Ranking the Areas of Dark Souls II [Part 1]

I'm Billy s welcome back to the channel today we're dodging poison statues and struggling through snowstorms as I rank the areas of Dark Souls 2. this is part one of my list featuring areas 29th through 16th check back next week or click the card in the top right corner if you're watching late for my top 15 areas in Dark Souls 2. there's more to drag Lake than meets the eye with so many unique climates and locations it truly feels like a Melting Pot for every medieval fantasy game ever there's something for everyone in Dark Souls 2 molten lava keeps haunted forests a [ __ ] pirate town is it because the game is all a dream so nothing has to make sense and anything can exist I know that was one Theory floating around whatever the case Dark Souls 2's areas are fascinating to me because we have some brilliantly designed locations alongside some of the worst levels design in the entire catalog of from software's games so let's not beat the bush all 29 Dark Souls 2 areas ranked and be sure to leave your thoughts down below where else was going to come last in a Dark Souls 2 area ranking I do not have enough vitriol in my body to fuel my hatred for The Frigid outskirts and they really make you think you're going somewhere cool after having you hop in a coffin to reach it instead you're in a periodically striking blizzard that doesn't give you a moment's rest the Dark Souls 2 optional DLC areas were designed with Co-op play in mind and you'd summon people from the statues at the start to help you survive the harsh winter ahead but from software now knows that if people can avoid Co-op so they can be anti-social they will do that dangerous reindeer will spawn to get in your way constantly and their moveset is purposefully hard to dodge through so you'll want to get used to killing them by following the right wall and just running I was able to get to London's Allen with about four reindeers attacking me throughout but I still remember my first time in the outskirts having spawned every single reindeer because I died that much that I had to kill them that much I bet if you removed the blizzard in this area it actually becomes far more bearable nothing is less enjoyable in games for me than when your view is obscured in a title not designed around that concept I'm glad that they tried something new here that's a positive but I just don't think snowstorms are fun in Souls games the consecrated snow field and Eldon ring had the same issue for players so maybe we just dropped blizzards entirely Focus Less on disorienting the player and more on challenging the player to follow a path in the storm I could imagine a blizzard covering like a large ruin with sconces lit on the walls and you have to follow the correct path to progress lit by said sconces but you're barely able to make out which direction is which due to the snowstorm come on hire me from software you know you want to my only advice for the frigid outskirts is to just leg it forwards when the blizzard lets up as the reindeer cannot spawn while it's clear other than that stick to the right and pray or better yet just don't do it don't put yourself through it go do something else have a cup of tea go outside touch some grass do a death drop I don't know anything else please somebody from software accidentally pressed the control V command because no other explanation can be found for why there are so many poison spitting statues littering the walls of the Black Gulch I have never in my life feared the color green more than when entering this dank dark oily Cavern law wise the statues are all made by the rotten and he loves them but they are one of the most irritating level hazards to handle in any game as you can either Sprint through and probably get poisoned or take your time breaking them one after the other [ __ ] up your weapons durability and wasting 15 minutes of your life the best bonfire in this area is hidden behind a petrified enemy which is always such a fun idea whoever on the B Team thought hiding important items or locations or bonfires behind petrified characters and adding more of them into scholar of the first sin I'd just like to talk there are two character invasions from the Woodland children Gully and Victor and yes they are both so incredibly inconvenient to fight you practically have to hug the boss fog to get a safe space away from those demonic statues otherwise their poison will be interrupting your every animation as you fight the path to the boss is woefully short and if you're just rushing past the dark suckers giant worms and poison statues you won't have many issues if you want to explore the level thoroughly though you have to drop off a cliff and find the hidden Caverns below a mysterious locked door awaits your arrival and if you want to open it you have to delve even deeper there's a second larger Cavern containing two Ancient Giants hidden away from the rest of the world killing them will not only drop the key needed for the door on the cliff but also a soul of a giant which you can keep in your inventory to make the Vendrick fight later in the game much easier a fun will find that genuinely saves the Black Gulch from being the bottom location