Dark Souls 2 is a Good Game, and Scholar RUINED It!

perhaps you've seen it maybe in a dream a murky forgotten video game a place that looks like dark souls 2 if it wasn't complete in this dream every encounter you once had that felt like the game designers had a hard-on for killing the players much as possible has now vanished in this dream even the worst levels in the entire dark souls series like shrine of amana and iron keep are fun if you told me two weeks ago that there was a fun version of dark souls 2 that was hidden away in a 40 dlc steam pack i would have told you that sounds preposterous there is no way that fromsoft would take a good game and make a series of unnecessary changes that are all bad just to justify selling the old game again at full price right [Music] i trusted the average redditor i trusted the average 2015 forum post that told me that scholar was the superior version because of some balancing tweaks that i don't care about i was told that vanilla dark souls 2 is worse in certain areas like drangleic castle and i was lied to every level vanilla dark souls 2 is better than scholar the first sin and i'm here to prove it and yes i enjoy vanilla shrine of amana and melee only with no summons i'm gonna get cancelled for saying that if you watch my video another hate-filled critique about dark souls 2 then you are familiar with the fact that i hate dark souls 2. however when i made this video i had only played scholar the first sin which is the definitive edition re-release of dark souls 2 and definitive is in quotations for a reason because it's not under the false pretense that i played the definitive edition of dark souls 2 i made a video about why a bad game is bad and then got a lot of backlash by dark souls 2 fans and here i was just surprised that there were dark souls 2 fans this is why people don't like me but then i tasted the savory flavor of good old vanilla for the first time and i understood what those crazy people meant when they said that they liked dark souls 2 because dark souls 2 is a good game and scholar ruined it before we really dive into the meat and potatoes of this game i should make three statements i will refer to the original dark souls 2 as vanilla and scholar of the first sin edition as scholar throughout this video so get used to it i guess the order in which you played the two versions of dark souls 2 will impact your overall opinion of the game if you played vanilla first and then scholar you will look at scholar as an optional hard mode however if you played scholar first and then vanilla you will look at vanilla as an actual good game and my positive opinion of certain levels like shrine of amana may be connected to the fact that i literally have ptsd of the thousand enemies in scholars shrine of amana that made vanilla feel like a cakewalk by comparison vanilla dark souls 2 has huge issues and this video is by no means trying to write those off just about all of the bad section from my previous critique of scholar holds true for vanilla the broad sword can't hit with the second attack in the combo most of the base game bosses are as boring as sister freddy's sex life enemy hitboxes are wonky at best and at worst terrible and the punishment for death being losing hp until half is still stupid unless you get the ring of binding although these issues still persist most of the ugly from my critique that details the worst levels of scholar is not applicable to vanilla as the enemy placement is completely different vanilla has some issues and scholar fixed none of them while adding on to the pile of crap that i reviewed in my first critique on dark souls 2. while i start covering the levels of vanilla keep in mind that this is not a dark souls 2 is perfect or dark souls 2 is better than dark souls 1 video because neither of those things are true however what this video is is a dark souls 2 is a good game video because well i actually like dark souls 2. shocking let's jam a bite-sized critique of vanilla as my way of comparing vanilla to scholar and only 0.5 minutes in vanilla is already better the stupid tutorial statue is gone why is there a petrified statue that blocks off the final part of the tutorial where you have the option of fighting two ogres i like it when there are optional heart fights in the beginning of the game that players can attempt at a lower level but probably lose to come back at a higher level and then clear the enemies so why did they get rid of it now the only way to reach the end of the tutorial is to acquire a fragrant branch of yore this decision is especially questionable when you consider that branches of yore are hard to find items that are required for moving forward through the mid game in places like the shaded woods or the ruined sentinels unless you use the rune sentinel boss skip but the most obvious path forward as dictated by the game is for the player to use the branch of yore to fight the ruined sentinels so that by the time you reach the rune sentinel boss you will need a branch of yore but you might have already spent that on the tutorial petrified statue which you probably