do i have eight wow looks like i need to pump some decks in i mean you don't that's that's the thing you don't really i mean we're not gonna be blocking with it i just have it on my off hand like i don't think not having the stats actually affects the parry um obviously if you're blocking with it you can see how slow it is because we i don't know if it affects actually the block speed oh hello guy but yeah in dark souls 1 when you couldn't use an item due to not having the right attributes you had unique animations and i don't think dark souls 2 had that and dark souls 3 definitely didn't they removed that but i don't think star souls 2 had it either but it's just really cool get the witcher and again we see more of this kind of embers stream like embers hear the crows above us get a better glimpse of the castle and if i pan my camera you can hear that kind of like tinkle that enchanting sound and that relates to um a corpse of a fallen giant which is here there is the you can see how his body is becoming a tree so i mentioned could the tree in the intro cinematic be of a giant and you know it could be it could be or it could not be due to the amount of corpses that are lying around not only in the in the lake but also um around the tree and the reason why the tree hasn't got leaves on it is also interesting um presumably because of all the death it's made the land you know unfertile so life can't actually the tree can't actually grow any leaves so it's essentially a dead tree kind of representing the death that surrounds it i don't know oh i don't know this place forest the fallen giants is just dead chill it just it gives me a proper cozy feeling because i've done it so many times human effigy excellent and here we go as i mentioned earlier how the brutes replace um old paths and create new paths of navigation you know we use this to to go down it's really cool you know yes it's destroyed the supporting structure but it's also kind of replaced it bigger yes you definitely need bigger how have you got there what are you doing there we go god these soldiers and again we're able to climb down because of this branch um i will jump over to this area again a semi semi kind of secret you give to some prison stones not too much but try jog just a really cool little area that if you've got the balls to do it you get prism stones there that platform here again it this area that that platform leads to is only accessed by an item but um i don't remember i don't know if this is available in the scope or can be done the scholar first sin but definitely in the original you can jump and roll and depending how good you are at it and there's other factors um into this uh strategy but basically you land on this platform and you can basically sequence sequence there we go sequence break the game god i'm like a scratch disc just repeat words cause i can't say surprise [ __ ] favorite tactic in pvp is to do the backstep and then parry and it's very effective not against npcs like uh but pvp especially oh i didn't mean to do that you can't do a backstab out of a running animation you'll do a running slash get parried your fist got parried which is dead actually yeah you can parry with two handed i completely forgot about that i completely forgot you could do that that's amazing i don't even need a uh a buckler then also my weapon is ruined so we're gonna use the short sword i know i've got the flesh told yeah inexpensive straight sword standard issue for drawing like foot soldiers no masterpiece this weapon won't be used to fend off any threatening foe i think this weapon is actually pretty good you know um i think it's like one of like like an underdog like a black sheep because the the requirements are pretty low and the attributes on the dna but if you upgrade it via certain paths i think it can actually be pretty good it's cool though like i love the the hilt the hilton it's sick now either it's been bent due to to war or it was fashioned in that way on purpose but it doesn't matter it looks cool as hell and can i actually use it have i got enough stats for this i haven't no yeah i can actually use this weapon so that's fine yeah i forgot you could i forgot your parry's two hands that's that's mint hello now these are the ironclad knights and these are animated suits of armor much like kind of well the black knights and silver knights well black knights were once we're not one well we're not the [ __ ] i can't speak they weren't intended uh to be animated suits of armor uh but upon gwyn linking the flame it's implied that whoever once resided in there was also kind of burnt along with him and now it's just souls inhabiting a suit of armor anyway these beings never once had someone in them they were just created um to be animated kind of get me and this animation is not unique to vendrick because i've made reference to the to the giants and the technology stole if that was the technology stole the golden technology i'll have to brush up on that part of the law um but the old the ironclad knights the turtle knights as they're named are creations of a former ruler that being the old iron king and vendrick as i said he's kind of conquered the old um and repurposed the old and kind of took over the creations of the former rulers of this land and repurposed them and this is an example of that so yeah this sword does minimal damage compared to the broadsword but you know it's all right are pretty um obviously they are heavily armored so slashing type weapons rather than blunt will take a lot longer can you get a nice little view here kind of deep between the structures you see the roots there as i said making the way crawling over every surface breaking through every other surface you can see the repairs the scaffolding that people attempted to make in order to as i said make repairs or just offer a new path of navigation as the wall with the giants not only was it a toll on the people but also the fort so you can imagine the constant repairs that needs to be made we also see the crest of drunk lake now i didn't point it out um when we were at the