on my list you can also find lucatel of Mira in a tunnel near the start of The Gulch though I forgot where she was in this playthrough can you find lucatel of Mira good luck just beyond shelver sunken city lies a brief optional complex of tunnels this is Cave of the Dead the second of the three Co-op DLC areas on my list and what an annoying area this is the cabin may be small but it's lined to the brim with poison and petrification statues along the wall that will hit you combined with a series of fast-moving hard-hitting enemies that call this place home and you're dealing with an area that is just as bad as the Black Gulch you'd think that with such a condensed area it would be ranked lower but once you know the path through cave of the Dead it isn't as daunting as like The Frigid outskirts for example there are brassiers below you can light if you want which I did in my playthrough to signify the correct way out of the first room you drop into only for you to enter a long Corridor populated by more statues giant worms enemies and oh yeah clusters of poison and petrification statues that move what is wrong with UB team they really thought that difficulty aligned with how many status ailments can we fire at the player not stopping to think that perhaps petrification isn't the fun Co-op mechanic they thought it was given it can lead to a cheap death if you get hit enough times which isn't that hard in this area you can see why it's so hated it's not helped by an NPC gank boss at the end though bosses don't factor into my area rankings but if they did Cave of the Dead would actually be 28 for not 27th however once you know the Boss run back it's easy enough and way less tedious to get through given its smaller size I just can't believe we had to pay for this back in the day before we continue please just lend me your ears for 20 seconds or so I'm trying to reach 10 000 subscribers on my channel before the end of 2023 over 80 percent of my viewers are not subscribed so let's Rectify that Harry that subscribe button for more gaming countdown goodness I've got many playlists filled with the good content back to the video and rounding out our Trio of awful optional DLC Co-op areas we have the iron passage found within the depths of Bloom Tower the moment you enter the area you have two options one take the lower path and run the enemy Gauntlet or two take the upper path pull the lever attempt to reach the gate at The Far Side before it shuts fail and then run the enemy Gauntlet it's such Incredibly Close timing that I have yet to master and releases so many irritating enemies in your vicinity so just take the lower path if you have any sense of self-preservation iron passage honestly would be fine as a Boss run back area if it wasn't for the enemies that can cause slow movement a few Majors on the upper levels figured that if you run slower you'll get hurt more without that caveat you could easily run past most of the enemies in the passage making it to the boss without much issue as long as you heal at the right spots but the design philosophy of these areas denotes that you must suffer an awful mechanic to get what you want and in my case if you watched my boss ranking video last week you all know I love the blue Smelter Demon so I really am suffering to get what I want here similarly to Cave of the Dead both areas have a quick Boss run back once you know the route but iron passage just barely edges it out on the totem pole because there are no status ailment afflicting statues waiting to petrify you right before the boss store a part of me wishes I could explore the iron passage more clear the enemies out and actually see what the upper half of this area looks like but I don't have the patience nor do I particularly want to indulge in that psychotic portion of my brain every once in a while you'll run into an area in from soft games that is just pure filler and for me that comes in the form of the doors of Pharos a transitional area between the Shaded Woods and bright Stone Cove celldora it felt like the developers just wanted to chuck an area filled with Pharaoh's lock stones and that was it there's nothing of note to find here aside from an awful optional boss tied to a covenant that you can unlock somewhere else on the map there are these cool Mammoth looking enemies that I wish made more appearances in game their design feels very Lord of the Rings very Middle Earth normally you'd get invaded entering the optional portion of this level but on my playthrough I encountered a mechanic I never knew about apparently if you join the rat covenant before coming to the doors of Pharos none of the enemies will attack you it took me by complete surprise I thought my game had glitched but I'm honestly not complaining The Invader who normally invades you in the big pool area has a very annoying crossbow that I was happy to skip and I'm glad I didn't have to kill any of the gavlan look-alikes because they just seem like Jolly fellows enemies only started attacking me again after I killed the boss of the area such a weird experience at least the aesthetic design of the doors of pharaohs is interesting to me it keeps it from really bottoming in my list but I still find this