shouldn't have since the only easily found branch of yore is from the life gem rhymes one of the two early branches in the lost bastille is only accessible through the rune sentinel boss skip so if you miss this skip then there is only one other early game branch in some random room in no man's wharf so there are two branches for three statues what the actual hell why so branches are rare items that are always in hard to find places then why let the players misuse the only easy to obtain branch on the tutorial when they should probably just use it for the rune sentinels it just sounds like the scholar developers want players to get stuck but guess what the ruins sentinel boss run statue is also taken away in vanilla vanilla made me like petrified statues the overabundance of petrified statues that block your progress for no reason other than to piss you off is one of the first of many changes scholar does for no reason other than to fulfill a quota of changes that piss people off so that we can resell an old game at full price again the first level the forest of the fallen giants is actually easy now kind of what first levels in video games should be like and in place of the undead army that scholar put in the first level we have an optional fight with the king of sjw's himself the white knight the hyde knights are also the black knights of dark souls 2 which are optional hard enemies that will kick a new player's ass and even give a returning player a run for their money and for some reason in scholar they put every high knight in one level in the beginning of the game think of dark souls 1 but all the black knights are walking around one room in anor londo for some reason that feeling of accomplishment you get when you finally beat your first black knight is gone in an instant thanks scholar the hide knights did nothing to improve hyde's tower flame other than to piss you off when the optional boss is dead and all of the white knights just activate which is plain annoying and obnoxious now if you want to fight ornstein after beating the fat man there's just a bunch of white knights that'll chase you down faster than anyone who's ever insulted pokemane now that i think about it just about all of those horrifying ptsd memories of getting jumped around every corner of every level is gone in vanilla in my previous video i said that there were so many ganks in no man's wharf that it felt like enemies were spawning off screen looking back at the gameplay some of the ganks could have been prevented if i was more observant but i still don't understand why the amount of ganks that have to occur in the level has to be so damn high no man's wharf has a gank squad hidden around every corner of scholar and in addition to this when you trigger one of the enemies the entire group will just come stomping in to make sure the game always feels like they are respawning enemies off screen the enemy ai in vanilla is more akin to dark souls 1 so it's easier to aggro a couple of enemies take them out and then aggro a few more in every level of scholar there are always some gank squads that will wait in a very hard defined area and then when the enemies in front aggro a timer is sent and then eventually the gang squad wakes up and kills you every time this happens i'm not left thinking wow what a great game i'm just learning that there is no reason to go through these levels slowly since there's a cheap death around every corner and then the player only gets better at running past enemies rather than actually fighting them and much to my surprise they're gone the level is normal in fact all of the levels are normal in vanilla iron keep is just three sets of two enemy knights followed up by a few more enemies in the bigger room before smelter demon there's a few hidden archers here there but it's nothing like scholars version of iron keep if we take a look at the big room before smelter demon and scholar all the enemies with seemingly infinite aggro storm the player as one little hidden guy hits it from behind and this affordable militia of tin men and archers are missing half of their numbers in vanilla the reason why the number of enemies in an encounter is important in a game like dark souls is because every enemy after a certain point increases the difficulty exponentially just look at this very scientific graph i made as proof 1v10ing the enemies in iron keep isn't twice as hard as the one to be fighting the enemies it's more like three times as hard and it also takes three times as long to kite the enemies to find an opening difficulty in the amount of time spent on the encounter increases exponentially as more enemies are introduced into the encounter and scholars shove so many enemies into every level that fighting all the enemies just appears to be a waste of time when it was reasonable in vanilla playing through vanilla i genuinely feel like a ptsd victim every time i walk into a room like the one shown here in iron keep i remember the terrible things that scholar did to me and i dread every moment of progressing into the next area of dark souls 2 but then every time vanilla