entrance but i will when we go back up there but we'll see that again um on another surface another wall just up there but yeah that is vengeance crest crest of the kingdom we also see stone people stone statues now if you're familiar with dark souls well not even dark souls um people are petrified due to basilisks so the fact that these are here implies that basilisks are once here but we don't find basilisks here so that's rather weird i can't remember if the salamanders can also turn onto stone i mean it would make sense seeing as this is their layer so this may be a result of that salamanders but um obviously dark souls won the curse you and turn into crystals in this game you turn into stone um and for npcs who've been turned to stone you need a fragrant branch of your as we've discussed now we're gonna get a pretty decent weapon um early game there were many youtube videos made jesus he got me um in the early days of dark souls 2 you know how to find overpowered weapon in five minutes and it was this the fire long sword it's pretty good in the very early days it was compared i can't actually use it but can i two-hand it no i can't run it in the very early days it was compared to the to the drake sword like a noob trap weapon because as i said it was good in this first early area but you know kind of quickly becomes redundant um so yeah i remember hearing those comparisons that this was basically the drag sword of dark souls 2. again more useless information for you uh and really doesn't add anything it may mean something to someone it was around back then well i don't know maybe not again we see structures that we can't yet reach as i mentioned if you're skilled enough to make that jump and land on that platform down below sorry that is a twinkling tie tonight i believe that um and if you're playing online play messages playing messages will indicate that yes you can go over there but sir this is much later in the game and something that we would not be able to do during this play through looking sliding down the stairs oh that's funny and we were being shot by a archer here and that is an area we'll be able to go into in a short while now the crest the other crest that i mentioned is here much more high res more detailed crest see the two dragons facing each other the symbol of drung lake and this room i believe has some concept art in the design works and in the mentioned video crobat where he compares the e3 gameplay of the game of the version of dark souls 2 we never got uh this area is featured for you know a pretty substantial amount in the early part of that um gameplay demo and he compares kind of this this run-up and this bonfire to the original version and due to the lighting mechanic this place is pitch black and a good point mentioned in the comments of crowbar's video is um how light offers comfort because when you light the bonfire because it's so dark in the room in the version of the game we never got to play but only we got shown when the person playing lights the bonfire the statue of this woman is revealed it's embracing woman and you know someone made a comment in that video you know light offers light provides comfort uh we get to see this embracing statue and instantly we are kind of you know settled down view this site but also we see the statue is covered in blood so someone presumably chose this place to die may have been praying to it while they were struck down the blood splattered upon it and who this woman is is to be debated could she be the same woman that's kind of depicted where's the bloody coin on the rusted coin although this figure has wings presumably from that detail so probably not but again someone of importance what she resembles as faith and clerics were a part of drangleic but vendrick hold them at an arm's length he wasn't too much into his faith he wasn't really a man of faith was vendrick and forgotten the items that give us that law but yeah you know this wasn't this versions of the way of white which is lindelt in this game lindelt is like basically the way of white dark souls 2 i didn't mean to do that um they don't really have a high i can't get my words out today they don't have a high involvement in jung lake but neither does magic really bendrick was just a man of action really a man of the sword to be honest got beaded bandits hello sir thank you for featuring in the video we can travel now back to obviously the bonfire if you wish sorry the bonfire medulla but here we see an interesting npc i believe now we've sat the bonfire yes my sword is is fixed thank god this is valencia now you can see that she is basically a hermit crab and carries her home with her made of rickety wood but you know a pretty sound piece if she made it by herself you gotta respect that and she gives us some dialogue as to why she carries a home on her back but what i'm more i care about more is her hands look at these ghastly nails now nails to be this long implies that she's pretty old and she is an old woman and she is undead so so that factors into her hands not looking you know the most healthiest but notice this dark black aura that's emitting out of them now this i believe we see this later in the shrine of our mana there are beings that are lulled to sleep by the melfinito song and uh kind of the fireflies and i think they also have the same effect on their hands so this implies you know dark and the abyss so maybe she's just been undead that long that this black fog i don't know how to explain it it kind of represents her dark soul i don't know do you know what i mean i'm not making sense but really important detail i don't think i don't see many people mention this black aura emanating from her hands but we do see this elsewhere in the game i believe and i think it is from those enemies in the shine of our mana i could be wrong though if not they do have identical hands i think kind of close monstrosity hands anyway she's very much still human uh her face as you can see she looks very she looks like a man honestly she's got quite a masculine face um she looks like a dregling honestly