RE: "In Defense of Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin"

hello and welcome to a new and more importantly different kind of video in this one I will cover the video of another content creator on YouTube that people who follow me for a longer time will already recognize this time the topic will be the YouTube Amala and more importantly his video called in defense of Dark Souls 2 scholar of the first sin but before we can dive into the video I have to give a short introduction to explain why I'm doing this why it is an English and more importantly what will be the goal of this video everyone who isn't interested in this can now just jump to the time shown on the screen to skip directly to the analysis so first of all I want to explain why this videos in English because in case a new viewer is watching this this channel is usually a German channel and it's still going to be a German channel in the future I will not start doing English videos exclusively because in my opinion it is important that content creators for languages other than English exists as well even if you could reach a wider audience by just doing everything in English however since this is a response to an English video it wouldn't make much sense to do it in German since most of the people interested might not be able to understand it now to the question why I'm doing a response video in general normally I don't do these because I think the place for criticism for a video should be its comment section and I did that to a certain extent but I want to talk about so much more that it would just be too much for a single comment especially since it's hard to include any evidence and those to be honest I would have never thought that I would do a response video on maula because when I found him I really enjoyed his style and his knowledge that he gained through research I thought that he was doing good objective videos as it was often set by him and his viewers in the comments section but over time I realized that the videos were not really that objective and in the beginning I blamed it on myself and that I just assumed they were because they are so detailed and very well written however over several really watches of his videos and noticed that Mahler himself sees his work as objective so much that he even challenges other content creators isn't it so strange that people can't seem to get a quote from my videos that would even remotely resemble that statement the idea that I tell people they are watching move is wrong for example when my discussions are always concerned with the facts you use and how well research those are versus the feelings you experience therefore I decided to do exactly that and do a response video with the baseline being his critique of Dark Souls tools scholar of the first sin now I want to make two things perfectly clear first this video is not here to actually defend Dark Souls 2 I want to make clear that I'm not a huge fan of the game I don't think that it's terrible but I find it to be the weakest one of the trilogy therefore the goal of this video is not to show that Dark Souls 2 is secretly a good game the goal is to show the problems in Mallis analysis especially in his view on objectivity and subjectivity this is also not just a problem of this one video it is a fundamental problem in his work that i want to point out second even though i will criticize smaller a lot in this video i don't want to say here that he is a bad youtuber and you shouldn't watch him actually I would even say the opposite because he puts in a lot of work in his videos which is not often seen on YouTube anymore however I think that it is important to also criticize a content creator as it has the same foundation as an analysis of a movie or a game especially since a lot of people seem to have the illusion that what Marla does is completely objective like I also did and that this means that he is better than other content creators and this is also supported by mawla who sometimes can become a bit smug even though he criticizes others for the exact same thing people who dialogue in group encounters are just bad at it and that criticism is false that would be really stupid to just say out loud like that so instead I said it over 10 minutes this is dripping with smug this is so hard to listen to it's unreal but let's treat it as a valid argument also for your notes if your immediate response to this is well I didn't notice anything or I didn't happen to me or I think it works fine I also want to point out that I don't think that I am above Mahler because I show his mistakes I respect him for the research he is doing for his videos and just because I'm criticizing him here doesn't mean that I think that I am superior or more intelligent because this whole subject about objectivity is not an easy topic and I'm not even sure myself of everything that I believe to know about it will be true therefore feel free to criticize me if I'm making mistakes I would only ask you to do it without insults and just arguments you know like elegant women last but not least for the introduction I want to give a short background about the video that I will be analyzing in a minute Dark Souls 2 was often seen as a black sheep of the series by a lot of people and with good reasons however there was still a large community that liked the game and that felt that its strengths were under represented it and therefore asked Harris also known as h-bomb a guy a fan of Dark Souls 2 to make a video highlighting the good parts of the game sadly this video had a lot of flaws in its argumentation which resulted in a lot of backlash especially in the comments and as a response Mahler then created a video series where he went over everything that Harris said and analyzed if the arguments raised were valid or if the effects presented were true this resulted in a final video called in defense of Dark Souls 2 scholar of the first sin which even though it says it is a defense was more of a showcase of its flaws but that alone would have not been enough for me to make this video the reason why I did this video in the end was as claimed that this would be an objective assessment of the game like the game as much as you want but when I am discussing measurable functionality and the effectiveness of a project and its aspects your feelings aren't relevant hell it may surprise some that I personally liked playing Dark Souls 2 at this point I think it's a fun game though I have to stymie my own feelings when it comes to a more objective assessment as this game has a handful of issues as I have already mentioned my goal here is to show that this is not true and even more that Mallis principle of his objective analysis which is also using in other videos it's not fully objective as he claims and his audience believes the end code then would obviously be to make mala think about his approach to analysis especially his view on objectivity or to at least start a discussion which would then show me why his approach is in fact