area to be complete filler after seeing areas like No Man's Wharf and Earthen Peak which served as the transitional area between their Roots respective first area and final area respectively it feels even lazier next up the sister location of our previous entry the Grave of Saints takes everything I mentioned about the doors of Pharos and admittedly applies it here in almost every playthrough of Dark Souls 2 I always end up at the Grave of Saints before the doors of Pharos as I tend to leave Freya till last out of the four Lords because of my Arachnophobia so this area just feels more natural to me as the introduction to the rat king covenant it's far shorter than the doors and feels more aesthetically accurate to a location that rats would really make their nest in Burrows dug up sconces littering the walls rat statues around every corner and a ton of Pharos lock stones that have absolutely no meaning whatsoever if you came here second after doing the doors of Pharos and joining the rat covenant there the enemies here will also be non-hostile hence why I would rather do it the other way around because the previous area has a way worse enemy selection to deal with there's not really much to say about Grave of Saints outside of all of this I find it a more aesthetically correct area for its purpose the Covenant and that's literally the main reason it ranks higher it's a nice extra path down to the gutter too seeing as you'll likely need to go through here if you haven't unlocked ladder Smith Gilligan and is 12 000 Soul ladder the only tutorial area in a soulsborne game to not feature a tutorial boss of any kind things betwixt is such a non-entity ironic given it's literally the limbo between the outside world and dranglake And yet when I think about Dark Souls 2 this area does pop up vividly I have fond memories of Awakening from the fall in the intro cut scene in that beautiful gazebo of wandering the sparsely Green Landscape heading closer and closer to the giant crack in the wall at the far side the fire keeper Hut is an iconic location from Dark Souls 2 and nothing feels worse than getting absolutely roasted by the Crohn's chilling in their vacation home Hideaway with their handmaid's tale looking servant there's the optional path leading to the singular ogre that I challenge to defeat on every new playthrough to prove how good I am of the game but then you get to the actual tutorial part of the level and it just feels a bit lazy you can either skip this area entirely and just run to majula or you can go through a couple of minorly interesting rooms that ultimately give you no real payoff Beyond Unlocking The Crow's Nest for strength builds it's worth doing this as the Demon's great hammer is a potential item you can obtain by trading petrified somethings to the crows and it's very good at bonking enemies when you're able to wield it what annoys me about things betwixt is that between the 2014 release and Scholar they decided to lock the final third of the area behind a petrified enemy it's not like there's anything of note back there beyond the gender-changing coffin so why do this in the first place it gives new players this assumption that something good must be back there but then it's just Cosmetics instead you can get invaded by the pursuer on that very same Beach but I didn't really bother because I didn't want to kill the ogres as I had no reason to use the coffin instead I spent my time lighting all the sconces so I could fight in Vader satisfying that lighting every flame actually does something this area does a good job of teaching players the controls I'll give them that but it really needed a boss to tie things together which is ironic given I feel this game has too many bosses for what it is I debated on whether to include the Throne of wand as an actual area on this list as it's just an extension of dranglia Castle but at the end of the day you can't access it on your first visit to the castle and it technically fills the role of the Kiln from the first game so even though it's a glorified Boss run I'm counting it the stone path leading down towards the throne is pretty unique I'll give it that not the most intimidating of approaches since I'm not a fan of how open and rectangular the actual Cavern around the path is but I like walking past the lit torches and approaching that giant fog gate in the distance I don't include bosses in my area rankings but boss Arenas are fair game and I admittedly feel this arena is a complete letdown compared to every other from Self final Boss Arena it's a semi-circle with a large drop-off Point yet it feels like there's nothing Grand or striking that makes me think wow what an end game Boss Arena it's just a large room with a dusting of ashes on the sides of the walls the throne itself is locked behind a door that can only be opened for the Giant's kinship but it's a far cry from the other Kilns in the other games which are these crazy Open Spaces that feel intimidating by comparison locking yourself in a tiny room on a throne beneath the Earth nobody will know about kind of sucks the lore is why this area beats out those below it though the law of the throne being tied to nishandra and Vendrick which I went over in