sets up the enemies in such a fair and smart way that i'm left speechless dark souls 2 vanilla completely fixes the biggest issue i had with scholar being that i didn't know if i'm supposed to run past or fight enemies since every level was so over the top with enemy spam whenever vanilla throws in some enemy spam like in the shaded woods or drangleic castle they are very easy to run past while in other areas like iron keeper shrine of the mana you are not supposed to run past and the amount of enemies is reasonable the developer intent in vanilla is clear one in scholar i didn't know if the developers knew what the they were doing because whether or not you're supposed to run past or fight the enemies there's enemy spam everywhere in scholar now i know how all of this sounds basically all my praise so far has been look all the enemies are gone but it's a lot more than that the beginning of vanilla dark souls 2 isn't just better because it's easier it's easy so it can teach the player how to play the game because dark souls 2 vanilla has an actual difficulty curve before talking about the difficulty curve of vanilla we'll examine scholar the difficulty starts high then it gets higher at no man's wharf then the game peaks in difficulty in iron keep for some reason which isn't even halfway through for most players then it gets easier at the climatic midpoint level in drangleic castle for some reason and then the difficulty peaks again in shrine of amana before tapering off into the end game vanilla dark souls 2 is easy for the first four lord souls and then the climactic midpoint drangleic castle level is pretty hard and then the difficulty maintains a pretty hard standard for the rest of end game although the hardest vanilla levels like drangleia castle are nothing compared to the worst parts of late game scholar vanilla starts off easy so that new players can learn how to win multi-fights the multi-fights gradually build up in difficulty so that a new player will be ready for the harder late game levels in addition to the easier beginning areas teaching the player how to handle multi-fights the easier enemy placement results in the player actually killing all of the enemies which means that they will be a higher level for late game essentially vanilla causes a positive feedback loop where the game is easy so i'm more inclined to fight all the enemies and then i'm stronger to fight the more difficult multi-fights in endgame on the other hand scholar has a negative feedback loop where the game swarms me with enemies from the get-go causing me to run past the enemies which makes me a lower level for the hard end game levels which causes me to get better at running past all the enemies to make it through those hard end game levels any dark souls 2 fan who says scholars better because they removed enemies in areas like drangleic castle is wrong because that is supposed to be a hard level players who don't use the one million soul skip in vanilla will be forced into killing the four lord souls in clearing the early game levels so they made the early game levels easier to prepare you for the harder end game levels since vanilla is easy for the first four lord souls the player is ready by the time they reach drangleic castle for a challenge in scholar you get done being tortured by every level only to realize the epic castle level is extremely easy and disappointment shouldn't the castle level be hard why is iron keep many times harder than drangleic castle in scholar it's almost like the developers changed the enemy placement in iron keep for no reason other than to say it's a new 60 game we didn't know what we were doing when scholar goes from hard to hard in its difficulty curve i'm left thinking it was unfair from the start it's unfair now and it'll be unfair later so why not just run past all the enemies since the game will trick me into dying to another gank if i play it slow in vanilla i think the game was fair before it's a bit unfair at certain areas like in the end game but the game will probably go back to being tolerable after so i may as well still play patiently and clear all the enemies like i was taught to from the earlier areas when vanilla is unfair it's pushing my buttons a little when scholar is unfair it's already pushed all the buttons off the shirt alright that's actually a weird analogy but the point remains that scholar quickly makes me lose my patience while vanilla respects my time so when the game gets a bit harder in areas like drangleic castle i'm just not as frustrated even though i enjoy most of the levels in vanilla dark souls 2 there are still some problems in the late game this little group of enemies at the end of shrine of amana is unfair because the hitboxes and all the melee enemies is just a bit too big to catch rolls and these enemies are so fast while not being slowed down by the water like the player is that it feels a bit on the unfair side keyword a bit i will also say that the shrine of a mana boss run is still a bit on the crap side even in vanilla but it isn't too hard to run past the enemies and the boss is so easy that it's not