valid and where I am wrong in my view on objectivity to reach that goal I will in a the points raised in the video and look why those can or cannot be considered objective and bear the problems in the argumentation are I want to say here that I will therefore your smallest video as a baseline but in comparison to his response series I will not analyze every watt used I will concentrate more on the topics itself this will also mean that I might not include everything he said in the video I will use quotes to show my points but there will also be times where just summarize what he said if it's not necessary to have a direct quote if you think that this is not genuine enough and you fear that I will leave out quotes that would be a counter to my analysis I recommend you to just watch this video first and check if everything was done correctly and criticize me if it wasn't a link to the video can be found in the info cards and the video description and with that being said let's start the analysis so the video starts with around 6 minutes of Mahler actually stating positives about the game like the diversity in the levels and other different features I won't really go into these points because they are not really focused on they are just stated without much of an explanation so there's not much to analyze however I want to give a short personal note here while I think it is important to not only show what supports your point I think the video would have been better without this section i don't assume that there was an evil intention behind it but I think it weakens the whole analysis because it feels like a manipulation of the viewer and that comes from two points first of all Mahler uses a very special tone during this section choose each of the available paths from the get-go and you will end the game feeling like a god that he doesn't usually use and it sounds more like a person that wants to sell a product than a person who wants to analyze it second while he sums up a lot of points he doesn't really go into detail for any of them which leads to the section being only 6 minutes long while the whole video has a length of more than 100 minutes this already creates a conclusion in the viewers mind that the game must be bad because 15 times more time is used to describe the bed than the goods even though all the bad points just get an actual analysis of several minutes which therefore increases the length of the section again I don't think that this was intentional it was probably just men a joke for the introduction but looking back at the whole video it feels a lot like the overall opinion of the viewer is supposed to be formed by the presentation alone but since he usually doesn't do that in other videos I don't think it is a general problem with his analysis but it was worth mentioning now we come to the actual meat of the analysis and before we go into the arguments I just want to show you what Marla says in the intro again now I would prefer to only have to say this once but that's very hopeful like the game as much as you want but when I am discussing measurable functionality and the effectiveness of a project and its aspects your feelings aren't relevant I wanted to make clear in the beginning that Marla is striving for an objective analysis this means that unless he states it in any way or form we will take his arguments and points as an objective criticism of the game so there's no gain from saying something like he obviously just stated his opinion and you only interpret it as as being objective I don't think he would do that since he criticized other content creators for the same thing but this is just a reminder for other viewers so he starts the critique by analyzing the movement of the game I will just summarize what he is presenting here what he and a friend of his called for Tia basically found out is that the movement in Dark Souls 2 scholar of the first sin works differently from Dark Souls when using the left analog stick to walk you don't have a full 360-degree control over your character instead there are snap points that will result in a major turn once you hit them now up until that point this statement would be totally objective because he would only describe how the two games function I could split hairs here and saying that Dark Souls probably has snap points as well just so much that you don't notice them but I don't think that this would actually change the difference that was described here the problem comes with the following statement so in case this isn't clear your analog stick doesn't represent a full 360-degree turn it is limited to roughly eight directional snap points this is already bad as a base because it reduces the amount of control a player has over their character but this is horrendous when considering exploration and platforming it should be pretty straightforward that this is terrible though it can be changed in the inny files from my knowledge at the very least before I go into the reasoning of why this is not a checked off anymore I want to give some background here while describing the different movement systems of both games he says the following about the one present in Dark Souls 1 in Dark Souls 1 we were given the standard 360 degree movement that is simply the preferred method of delivery for moving in third-person and that is nothing to celebrate it is absolutely what you should be expecting at the ground level for those who didn't see my video about objectivity and subjectivity I'll explain this a bit more what Marla basically does is that he creates a standard that he's then using as a baseline for the following analysis in this case that a game should give the player the full 360-degree control with a bit of explanation what problems would occur otherwise he then looks at the object effects that are given by the game in this case that you only have a certain amount of snap points and from that concludes that the movement of the game is bad because it does not satisfy the standard and this sounds fine right the problem here is the standard itself because it is not objective and I know this might not be obvious because a lot of you will probably agree with his standard as I do as well in principle so let me explain this in a bit more detail first of all most of you might agree that the 360 degree movement in third-person does not always have to be better for every game just take something like Super Mario 3d World on the Wii U for example this is a platformer and as you can clearly see it operates with snap points however this is actually something that makes the game more accessible because for example you won't fall down a narrow path when you move the analog stick slightly therefore you can make the argument that it actually suits the gameplay in this case now we could argue that he didn't mean it for all games even though he said it but that he meant it for games like Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 and in this case I would agree with his standard but this brings up the