from demon souls but anyway sorry valencia don't listen to my nasty words you've got beautiful nails [Music] and yeah typical souls fashion she laughs at you which is something to do with japanese culture um that was explained in bonfireside chat that's where i first heard him bonfireside chat where i think in one of the appendix episodes someone writes in as to why um npcs laugh at you because depending on the laugh kind of depends on their character something along those lines anyway i'm not doing that explanation justice so um yeah i don't claim to be an expert on these things a man who speaks gibberish i can't speak english and has severe dyslexia it's brilliant it's great it makes my arguments make so much more sense she sells broken straight swords she basically sells anything anything she's able to get hands on the hand axe which is pretty good the club again look at that a in strength like blunt blunt damage weapons are always superior in seoul's games she sells the travelling merchant hat hat worn by merchants from lanifa where blue represents knowledge wearing this increase increases item discovery lanifer is the farthest land to the south and follows a strict edict of isolationism the rare visitors from lana for is always a little odd so this set is seen on i think his name is marigold which is voiced by the same voice actor who voiced as uh oswald am i saying don hall of zena um who was the travelling merchants of sorts that you would have not really you found him in the depths then they'd moved on to the aqueducts and that was about it but you know he was the aishamai he'd sell you boss gear and this guy is very much the same in that this miracle if i'm getting his name right he can be found in iron keep and he wears the travelling merchants set i believe so that implies he's from lana for and again he's a bit he's a bit of an oddball but he has interesting connections to important things mainly dragons but we won't discuss that because we won't get there in this mini series but yeah interesting that they have a strict edict of isol isolation ism isolation is jesus so that might be why we only find one apc um from in dark souls 1 why we only find one nbc from xena from there because maybe xena kind of had that same edict you know yeah perhaps i'm not too sure but blue represents knowledge and we see blue in hide the tiles on the roofs of the structures are blue so obviously the wave the blue kind of work out of hide and have connections to hide so they can imply many things but something to consider maybe is if that also relates to hyde anyway raises item discovery so you want to wear this if you want to get lucky drops um basically it says the same things depending yeah it says the same stuff usually sometimes with armor you'll get like the headpiece description the gauntlets may say something different and of course the legs may say something different usually the chest piece is quite generic anyway she sells human fg live gems amber herb an annual herb with an ember color so deep it gives the impression of luminescence restores a small number of spell uses it is the mistaken belief of many that the flowers of this earth of this herb do not blossom however however small white flowers do blossom during dusk when the moon is visible and that's really really interesting again the moon an important theme mentioned this in the intro flowers blossoming during moonlight is something well not flower but grass um certain grass when plucked during full moon is very potent in demon souls uh we found she sells the fire bomb we will buy a couple of these there we go uh she tells the witching gun which we picked up around the corner a small clay iron and wreath in magic explodes inflicting magic damage created in melfia a land that flourishes with magic and pyromancy though the magic contained in the urn lacks potency it's a boon to any experienced traveler and against someone with a rather loud exhaust just drop us there forgive me so again melfia are we still here he's still there go on off you go sod off take your loud engine elsewhere trying to record a man uh creating melfia a land that flourishes with magic empirements so magic sorry pyromancy from the wrenches dialogue and dark souls one he says that it's kind of looked down upon as seen rather i forgotten the term he uses basically rather primitive yeah and that it doesn't mix well with advanced cultures um and you know we can kind of take that well you can kind of imagine in the town of venn high and people have to look down at pyromancy's pyromancers sorry but here in melfia well you could find both users of magic and pyromancy so cultures changed and now we have a land that embraces both which is pretty cool i reference melfia being the land scholars from meltia being the people who just deny guinevere's existence and we'll get that description from um the blessing i've forgotten the title of it mama's milk is what i call it um heirlooms have great anyway throwing knife won't be buying much then we have a bright bug again we saw these in the intro um a tiny bug that produces a light bright bugs are said to comfort the dead and are found in marshlands leading to the undead crypt and again this links into what i was saying with those creatures that have similar hands and kind of like a dark aura that are lulled to sleep by these bright books in the melbourneito song found in the shanova shrine of armana so you know the fact that she sells these because that relates to her actually being you know what i mean probably not but interesting by ingesting a bright bug just before death the moment at which they glow most brightly one attains great power for a short time often utilized as a last resort for adventurers who have lost their way has no effect in other worlds or for phantoms so really cool again quite rare only three and they cost six thousand each another fairly rare item is the pharisees lockstone stone activating a creation of pharos the vagabond pharos de vagabonde was a legend who wanted the lands creating contraptions to help those in sincere and to