like anyone is going to have to do this boss run more than once or twice so what was everyone complaining about i know everyone hated vanilla dark souls 2 shrine of amana but i just don't see the big deal i died once at the final fight before the fog wall and once on the boss run and that was it and my death against the final group was still mostly my own fault so i didn't really mind it that much i did hear that shrine of amano was nerfed in vanilla because of the community backlash so maybe i just played the easiest version of shrine of amana and that's why i liked it either way i did enjoy my time spent with shrine of amana in vanilla almost every encounter in vanilla shrine of amana is just a woman that shoots at you a creepy water monster man who tries to assault you and then maybe one more enemy it's usually a 1v2 or 1v3 very rarely are there ever two women shooting you at the same time which is something that scholars shrine of amana did way too much and it was just really infuriating when multiple people be shooting you at once all of the time vanilla shrine of amana is hard but for the most part it's not too hard scholar of the first sin shrine of amana makes me feel like i'm back in naam dodging bullets as the kami's chased me down with sticks and guess what even if you hate shrine of amana and vanilla the rest of the game is so much easier that it's just one little difficulty spike because vanilla dark souls 2 is a thoughtfully designed game that is easy in the beginning and then gradually gets more difficult while scholar is just random enemy spam the whole time back to talking about the lackluster parts of vanilla the catacombs are fun but velstad's boss run is just stupid this is a genuine scholar moment where i don't know if i'm supposed to fight the 20 enemies on the boss run or just try to run past and get lucky at the fog wall i would say that ancient dragon has a similar problem of being too difficult of a boss run that seems over the top with enemy placement but those are the only two areas in all of vanilla that really do this all of the levels in scholar are like velstad's boss run or worse the real issue with ancient dragon isn't even the boss run it's just that the boss is a piece of he's probably the most boring hp sponge fight in the entire dark souls series that also one shots the player meaning the fight is hard in the worst way possible also the dragon moves horizontally as it flies up vertically but only some of the time meaning that you can do the same positioning as you run away from the fire and then for some reason it won't work one in 20 times and then you die in one hit which is terrible and then you'll have to do the worst boss run in the game over again just to make it back to the boss it's really bad if you don't want to fight this abomination of a boss then you have to fight the mechanically boring vendrick with only three lord souls unless you look up on the internet where to get the fourth one that's super hidden in black gulch but i didn't use the internet so i forgot and i just had to fight vendrick and it was a really boring drawn out fight vendrick and ancient dragon are my least favorite parts of the entire dark souls 2 experience at least in the base games as the dlc has some worser parts it wasn't until writing this script and looking up things online that i realized that they are both optional apparently vendrick the literal king is an optional fight but the giant lord is required that's weird the moral of the story is that you shouldn't fight the ancient dragon or vendrick unless you really want the hidden ending where you fight aldia who is another terrible boss so it doesn't really matter either way it's still great that the only experiences i really hated in vanilla are optional so on repeat playthroughs i won't have to deal with them again if i had to describe vanilla in a single word i'd say that it's painless want to do the dlc well you don't need to look up a guide to find out where three impossibly hidden keys are you just get them for free remember all the terrible red phantom spam and all the levels they're gone for the most part remember all the terrible boss runs most of them are manageable a few are kind of bad and and like two are downright terrible but still it's been reduced significantly with a few exceptions it no longer physically hurts me to play dark souls 2. so let's recap vanilla is better than scholar because it doesn't trigger my ptsd war memories of getting ganked every 0.2 seconds and the worst parts of endgame aren't too big of a deal since they are optional anyway but a game not being bad doesn't make it good so what is good about dark souls 2. first of all a lot of the fun parts of vanilla were taken out for no reason in scholar i don't care what you say the fact that you can skip the beginning of the game with 1 million souls is cool as hell i'm never gonna do it but it's freeing to know that it's always a choice scholar got rid of this because it's no fun also the undead dragon vanilla comes to life and killed me now that's a good time why doesn't scholars undead dragon come to life