following question what is with people who stand out is that the movement in the game should have snap points as to why someone's then that might be different doesn't even have to be explained maybe he just has shaky fingers and the snap point system prevents his character from going into a different direction without him wanting to again the reason in itself doesn't matter but there are different people with different standards in the world and this brings up a follow-up question why would the first standard be considered objective and the second one subject whereas this defined a reasoning could be that more people agree with the first standard however in this case I would like to see the study to prove this point otherwise it's just a statement furthermore if we say that something is an objective standard because the majority of people agrees to that where would that end - I like it more to have a prebuilt character with its own backstory or one that is completely blank or even a combination of both and what if the standards of people change over time do we have to change our objective standards every year as well as you can see such an argumentation does not make really sense so the only conclusion can be that both standards are equally subjective the problem is now that this means that the whole baseline of the argumentation made by Mahler is subjective so this also means that the conclusion that the movement system of Dark Souls 2 is bad / horrible can never be objective even if you prove it with object effects therefore it also must be subjective now I want to say that this would usually not be a problem as an analyst you can define your standards under which you are analyzing the product the analysis can become even better if you analyze the product under different standards and not just one because a product via the game or a movie can easily fulfill several standards at the same time in this particular case both standards could have been fulfilled by just adding an option in the menu but the problem is here that Mahler considers his standard to be objective while all others are subjective and this is just wrong and to answer a question of Mahler I guess this is also what critics mean when they say or to put it like he likes to his opinions are objective and the opinions of people who disagree with him well those those are just subjective because in the end he is doing exactly that he just changes the order instead of stating the opinion in the end he puts it in the beginning and uses it as a baseline which blows the subjective part of the analysis and makes it sound more objective now again I don't say he does it on purpose because as I said I agreed with him at first since I also agreed with most of his standards however in the end he is not doing an objective analysis like that it is subjective we I'm now going into the next part of the analysis I want to just shortly talk about some obvious questions that my statements raise first can there be an objective analysis yes of course but this one would then only focus on the actual facts in this case an objective analysis would be to just describe how the movement works how it differs from other games and maybe even what consequences this can have like not reaching a snap point when you need to turn but it is then always important to say that these consequences can happen they don't have to otherwise it is wrong since not everyone will experience the exact same outcome second is there an objective standard as far as I'm concerned no at least not as long as the analyst is defining it after all the difference between objectivity and subjectivity is that the result should be independent of the researcher which in this case is the one doing the analysis but if the standards can differ this can never be the case there is theoretically a standard that could be described objective and that would be to define the baseline as to what the creators being for example developers or directors wanted to achieve and what their standards were for others product because then every analyst should come to the same conclusion if all the object effects would be included in the analysis the problem obviously is that we cannot know for certain what the correct goal or even what the standard was we can only assume that which takes away the objectivity again the third question is then one that directly follows the second what is for example with bugs in a game or inconsistencies inside a story can those be considered objective flaws the problem is not really and I know I just opened Pandora's box for myself with a statement but let me first explain why this is the case and second why this is not a problem so in the beginning I want to say that the statement doesn't mean that bugs or inconsistencies are not objective facts you can point them out and there's no way of denying their existence the question is more if you can consider them flaws and with what I said before I cannot really say that this is true for example you can have the standard that a story should be consistent but you can also have the standard and I hate myself for saying that that a story just sub where's your expectations you can even have both standards at the same furthermore a story does not only have to fulfill one of these standards but in the end both are equally subjective and you can analyze a story with both of them as a baseline now what we could say is that a writer would want his story to be consistent which would lead us back to what the creator's intentions were and therefore inconsistencies could be called objective flaws and I think that this is true for most writers especially those who don't want to be made fun of but in the end we don't really know that he could just have wanted to subvert expectations and logic was not effective while writing again that doesn't mean that it is not sensible to analyze a story under that standard especially since a lot of people share it but we can't really call a story objectively bad just because it has flaws in its logic as for bucks or other technical problems this becomes even harder I mean there are instances where there can be funny or instances where they make the game more enjoyable as seen an anthem we're back increased the loot rate and the players were angry when it was fixed but I can't think of a standard that would prefer the existence of packs in general it would always be a specific scenario defined by the case in my opinion however just because I can think of a standard doesn't mean there isn't one right on the other hand we can safely say that parks are definitely not something that a developer intended as that is the definition of a bug so with this idea we could say that they object to flaws in the game the problem here comes more from the good old sentence it's not a back it's a feature I mean just take the to next point smaller talks about the first one is an interaction where you can't use a letter when an enemy is nearby at first glance this looks like a bug and is therefore an