dire needs the scope of his travels was so wide that pharos has been mistakenly credited with many inventions that were crafted by others so there were many copycats of pharos and that is something we may be able to delve into during this mini-series but uh he did create things his identity speculated um and linked with the rossen uh that's that's a common theory where pharos ended up due to the fixing of a certain statue which we saw just outside of the pits i made reference to earlier in this episode so yeah farris is a cool character and i just love the law surrounded by him and here we find a fragrant branch of yore a fragrant tree branch with a faint sweet smell restores the life of things turned to stone extending inhalation of the branches scent can lead to coughing and nausea and this kind of coughing and nausea and sickness links in with an npc that can be unpetrified uh on the way to shaded woods she too is a pyromancer and her master is a magic user so presumably no that actually they're both i forgot if they're from melfia i think that guy i'm referencing is actually from a different kingdom but anyway we see magic users and magic users and paramounts is kind of working together even though he purposely loses her and doesn't care about but anyway we're not getting we're not going to get into that um but yeah just again the theme of smell smell and this sweet scent we've seen another mention of sweet um and petrified someone trees the archstone trees were made of stone until they were burnt uh by the witcher izalith and a doors of chaos and here we see the smell of wood um turn someone well the smell of wood reversed effect of stone so again interesting themes and stuff to think about related to that topic of stone wood we get london grass key sorry we'll read before we purchase it medulla land of exile is compromised of abandoned old houses one of which londongrass has fastened into a workshop so you know presumably he was doing his stuff putting his tools in the shed and whatnot and then malenchen she creeped up behind him and picked picked his pockets or picked it up off the table and ran off and now she's she's a very much an opportunist opportunist much like the undead um undead merchant in undead merchant in the undead berg who sells the residence key that you need to use to free griggs as i believe that's the only door that the um or is it is it the only key the only door that the master key doesn't unlock i forget doesn't matter anyway she's an opportunist like the undead merchant seen in previous games in the previous is game you're stranger to this land oh we get as strange as these days everybody's gonna run off drang lake's been a pile of rubble since the war thought long long ago and the challenge crossed the sea and again that dialogue is exactly the one i was referencing earlier that got the community um absolutely spinning when valencia was found in hudson cops for the network test she said that line and everyone went mad or it was including the trailer i can't remember but yeah she references that you know the war with the giants was long long ago and as i mentioned many generations fought with the war of the giants so it wasn't a short war to say the least and she has lived through that due to the undead curse of course but also due to her nature and very being she's a opportunist as i said and she doesn't give up hope and she's a traitor and she often you know although she won't get many souls uh the little soul she gets keeps uh keeps her going and uh we are her main income from now on as uh she's the only merchant that sells an unlimited amount of live gems so when you play this game you'll soon be buying 99 um life gems and yeah you won't really be using much estus flasks outside of boss fights because life gems are overpowered and yeah it's pretty ridiculous so i do recommend not using live gems um as a bit of a challenge for yourself as you get more of that dark souls experience um as i said they are a bit of they are too good of a crutch really but for a new player i shall forgive you you can use them it seemed like the battles would never end poor foreign [Music] i do you wise old frogs don't believe what an old hag says i love it i love that bit of dialogue so yeah that was the dialogue you need and she will repeat that dialogue now she will only move until the boss of this area is defeated there are two bosses technically this area if you don't defeat him um outside of his boss arena and the pursuer and the last giant so once you defeat the last giant she will move and guys that is honestly where i'm going to leave it to be honest i know you may have got the intention i was going to keep going but so was i but my stomach's rumbling i'll be recording for some hours and uh i need a bit of a break i wish i could keep going but i've got a life to do and things to do and plates to wash up because uh living on your own it's great if you don't do it no one will but anyway i hope you've enjoyed this i hope you're having a good christmas or soon to be because this will release on the 24th i hope you're having good and good times with your family and you have well-deserved arrests as you can see i'm struggling to talk because the longer i talk in these in these types of videos the less sense i make i always mess up the farewell so without further ado i shall see you in the next episode and thank you very much for watching and merry christmas [Music] okay

Channel: Eredin

Views: 518,733

Keywords: Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 2 Lore, Dark Souls 2 In-depth, bearer of the curse, majula dark souls 2, Dark Souls lore, dark souls lore vaatividya, Things betwixt, forest of the fallen giants, king vendrick dark souls 2, nashandra lore, dark souls 2 story explained, Firekeepers, epicnamebro lore, scholar of the first sin, The Abyss, Oolacile, ancient dragon dark souls, aldia lore, Dark Souls 2 lorethrough, Dark Souls 2 2021, Pharros lore, DS2 lore, drangleic lore, ds2 memories

Id: huda4ewta9g

Length: 230min 53sec (13853 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 24 2021