why are the developers allergic to fun and why does scholar block the cool looking dragon level behind another petrified statue as i stated in my critique about scholar the locked off multi-fights can be a fun experience when there aren't hidden archers ready to ruin your fun and vanilla reduces the amount of encounters per level to a reasonable amount vanilla dark souls 2 is built around bite-sized little multi-fights and this works to the advantage of the combat mechanics dark souls 2 is slow but this works really well for multifights as all the enemies are slow as well so vanilla ends up being the best experience for slow souls multi-fight combat if every enemy attacked at the speed of a dark souls 3 enemy or bloodborne then it wouldn't be fun to fight five enemies at once since getting an opening would be way harder to time but in a slow game like dark souls 2 where the average enemy has a simple move set multi-fights end up being an enjoyable experience scholars stormed me with so many ganks and hidden archers that i couldn't enjoy the fights but on a weak broadsword only build vanilla always has a sense of fairness have you ever played through the beginning of dark souls 1 and enjoyed the slow souls multifight combat when locked off and wanted a game designed around this if you said you know i never played dark souls 1 unless i was locked on and i hate multi-fights then there is no enjoyment for you to be found in vanilla however if you were like me and you answered that you loved all the multifights in the beginning of dark souls 1 and usually don't use the lock-on anyways then you might enjoy vanilla dark souls too i don't like too many enemies or too little vanilla dark souls 2 is just about right vanilla has more consistently entertaining multifights throughout the game than dark souls 1. many dark souls 1 levels are more about traversing dangerous cramped level design where you can easily fall off the ledge and die think about blighttown or sends fortress as examples while these levels are great in their own way they aren't fun and uh turn your brain off and fight enemies in an arena sort of way this is where dark souls 2 takes something fun in the first game multifights and expands upon that concept for people who want this type of combat by making it the focus of the game and should dark souls 2 have taught the player to fight locked off instead of literally telling players to use the lock-on in the tutorial yes this is still a major problem in vanilla that i ranted at scholar for but unlike scholar there is an actual good game waiting for you if you can master locked off combat in vanilla it's about time we talk about the death counts in scholar and vanilla the servers are offline so the death count in majula was only tracking me the entire time just to make me feel bad in scholar i beat almost every boss with the broadsword including the dlc and i died around 200 times i should note that the number on screen is inflated because i died probably over 40 times in the frigid outskirts and then a bunch more new game plus but either way i die between 150 and 200 times on my first playthrough of scholar wow this feeble guy is pretty bad at dark souls now let's look at vanilla a game with all new enemy spawns that could easily catch me off guard and increase my death count and i also killed all of the enemies in just about every level and i died a grand total of 31 times wow that is just insane even after beating the hardest scholar levels in vanilla which is shrine of amanda and iron keep i had only 22 deaths and most of the deaths that got me to 31 were just from ancient dragon one shots anyways in the boss run now the average dark souls 2 fan will see this and think i guess feeble is just bad at scholar lol good but honestly i don't really care about the death count such a high percentage of scholars deaths were from well-hidden gank squads or hidden archers that require me to use a bow to make the game fair which is a playstyle i really dislike and all that crap is gone in vanilla it's almost like vanilla doesn't have a bunch of enemy spam gank squad cheap deaths so i rarely died don't get me wrong dying less doesn't make the game better but vanilla earned every one of those 31 deaths except for ancient dragon and let me tell you what scholar did not earn 234 deaths from me it took them one cheap death at a time although vanilla dark souls 2 is the superior game if i'm in the mood for locked off multi-fights it is still not superior to dark souls 1 because i'm not trying to commit career suicide with this video in all seriousness dark souls 1 excels over the sequel because dark souls 1 is high art and dark souls 2 is not wow i sound really pretentious right now but i'm completely serious as i tried to show in my dark souls 1 critique the journey of dark souls 1 through its vertically interconnected world from ringing the church bell at the top of undead parish to traversing to the poison lake at the bottom of lordran from the land of the gods to the lake at the bottom of the world it's an experience like none other dark souls 2 is not that good in dark