my Dark Souls 2 boss ranking videos Link in the top right corner I check those out for more details and since you all are probably curious I always walk away from the throne in Dark Souls 2. I like the idea that my character is just so disillusioned with how frustrating the game can be that he wants no part in perpetuating the cycle just beating the final area of the game are the other final areas of the game the giant memories which I'll be referring to as a collective are a trio of end game areas you can discover after collecting the Ashen Mist Heart in the Dragon Shrine if you head back to the giant trees in The Forest of Fallen Giants you can then access three different memories here you can obtain three Souls of a giant which will make your battle against vendrickezia but more importantly you can collect the Giant's kinship from the giant Lord needed to access the Throne of want my favorite aspect of the giant memories are that they take place in The Forest of Fallen Giants as the siege of the Giants takes place you get to Traverse areas you've already explored but now from a completely new perspective seeing how things ended up the way they were my favorite being the giant head outside the pursuer boss fight in the present that can absolutely one shot you in the giant memory if you're not careful I do think the Giants themselves are a little overtuned damage wise such as their this pair in the memory who wrecked me multiple times but as someone who tends to just rush through these areas to get the giant souls and get out it's not the worst thing in the world there are items to find a few secret rooms to discover and you can even inherit benheart of jugo's equipment if you followed his quest line which gets you Dark Souls 2's incarnation of the Moonlight Greatsword no idea how we made it into this memory I don't know the law behind that somebody tell me down below but this area ranks quite low on my list because I'm not the biggest fan of how Dark Souls 2 end game plays out in general and I feel this is such an obtuse way to progress the game I don't know how I'd have figured out to go back to the Forest of Fallen Giants and was lucky my best friend let me know how to progress hi Nathan shout out to Nathan best friend [ __ ] you for calling me out for saying strength Supremacy a few videos ago Ma it's also worth noting there is a secret fourth memory you can access with the Ashen Mist Heart if you go to the Duke's Dear Freya boss room and interact with the dragon there you get access to the dragon memory but it only leads to the ancient dragon soul though of the memory areas it has the largest connection to Dark Souls 1. as you're seemingly appearing either at the End of the Age of dragons as you can see withering Arch trees in the distance or this is the dragon from Ash Lake in Dark Souls 1 after it finally passed on either way it's a really cool law moment and now for the last of the smaller and consequential areas the dark Chasm of old rounds out our bottom 10 areas of Dark Souls 2. if you haven't heard of this area before I don't blame you it's part of the pilgrims of the dark Covenant quest line which leads to the dark lurka boss fight here you meet dark diver grandal in three locations the Black Gulch the Shaded Woods and under dranglia Castle once met in each place he'll allow you to join his Covenant and Traverse the dark Chasm of old the first time is free but future excursions will cost you a human effigy experienced players can roll with the toll but new players please be sure to save a few up if you're pursuing this questline the dark Chasm of old has three different layouts depending on where you enter and the goal is to lie to Brazier with a torch kill all the enemies and then Escape via a drop into the abyss at the end of each of the three chasms basically if you don't have flame butterflies to light a torch you're screwed the enemies in this location are almost always NPC builds you've got to Havel a Rapier wielder a xanthus crown pyromancer etc etc they can be a little Annoying to fight and when also dealing with a few ranged enemies including Forest spirits that can use ranged magic and archers and Rogues yeah it's not the most fun once you complete all three areas you gain access to dark lurker but if you fail to beat him you have to go through one of the three chasms all over again my recommendation is the dranglia castle Chasm as it only has four enemies though one of them is Havel so be prepared for that I do like the lore of the chasm if it wasn't obvious it's the abyss from Dark Souls like the main story of the game revolving around shards of Manus trying to regain their power through strong Souls the dark Chasm of old is an ever-expanding darkness that is also trying to reclaim its lost power by absorbing the world around it as it turns out killing Manus daddy of the abyss and dark Souls rarely had an effect on the world of Dark Souls 2 in ways we just couldn't have predicted finally we are out of the small areas and now we can discuss all the big ones starting with everybody's least favorite Shrine of Amana coming after the fantastic drangler castle I don't think anybody was expecting a Serene swamp filled with bioluminescent plants