objective flaw right but what if this was intentional what if it was implemented for example to make it harder for the player to just run through a level and he has to at least fight some enemies then the standard completely changes and we have to look into the question if the design decision succeeds in doing this I mean here for Tia is still avoiding the enemies but here Marla is forced to at least fight this one enemy I don't say that this standard would immediately turn the conclusion of design decisions so that we consider it could but it would require a completely different analysis and the same goes for the momentum that he describes when going over the edge of a platform in the end these things could be intentional or maybe they are just a bug we don't know and to come back to my statement this means that Marla's conclusion it should be pretty straightforward that this is terrible it's wrong because as I showed it cannot be considered objective and I just want to say here that this doesn't mean I don't agree with him that this is overall bad but this is my opinion because I have the same standard as he however just because I or you agree doesn't make it objective to summarize this whole section Mahler uses standards as a baseline for his analysis he then uses the object effects from the game to show if the standard is fulfilled or not and based on that he defines his conclusion if that system is bad or good the problem is that this is not objective even if he says so the standard independent on how much people agree with it is subjective and therefore the rating in the end is subjective as well however I won't deny the possibility of an objective standard I present it a possible one which is the standard from the developer but the problem here is that we don't know the details of it meaning we can't really use it as a baseline on the other hand I want to say again that just because the analysis is not purely objective does not mean that it is worthless or that it has a low quality his analysis still holds a lot of value because first his standards are shared with a lot of people so the conclusion is true for a wide audience who might want to play this game and second his conclusion is very well explained with evidence from the game itself it is just not objective who this was a long first section and I think at that point it might be a good moment to just say how I want to take at the rest of the video obviously I will not explain in the same detail every time why his standard is not objective this only has to be done once I will point it out however if necessary there will be one additional major point that I want to talk about in a later section because it is again something that is a problem with this analysis in general but I will come to that in a moment as for the rest of his points first I will also point out if there are objective mistakes meaning he just represented at something incorrectly second since a lot of these points will be subjective in the end I will also add my two cents to the different topics to give an alternative perspective to explain why someone could see this differently this perspective doesn't have to be mine but I think it is important in an analysis to also include other possible viewpoints and I mean Mahler agrees with this idea so first of all we have Harris admitting of the criticisms that counter his analysis during the video more people need to do this instead of creating their own echo chambers and videos and it's something I've always appreciated about him which makes it even sadder that he didn't seem to follow his own advice in this video but with that being said let's go to the next topic which is about fault damage so first he talks about the fact that they changed the fall damage in comparison to toxoids 1 which is true but I don't think he quite understands in what way something interesting that they changed in Dark Souls 2 is the full damage it is believed that when they created the drop in majula that to compensate for the fact that players will be able to approach it early they decided to increase the full damage limits because he is only really talking about the damage itself which by the way can be very high in Dark Souls as well just look at my first drop into nito's boss arena which is not even optional but required that is very much it even nearly killed me however the real difference is in fall damage in both games is not the damage itself but how it is calculated in Dark Souls 1 the fall damage was not a wrong number but it was percentage based meaning that you lost a certain percentage of your health when dropping down to just show this here's lobosjr dropping from the same height as I before but with a lot less health the damage is very different as you can see though I have to add that also the equipment load has an impact on the fall damage so it is not always the same percentage in comparison to that Dark Souls 2 is fall damage is a raw number which means that you can survive a drop if it does increase your health which system is better and if it is too much fall damage or not is up to everyone there's no objective way to say which is better or worse and Tomales credit he doesn't say that he even says the opposite the damage increase in general is simply a change but in context it can be extremely punishing think of it what you will showing that this is a subjective argument which is correct he says several times that the amount of fall damage in Dark Souls 2 is punishing which is in principle correct since losing health is always a punishment but since he also mentions the word extremely it would have been better in my opinion if he had explained this more by comparing the fall damage to the amount of health someone has at a certain point for example however in the end I have no huge problems with this section I just want to showcase it because this is actually how you can make an objective analysis just show what the facts of the systems are and then what this can lead into in that it can be punishing it's a shame that he didn't realize that and structure the whole video like this to make a truly objective though and I say this because immediately afterwards we come to the section about ADP and here's where it gets really problematic the first time even more than with the movement in my opinion so this is how he begins the section anyway let's tackle something far more substantial something that Harris missed in his video and whether or not it was on purpose is completely up to you guys but this [ __ ] is important ADP for those who aren't aware ADP refers to a statistic in the leveling system that you can choose called adaptability ADP alongside attunement will increase your agility among other things and your agility is directly responsible for your iframes iframes a paramount to the souls Bourne series it basically added an option to escape a guaranteed hit while tying it to timing which means that you didn't need to block every attack or back away from the enemy each time they tried