souls 2 you go to a bunch of random disconnected levels and fight mechanically uninspired bosses at the end of every path even if i enjoy vanilla dark souls 2 it never reaches any of the artistic heights with this level design world design boss designer story that was dark souls 1. by the end of dark souls 1 i'm tearing up while fighting the weak hollow of what used to be a god after traversing through his kingdom and seeing the catastrophe that trying to hold on to his legacy and inflicted upon the land by the end of dark souls 2 i'm indifferent towards the kingdom and i guess i'm killing some evil woman the king banged and she now uh looks like the grim reaper and let's be honest dark souls 2 regenerating hp through life gems is a band-aid solution over having a consistent amount of enemies in every level every level can be as drawn out or as short as possible if the player has unlimited heals anyways and it was just a solution to cover kind of lazy game design dark souls 2 is a good game while dark souls 1 is an amazing game with the terrible ending because of how rough the final third of dark souls 1 is i can understand if someone else prefers dark souls 2 overall since its ending is a bit less bad and the worst parts of dark souls 2 like the ancient dragon boss run are optional dark souls 2 is about on par with the first when it comes to replayability if you are in the mood for locked off multi fights specifically whenever i think about replaying dark souls 1 a bad feeling grows in my stomach while thinking about the last third of the game that makes me want to just beat smoan ornstein the dlc and then just quit because the majority of the end game is so unenjoyable dark souls 2 doesn't force the worst parts of the game on me like ancient dragon so it's easy to see myself doing a new game plus of dark souls 2 over the first although i still prefer replaying dark souls 1 over the second game since i like playing souls games for boss battles and dark souls 1 does boss fights much better than the sequel so many dark souls 2 bosses are mechanically identical knights in armor that a player can just circle strafe for an easy win while dark souls 1 bosses are golias that require positioning strategies to overcome in summary vanilla dark souls 2 is more replayable if you want multifights while dark souls 1 wins if you replay the game for bosses and creative level design both games are fun in their own way but dark souls 1 is so much better as an artistic achievement when dark souls 2 is just another good game then i will always prefer the first game to the second in my previous critique of dark souls 2 scholar the first sin i wasn't a big fan of the dlc at least i didn't like it as much as the average dark souls 2 fan and while i still prefer dark souls 1 and 3 dlc over the second i did think that the dark souls 2 dlc was better in vanilla now this is a stupid thing to say since the enemy placement in the dlc is unchanged between scholar and vanilla but it's still better in vanilla now how is this possible scholar taught me from the first moment to the last that the game was just a series of cheap deaths so i rarely bothered to play it slow and just ran past most of the enemies by the time i reached the dlc i saw that there were a lot of enemies so i did what i was taught to do in the base game and i just ran past everything this is why the most awkward part of my critique about scholar was when i reviewed the dlc i was so used to running past that i saw the entirety of the dlc levels as more enemy spam to run past despite it not being as bad as scholars base game design it's also worth noting that by the end of a scholar playthrough i'm so burnt out from all the cheap deaths and enemy spam that i have no desire to play the game anymore and i just want to never touch the massive amount of dlc content when i played the dlc after a scholar playthrough i had no willpower left to pretend to have fun with anything vanilla's base game is actually fun and reasonable so whenever i reach the end the thought of playing more content in the dlc isn't physically repulsive as i mentioned before vanilla has a proper difficulty curve that teaches the player to slowly get better at multifights while gaining extra levels from killing all the enemies so not only was my character a higher level for the dlc i was skilled enough as a player for the extra challenging multifights by the time i reached the dlc in vanilla my gameplay was completely different from my scholar playthrough because i've been slowly conditioned to kill all the enemies rather than give up and run past nurture over nature it's not in my nature to run past enemies i was taught to do this by scholar and vanilla re-taught me how to play dark souls 2. although i enjoyed the dlc more i did mention that it's my least favorite dlc of all the souls games so let's talk about the issues that i did have some parts of the dlc like this npc invasion in the same room as the porcupine army and the ivory king do start to push my buttons just as much as scholar and let's not forget about the blue smelter demon boss run or the frigid