singing maidens and waterlogged ruins nor were we expecting some of the most tedious enemy placement in the entire franchise but from software really does love to surprise us you silly scamps this isn't a poison swamp but I'm treating it like an honorary poison swamp the main drawback to Shrine of Amana are the enemy types specifically the Amana priestesses who like to Fire magic at you from long distances with the tracking of the Gods the archdrake pilgrim Knights are easy enough to handle close melee enemies at this point in the game should be getting melted by you if you handled your stats for your chosen build correctly and even the Amana aberrations hidden within the water are bearable on their own being these corpse-like creatures that light up under the surface but those Mages man with scholar at the first sins awful proximity-based aggro ranges it's like every single Mage is firing at you all at once and you can't get a moment to breathe the stretch of level between the second and third bonfire is genuinely some of the worst level design in the franchise you've got Mages firing at you the moment you leave the safety of the bonfire there are underwater aberrations who are hard to spot that will aggro you if you get close and while the Mages fire at you a large Knight Will aggressively chase you down going past the ruins more Mages and more Mages appear until you reach the next milfanito hurt and then there's just a giant expanse leading to the cavern with the Third Bonfire with tons of Mages and archdrake pilgrims with no cover to protect you from the Mages fire you just have to play extremely aggressive of and it's a 50 50 chance if it'll work in your favor and every death forces you to do this whole sequence again which is annoying because it's so easy to die there are a couple of optional paths for extra items and a door leading to vendrick's Soul if you've beaten the Vendrick boss and are human as well as a special milfinito shrine at the far end of the area after the boss that you can only get through while hollowed though I got my ass absolutely handed to me on a platter by The pyromancers Who set up shop there it's just not fun to play through if we had more cover to hide from the Mages and more ruins to explore as opposed to just wading through empty Lakes Amana would feel so much better to Traverse which is a shame because aesthetically it's one of my favorite areas in the game you know I originally thought that No Man's Wharf would be higher on this list I hold the area in high regard as such a unique location in any of the Soul spawn games from an aesthetic perspective it's a Pirate Cove complete with a ghost ship taverns with sleeping soldiers and a whole host of terrifying dark dwellers in the crevices hidden from the light though it used to be a prison Port where they'd cut off all the undead who couldn't fit into the cells of the Lost Bastille it has a couple of nice interesting shortcuts is a rare area with a winding path towards the goal of ringing the bell to bring the ship to port you can meet carhelion of the fold here in case you're a mage build as well as your first potential meeting with lucatel of mirror either near the bonfire in the original game or in a house in the town in scholar of the first sin the issue much like everything in scholar is that there are so many enemies that can lock onto your presence from so far away that you have to manage them Express certainly otherwise you'll have the whole town bearing down upon you when you least expect it I know when I played the 2014 base game all those years ago this area was far more manageable enemy wise it also introduces doggos into Dark Souls 2 and that is the true first sin I think No Man's Wharf suffers from just being a bit shorter than most of the other areas on my list it has a lot of density and I love the progression path taking you around the whole Port but there's not necessarily a lot to find outside of a fragrant branch of yore and gavlan who can sell poison-based weapons and the Ring of giants there's also a Pharos lockstone here that just lights the area up it's supposed to scare the upper level dark dwellers but if you have a torch you'll do fine I think what I'm learning is that I just want from software to make a pirate game in a similar vein to secular come on from software you know you want to the true poison swamp of Dark Souls 2. I've decided to lump Harvest Valley under the Earthen Peak brand because let's be real it's the same area with the same aesthetic same dangers just with two very distinct segments the first half of this area is a poison smog-filled series of quarries littered with dark wielding Giants that you have to travel through in order to reach the main tower it's fairly easy to just rush through Harvest Valley talking with chloane as you go aside from the brief segment where you have to open a gate near some desert pyromancers enemies that are surprisingly good at one shotting you if you're not careful I do appreciate this design decision though if you want to explore the poison Mist you can go nuts but if you want to just get to Earthen Peak it's pretty simple and the only real danger are a few more pyromancers along the way now if you want to