to hit you you had an additional option unacceptably risky one but a rewarding one at that this means that about a split second of time after you hit roll several frames of your roll animation render you invincible hence invincibility frames or iframes this amount of time is set to a limit of 9 in Dark Souls 1 and depending on encumbrance your animation frames go up which also pushes your iframes up in any sort of ratio this meant that heavy gear gave you a long rolling animation or a fat roll which was the least profitable in terms of being able to avoid damage but obviously meant that you would be carrying a large and beneficial amount of gear which acts as a trade-off in Dark Souls 2 your encumbrance still has an effect on your roll making it slower or faster but that doesn't have any effect on your iframes iframes as I said are now tied to a level able statistic called ADP at base you can have as low as eighty-five agility on certain bills which amounts to 0.16 6-7 seconds of invincibility frames which is just over a third of what you would expect from Dark Souls 1 this is a tough amount of iframes to deal with ultimately when you're faced with such a little amount you'll be getting closer and closer to the difference not even mattering compared to having none at all though at their highest the iframes reach over triple that which is a different way of providing the stat I suppose until this point I have no real problem with the analysis he basically just describes the object effects about iframes and Dark Souls 1 & 2 the only thing a bit problematic would be the moment where he says that it is tough to deal with such a low amount of iframes since it is a comparison I would have preferred the world tougher with a reference being Dark Souls 1 since it is up to the player if he finds 5 iframes to be tough but I think this would be nitpicking because the real problem starts now however nothing in the game makes this clear whatsoever the description for agility is boosts ease of evasion and other actions the reason this is so incompass inton reality there are certain levels of agility that pertain to the amount of iframes your character will have for example at 85 agility your character will have 5 iframes while at 116 agility your character will then have 16 iframes this is imperative information to a new player and the game is almost purposefully obfuscating the information but it gets even funnier agility will improve the speed in which you consume Estes look at that description again what part of boosts ease of evasion and other actions tells you that this has any effect on healing or consuming Estes the cherry on the cake however is that in Dark Souls 2 Zwicky they state that they do not know the extent of this statistic it so unclear to players that even years alone with the game has left the community surrounding it confused as to whether there is more to it than what has been found this is because of how purposefully poorly it's translated to the player okay let's just unpack that what he basically says is that nothing in the game mix is clear that it is purposefully hidden from the player and that the additional effect it has on healing is described even worse now as for the first part that one is in principle countered by its own video while boosts ease of evasion doesn't tell you directly about the I friends it tells you that your touch role becomes more powerful we can now discuss if that is enough information for the player but I think that knowing that the role gets better is enough for most players to level that statistic if they plan on losing a lot of dodge roles as for the second point I find that one to be a bit misleading a viewer that doesn't know the games would assume that iframes are completely explained in the first game and it is only hidden how they work in the second and this is just wrong from a developer's perspective players shouldn't even be aware of iframes because it is a mechanic that was hidden in Dark Souls 1 completely now one could say that this is a video about Dark Souls 2 and he would make the same argument if he would analyze Dark Souls 1 but since he brought Dark Souls 1 into this himself it seems that he doesn't have a problem with it hiding iframes I would have at least mentioned it in the end he seems to have a standard that requires the game to explain everything in the greatest detail and that is fine even though the standard seems to be only true for Dark Souls 2 but another problem is that I have to assume the standard in the first place because he hasn't even defined it which is another problem for most of the video he often seems to assume that his viewers know the standard he is using as a baseline maybe this comes from the illusion that a standard his objective which is why he assumes that everyone should know about it but as I explained in detail it is not I for myself think that it is enough description to give me the information that I need and I don't need every detail since long drawn-out descriptions were destroyed the immersion in my opinion so my standard here would be that the description has to give me the information that I need to know if that statistic is worth leveling for my character build while also being short on point and I think in that case the description is enough on the other hand I actually do agree with him on the third point it should have been more clear as to what it is doing because other things is just a bit too general in my opinion a player cannot know what this means because it could mean anything however again that doesn't make it objective some players might have a stand that that mechanics should be hidden because they want to experiment for example a similar thing was done in Dark Souls 1 where your casting speed was tied to your dexterity which is not even hinted at in the description the problem here is then again that the conclusion that both descriptions are problematic is not objective but this section is not over yet the fundamental issue here however is that on top of the horrifyingly incompetent way they've translated this two players resulting in them potentially progressing through the game blissfully unaware of the handicap that has befallen them iframes are fundamentally more important than literally any other statistic health stamina dexterity and strength pale in value compared to iframes in its early levels and so tying it to a statment that once players understand that which they apparently weren't meant to they would plow their opening levels into ADP as a guarantee of receiving the benefit this is fundamentally awful in an RPG with meaningful upgrade choices to make there isn't supposed to be a stat that you value more than another definitively in every build many may feel they didn't need the stat or they like trying to play without it there shouldn't be much of a difficult argument here to swallow but when you have the opportunity to triple the amount of time you spend invincible peer role versus leveling more hitpoints or damage the choice