outskirts that are completely obnoxiously difficult for no reason other than to piss me off although i may be better and more used to killing all the enemies in a level now the dlc still has awful boss runs and some stupid amounts of enemy spam knowing that the dlc was the same in vanilla and scholar combined with dark souls 2 fans thinking the dlc is the greatest thing ever made it made me think that vanilla would just be like the dlc but i was wrong some parts of the dlc are a precursor to the enemy placement we would see in scholar of the first sin but if you play vanilla you'll see most parts of the dlc as a more difficult evolution of the base game's multi-fight combat with a few extra hard areas that are annoying and obnoxious for almost no reason alright guys we've made it the vanilla dark souls 2 mini critique but also a comparison to scholar is over so let's review what we've learned so far scholar of the first sin is a re-release of an old game that changed the enemy placement by taking away enemies from hard end game levels like drangleic castle or the ancient dragon boss run and in turn increased all of the enemies in the early game levels so that iron keep an early to mid game level is the hardest level in the entire game scholar also added statues that block progression until the player gets a difficult to find item called the fragrant branch of yore which results in players getting stuck more often and having to look up where to find items on the internet to progress scholar also got rid of the hide knights by sticking them all in one level for no reason scholar of the first sin is unequivocally worse than vanilla in every single way maybe someone will tell me that scholar balanced some magic or pvp items but i don't give a sh scholar literally has an upside down difficulty curve while vanilla has the smoothest difficulty curve i've seen imagine if they took dark souls 1 a thoughtfully designed game and then changed every enemy and item location just to sell it again it's ridiculous miyazaki would never let any harm come to his brainchild so prepare to die edition and the remaster had minimal changes unfortunately miyazaki didn't care too much about the legacy left by a game that he didn't have a hand in creating vanilla dark souls 2 is a thoughtfully designed game with some major issues and then miyazaki probably asked some junior developers to change a bunch of random crap even if it didn't make any sense just to justify reselling an old game with minimal graphical improvements in other words scholar of the first sin is a cash grab this may seem weird since at the beginning of the video i mentioned how the average redditor dark souls 2 fan told me that scholar was better how could they think scholar is better when it's not my theory is as follows most scholar fans played vanilla first which conditioned them to play slowly while killing all the enemies because it teaches the player how to play the game and then they saw scholars in optional hard mode kind of like what master quest is to the zelda series is what scholar is to vanilla a harder game mode that changes things for the sake of making the old game feel new again the only issue here is that ocarina of time forces a player to beat the game once in normal mode to access master quest while scholar forces the player to play the overly difficult redesign game first and last no matter what scholars covenant of champions shouldn't just make the enemies harder it should be the master quest covenant in other words the changes in enemy placement in scholar should either a not exist b be hidden behind a covenant that explains that entering it changes enemy placement or c be a new game plus option that allows the player to enter master quest mode after finishing vanilla once just like how they handled it in ocarina of time i think maybe there could be some enjoyment to be found in scholar if a player had already beaten vanilla many times and wants extra challenge and change for the sake of change because they're bored of vanilla but no new dark souls 2 players should start at scholar scholar of the first sin has done more damage to the longevity of dark souls 2 than any of my video essays ever could and if scholar was a mod for vanilla it would probably be relatively unpopular i made a defense for dark souls 2 under the pretense that vanilla and scholar were similar because i believed reddit the moral of this video is to never trust reddit i said a bunch of nasty things like the developers didn't even like dark souls 1 and that they wanted to make kingsfield 5 but they couldn't so they made a game that forces players to use overpowered builds to overcome difficulty this is wrong the developers of dark souls 2 were genuinely trying to make a follow-up to the original that improved some things like multi-fights and pvp but in the game's travel development they dropped the ball when it came to boss fights in world design and level design scholar resembling king's field has less to do with developer intent and more to do with developer incompetence the developers weren't trying to make scholar a good game just a