explore the poison Mist you can do what I'm doing and just flail about aimlessly trying to find your way out by following the walls but because I'm smart or you can be intelligent light a torch and you'll actually be able to see what you're doing I didn't know until after my playthrough that that was even possible I'm so jealous there's also the hidden sunlight covenant off the beaten path here which is just such a weird spot for one of the most iconic covenants in Dark Souls gives me sunlight metal farming flashbacks oh God the second half of the level Earthen Peak is way more fun but also more frustrating if that makes sense because the enemies here are a lot tougher to deal with specifically The Headless mannequins which can gang up and poison you very very quickly this specific pair in this room made my life a living hell and I died to them more than I care to admit though I did get lucky and managed to slip through this door past the main area bonfire that usually gets shut by an enemy normally you'd have to work your way around Earthen Peak until you get to the other side I didn't have to do that which gave me a lot more freedom in how I went about tackling the rest of the level it plays really well with verticality in a way I enjoyed there's a lot of mechanics and traps to deal with pyromancers on the upper floors an actual mimic and more you can find paint here and you'll need to unlock the door in his room from the other side to get him to move on his questline sneaky bugger as well as ladder Smith Gilligan who you can recruit back to majula to help you enter the pit and of course Earthen Peak has the infamous burnable metal windmill need I say more mifa really let her house go it's very reminiscent of what Saruman did to eisengard and Lord of the Rings taking a beautiful landscape and absolutely decimating the environment for selfish needs if I didn't die here so much due to enemies I don't enjoy fighting it'd probably be higher but I suspect nobody is going to mind Earthen Peak sitting down here on the list the final area I'm ranking today missing out on my top 15 is Aldia's killer an end game area that is locked behind a king's door in the Shaded Woods the former home of aldia scholar of the first sin is filled with the dark machinations of his experimentation everything in here feels wrong somehow a giant dragon skeleton Halls lined with mirrors like that of the Looking Glass Knight complete with enemies that can break free from their confines to attack you an ominous series of don't you dare messages that when you light the Torches causes Red Phantoms to spawn and chase you a hallway filled to the brim with cages containing monsters mimics ogres and more a hidden room containing a prowling major some enemies and a large host of mimics jump scares that will kill you if you're not careful a room of corrosive acidic sludge that will destroy your equipment the list goes on it's an eerie location to explore your first time through but on future playthroughs it becomes a simple Corridor to run through to get to the Dragon Shrine there's just not much of note in Aldia's Keep and I feel like they could have really ran with the idea of this experimental Fun House of sorts picture this we could have had a progression system similar to the prison of Hope and Demon Souls forcing you to deal with Aldia's progressively more [ __ ] up experiments while searching for keys to unlock more of the keep ultimately leading to the guardian Dragon instead what we got is a significantly less interesting but still fun area to explore there's an invasion with lucatel's brother as latiel of Mira that's fun as well as Royal Sorcerer navlan whose questline asks you to kill various NPCs though as it turns out you can collect all the items he wants without killing if you do a bit of research and if you followed lucatel's questline she'll see you at the area bonfire where she bequeathes you her armor set truly tragic why did nobody ever tell me the hardest aspect of this level were the monsters outside though and that's the first half of my list complete apologies that this video is another two-parter I want to ensure I've got enough time to get started on my Dark Souls 3 playthrough for footage before tears of the Kingdom hits and sucks all my free time away so please look forward to next week's video If you enjoyed consider subscribing every little helps and I love making these videos for you guys genuinely my Social Links are on screen now feel free to follow where you feel comfortable I'd recommend my Twitter a massive shout out to my patreon supporters you guys are amazing it's still crazy to me that people want to support me even when I can't offer any exclusive patreon rewards so thank you so much I'll see you next time adios [Music] foreign

Channel: Billy S

Views: 11,665

Keywords: dark souls, demons souls, bloodborne, elden ring, video games, dark souls 1, dark souls 2, dark souls 3, ds1, ds, ds2, ds3, soulslike, souls, soulsborne, gamer, gaming, fromsoftware, fromsoft, tutorial, walkthrough, guide, boss, ranking, billy s, area ranking, ds2 areas, frigid outskirts, ds2 areas ranked, tier list, tier

Id: vyu2oP6T0Nw

Length: 32min 5sec (1925 seconds)

Published: Wed May 10 2023