should be very clear if the player wants to help themselves I understand that people do feel differently on this topic you are you know faced with adding small pieces of Health on to your bar or adding more for stamina or you're adding another 10 damage to a weapon that's already striking for 200 or you can choose to gain an additional two seconds of invincibility to your role this isn't some small addition as you can see here I am currently on low ADP this means that even when I am timing my roles as close to the attacks as I can I am still susceptible to taking damage but once I level ADP and increase my iframes dodging with the role becomes extremely easy by comparison now compared with even adding 100 extra hit points there is absolutely no competition because I would rather dodge several rolls than have the health to survive an additional half of one fundamentally then we have a system that both punishes the player by not providing them information that is arguably the most important mechanic to the combat while simultaneously providing a stat that if they were even made aware of it increases this resource nullifying the opening RPG elements of choice by being such a powerful stat compared to others if the game was kind enough to tell you this is an abhorrent addition that can only be described as a fundamental rotting of the mechanics that are extremely important at base ok let's ignore the part about it being a parent which is supposed to be an objective conclusion as this is what I already talked about let's also ignore the part where you gets mark and basically mocks other people for feeling different about different statistics I mean this is what he's doing here right this is not just me hearing this but besides that here I want to talk about the cost statement which is that a DP is a more important statistic than every other and to say it quite frankly this is just wrong I mean it is true as long as you play a melee bid that focuses on dodging but what about mages clerics pyromancers arranged builds in general why should they need a DP yes they dodged but since they are taking from a distance they used the dodge to just get away from the hitbox into his safe zone to use the next spell or projectile they don't need to have frame-perfect dodges but more importantly mauler didn't you make a long section in your response series about the fact that shields are very viable to use so what about a tank build why would this one need a DP such a build uses at our shield and just blocks everything together with a very heavy Armour the only attacks those builds need to be aware of our grips but those have a long wind-up so they just need to back up quickly enough these builds don't need a DP they need strength and stamina and most importantly vitality so this argument is just wrong and to add something to the discussion isn't a DP balancing the game even more I mean before the statistic existed a melee build that focused on dodging could spend their points basically as they wanted they didn't need a statistic so they could focus on strength dexterity or even stamina and health this was different from all the other bills especially magic bills who need attunement just to have slot for their spells miracles and pyromancies now when you make a melee build you have to weigh if you want to level text arity or if you want to increase your iframes first and contradictory to what Marla says this is not always a trivial choice since dexterity and strength not only increase your damage but they even allow you to use new weapons which is effective just ignored of course this is just an example stamina can be equally important to get additional attacks with your weapon before needing to wait for it to replenish this becomes especially important if we also consider PvP where players agree on a certain level so you have to see what statistic you want to increase in summary I want to say that I'm not a huge fan of ADP since I usually play dodged focus builds but again that doesn't mean this is objective this whole section is again just subjective since your standard that is not even defined but has to be assumed by the viewer is again subjective furthermore you are just ignoring other play styles which I find very odd since it was something that you criticized Harris for instead of thinking about alternate perspectives you've really just got a narrow-minded view assuming that these are the best battles in Dark Souls when in reality they are far from it so let's go to the next section which includes the second great issue that I have with the video despite the fact that the standards used as subjective and therefore the analysis is subjective as well this section talks about hitboxes so he starts the section by saying that Dark Souls 2 has some very tight hit boxes but also a quantum [ __ ] myriad of bad ones however this game doesn't just have some good hit boxes it has a quantum [ __ ] myriad of bad ones and no I'm not talking about the horribly bad ones caused by netcode or ADP either I mean the statement alone doesn't really say much since a quantum [ __ ] myriad would be different for every person and therefore a really bad choice for an objective video however I want to take the time and talk about the definition of a bad hitbox with the question being when is a hitbox of effectively bet because as before we could argue that someone has a standard that he wants hitboxes to be challenging even if that means they do not match the model now I would never say that I agree with this standard and I would probably have problems arguing with such a person but it is a standard nonetheless however on the other hand I think we can safely assume that the developers wanted the hitboxes to match the model because to be honest even if they didn't they would say the opposite because of the potential backlash so I think it is safe to say that the developers standard for hitboxes is that they match the model which would then mean we can say it is objective if we agree on this definition from before however the problem with this section is a bit different and to show what I mean here are some clips from the video now all four of these arguments combined make for a strong case that Kombat is heavily affected in this game by bad hitboxes there will be an absolute slew of hitbox failures in a minor level throughout the game several interactions we will scratch your head and wave it off as a little moment of being unfair and that honestly every game has this but the reality is that this game has far far more but ultimately these ones are so hard to even understand that combined with everything else we have covered on this one topic the hitboxes are basically irredeemable at this point the game really does knock it out of the park when it comes to the worst-hit boxes it has no [ __ ] idea what it's doing ultimately this game has a series of issues with the sit boxes there are so many examples of blatant incompetence when it comes down to the craft that it can't be considered anything