game that was different enough to justify asking for 60 more dollars from every dark souls 2 fans so they changed a bunch of crap and nonsensical ways to make money there were other issues with my defensive dark souls 2 video like how i thought power stancing in dark souls 2 was just holding two weapons and i didn't realize that literally makes no sense because how would that be any different than just attacking with one or the other since the damage is the same so that was a dumb mistake to make i never actually could power stance in the first place because i never had good enough stats to do it with the weapons i was using so the game was rigged from the start also it's pretty dumb that you have to hold y then lb to do a power stance attack since that's completely unintuitive as a combat mechanic although i never did real power stancing it also didn't really matter because i was doing so much damage without power stancing that i was hit trading anyways which was the point of that section of the video but it was still a stupid mistake to make and i apologize i also talked about how joseph anderson must have a different idea of what a cheap death is for me because he liked dark souls 2 but this was also wrong i actually agree with joseph anderson that vanilla dark souls 2 doesn't really have any more cheap deaths in the first game all of the confusion came from the fact that i had played scholar and thought that this was a good representation of what vanilla dark souls 2 is when that couldn't be further from the truth so i shouldn't have compared joseph anderson's vanilla play through to my scholar play through and although i still disagree with a lot of h bomber guys in defense of dark souls 2 video i do understand why he likes dark souls 2 now h bomber guy likes locked off multifights quite a lot so he likes dark souls 2 a lot looking back on it i threw a lot of shade at h bomberguy throughout my other two dark souls videos because my hate for scholar blinded me but after playing vanilla and taking a break from youtube i now realize that was uncalled for i'm 100 certain that h bomber guy won't watch this video but on the off chance that he is here i want to apologize although my defense of dark souls 2 might have a lot of problems i probably won't take the video down since i still really liked some parts like the frigid outskirts section it's also worth noting that scholar is completely ridiculous with gank squad so i don't disagree when i say that the game was either made for overpowered builds co-op or both at the same time i just think the reason has less to do with the developers wanting to make kingsfield 5 rpg game and more to do with the developers not knowing what the f they are doing so they ruined vanilla dark souls 2 in the terrible re-release the biggest issue with my defensive dark souls 2 video isn't even the content of the video itself it's just that no one really needs to make a video defending scholar the first sin when the obviously superior based vanilla version exists and if i knew vanilla was this good i would have probably never made the in defense of dark souls 2 video about scholar to begin with now there is one hot take that i made in my in defense of dark souls 2 video that i'm actually going to double down on which is how hit trading resembles skyrim combat if the player couldn't heal in the pause menu now i do understand why comparing skyrim combat to dark souls combat is illegal in the souls community however i'm breaking the law and i didn't mean that dark souls combat was skyrim just that on a spectrum between souls action combat and skyrim hit trading with an overpowered greatsword is closer on that spectrum to being like skyrim than a note hit dodge rolling champion and if the player has enough poise for most normal enemies to not be able to stagger them out of an attack animation then it's one step closer to being like skyrim and then dark souls 2 takes a third step towards skyrim combat by adding almost unlimited healing resources remember i'm not saying that dark souls has skyrim combat just that on a spectrum between pure souls combat and skyrim hit trading or having high poise or having unlimited heals are all extra steps towards skyrim but right now we're still in cyrodiil well this has been some journey i made a critique about how much i hate dark souls 2 and then made an in-defense video for a game that i didn't like only to end up enjoying the original version of the game in fact this whole series of videos crapping on dark souls 2 never would have existed if scholar of the first sin just never came out i would have released some video called in defense of dark souls 2. it's all right just a bit worse than the first one and then i would have been done with it a good number of people in the dark souls 2 community have been thoroughly mean and insufferable the entire time and i'm exhausted maybe it's time to play sakura [Music] you

Channel: Feeble King

Views: 528,956

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Id: dgJM4O8mAys

Length: 39min 21sec (2361 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 28 2022