but a fundamental objective issue an issue that will actively spoil many of the incredible meaningful battles and tests within the game the souls games have such a fantastic handle on tight hit boxes by comparison Dark Souls 1 offers barely any poor hit boxes by comparison to the embarrassment of Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3 offers ones that are downright satisfying to watch now all of these statements show that the hit boxes of Dark Souls 2 are over all bad and that they are worse than in other games I'm obviously interested in how he wants to prove that the thing is he uses examples and this brings us to the second important problem of the video and for that let me just explain something real quick when I studied physics we also had sessions we had to study math and in comparison to what you normally do in school this didn't include any calculations but mostly proving statements and one of the first things we learned is that showing examples does not prove a statement for example take the following statement if I add two numbers a and B together that sum will always be positive I can now literally provide an infinite amount of examples for the statement but that doesn't make it true because if a is minus one and P is minus two for examples my statement is not true anymore this shows two important things first examples do not prove a general statement and second examples can be used to disprove a general statement as long as you find a counter example so why am I telling this the reason is that malla tries to prove his statement that hitboxes are of all bad and worse than in other games by just providing examples and well I appreciate that he provides a high number of examples that doesn't prove either of the two statements all these examples prove is that there are bad hitboxes in the game and I could even specify a number from this video however it does not make the statement objectively true because these could just be chosen and not represent the game as a whole let me show this a bit more effectively with a counterpoint as you have already noticed I have included several examples of hitboxes in Dark Souls 1 that we would consider bad in the background now if I take Mallis logic that means that the hitbox is in Dark Souls 1 of our bet and I can even state that they are worse in Dark Souls 1 then 2 without even showing anything from Dark Souls 2 as a proof and as most would probably agree this would be ridiculous right and to make this even more apparent here's a statement from a youtuber called Joseph Anderson about Dark Souls 3 hitboxes I know mala doesn't really like him but it proves my point again we can stay here on this fight for the beginning of the hitbox extravaganza section 2 which I know some people have just accepted about the series at this point but just like I think Bethesda shouldn't ship buggy games Fromme should be held to a higher standard especially since it feels like they're getting worse with each game like mola he proves this by providing a huge number of examples for bad hitboxes in Dark Souls 3 however this raises again the question how two people can come to a different conclusion if the analysis were supposed to be objective because the whole thing about objectivity is that it should not matter who is the one measuring the result should always be the same the only conclusion can now be that the provided proof is no real proof for these statements the examples only show the existence of these hitboxes but they don't allow for an overall statement and they also don't allow for an objective comparison between the two games the thing is that I am again even more agreeing with Mahler while playing all three games and hid the feeling that the hitboxes were at their worst in Dark Souls 2 but this is again just a feeling that can be a result of this argument being - but it can also be a result of a combination of reasons the most important part being a personal bias while playing this game we can now ask the question how one can do the section correctly in an objective way first of all you can never say that the hitbox is overall objectively bad because even if you list all the hitbox errors from the game the object effect you get is just a number of bad hit boxes it is now down to the person to interpret that number is being good or bad and this interpretation is probably also dependent on the number of enemies or the length of the game in general and even for comparisons it is not really possible to state if a game is objectively worse or bet in hit boxes for two reasons first of all you have to define if a game is worse if it just has more bad hit boxes or if the ratio between bed and good hit boxes is higher but more importantly you then have to ask the question if all hit boxes are equally bad in some cases the hit boxes might only be a tiny bit off while it is very noticeable and others are both hit boxes being considered just as bad or do you include a weight either way both points mean that a personal standard that is not objective anymore is included again making the statement subjective so in conclusion this means that you can't objectively say that hit boxes are overall bad or good or that they are better or world than in other games you can objectively say that a specific hitbox is good or bad and you can also give an exact number of good and bad hit boxes this would be how an objective analysis of this section would look like but as soon as you are rating it you include a personal standard and it is therefore not objective anymore I hope I made clear in the section that while I appreciate the amount of examples we always have to watch what words we are using providing examples does not make general statements about hitboxes objectively correct neither is this true for comparisons all it shows is that there are BET hit boxes you can then certainly add that they are over bad or that they are worse than in other games but this is not objective anymore one last thing I want to mention here please if you want to prove something make sure that you are not using the YouTube or Google search as evidence YouTube and Google use an algorithm that show you things that are similar to what you have already watched before I mean when you search for bad Dark Souls one hit boxes it gave you the video about amazing Dark Souls 3 hit boxes because it was one that you recently watched and that is not even mentioning that Dark Souls 2 as a game was not considered good by a lot of fans so of course you will find a lot more negative videos about this game but this can never be an argument that the hit boxes of Dark Souls 2 are worse the next section is about AI and how bad it is in Dark Souls 2 but since my argumentation for this section will be a lot like the argumentation for the last one I will make this a lot shorter first of all I want to shortly present what the rating of the AI is just to make sure that this is nothing I make up bad AI but the game is plagued with this when it comes to groups they absolutely lose their minds when two separate entities have a singular goal there was no attention to trying to have them account for each other like they do in the other Souls games and I understand that this is a downright strategy in the souls series for killing enemies but it has never been as blatantly embarrassing and exploitable as it is in this game the fact is that no matter what you're doing in the game you can cause this breakage to occur in the AI regardless of positioning damage bosses or randy's no matter the weapon items or approach they will [ __ ] up and it will usually be pretty funny to be honest the thing is that all the problems he lists especially those like the agreeing not alerting enemies near them when they a Grove or just passing problems are present in all dark souls games so much that a whole soul leveling strategy on the wiki is based around enemies just falling off a cliff therefore the statement that this game is plagued with problems for especially that it is worse in this game is not really proven by these examples for once because I can show a lot of examples for bad AI and dark swordsman in the background again and second rating it at such a way means again that you use a subjective standard as a baseline of how many mean that it is overall bad or just which AI problems are worse than others and this means again that it is not objective as it was with hitboxes the thing is that I'm not even disagreeing that the AI feels worse in Dark Souls 2 but I personally don't think that this is really a result from the AI being worse I think that the levels overall were just more open in Dark Souls 1 so the AI would not hinder themselves and there were also overall less pits so the enemies just couldn't fall that often I mean mala basically says the same thing the sad fact is that this AI was created for simplistic grounds and then they were placed into extremely lopsided or rocky ground with no idea on how to deal with it and from chose to not increase their intelligence or abilities they just let it sit as it was if that was a design choice because of the AI or if it was just a coincidence and Dark Souls is speculation though in the end what is important is that again these examples are not enough to prove his point and rating the AI overall or in a comparison means he applied a standard which makes it subjective also in that regard I want to show this example of supposedly bad AI and Dark Souls 1 now everyone who has played Dark Souls 1 knows that I'm cheating here because this is actually scripted the snakes are fleeing from the slacks that were freed further down and who are now going up the stairs I am showing this example because a similar thing is done in Mallis video yes I know it looks ridiculous but I think it was Tripta to make sure that the player sees the soldiers hitting that tree since those will become more important later in the game they probably wanted to do that since you could traverse in the level without finding a tree now it could also just be a bug but we don't know so I think in the future it would be better to only include examples that really show the issue and might not be a plant encounter there was a similar thing in the hitbox section but it could have been that he was just hit by a fireball that landed a bit of screen but since this was hard to see I wouldn't even criticize mauler for including that one the soldier attacking the tree however should not have been included in the end mauler says that the impact of these problems will vary which would be a good thing because it's actually true with what he has shown it's not a general statement however directly before that he says that these issues are happening constantly ultimately the AI is broken in Dark Souls 2 it is riddled with issues that cause it to malfunction constantly how much this can obstruct the game obviously varies and for the most part the AI is serviceable but it is absolutely badly made and often times very embarrassing to watch when it tries to approach the world of developers presumably designed for it this is a contradiction either it happens constantly Hardware very either it is general or just dependent on the player you can't just say that both is true but even if he wouldn't have said this the fact that he calls it worse than in the other Dark Souls games cannot be proved objectively by examples as I have shown mala then opens the next section by saying that this is now some of his own perspective his own opinion so to say so next up I want to share some ideas and perspectives for a little bit I mean as I've already shown the analysis was not really that objective under that point besides part of the hitbox and AI sections but even if we leave that out and wondering why is even sharing this when you wanted to but when I am discussing measurable functionality and the effectiveness of a project and its aspects your feelings aren't relevant but let's just leave that aside for a moment since he's already stating that this will be subjective I can't really criticize this section since it's just his opinion and that can't be wrong however there are some aspects I want to talk about and maybe my or just an alternate view on the different topics he's mentioning he starts by talking about the bosses and that he dislikes that some of them have the ability to heal themselves and he also explains why and that it is hard to manage your resources correctly if you don't know about this feature and yes this is true though I don't really see the problem since healing and Dark Souls is free because the estus just gets refilled so it's not like you don't want to waste healing because you have to farm for it like for example and platform there are life gems but as you have already shown you get a lot of those very early very fast but if we consider these I can understand the point since you can use life gems in the hope of defeating the boss and he's then just healing himself making your life gems useless though you can say that you at least gained a little bit of knowledge however in my opinion I think that bosses with the ability to heal are not bad because they create a completely different experience than just giving the boss a larger health bar the boss fight becomes more of a roller coaster at the moment you see the boss healing himself most of the time it is important to just stay calm in this moment which can be an interesting challenge in itself furthermore if the boss heals a player can use that moment since it is often an opening to a tech and can therefore maybe even kill the boss before it's fully healed basically reducing the health power of the bus by just recognizing the right timing what I don't like about this section is that he shows all these bosses with the ability to heal and presents it as if they are just getting the ability without a deeper element behind it well if a boss takes the opportunity to heal it would be great if they balance it by giving you the opportunity to capitalize on them they do this a little embarrassingly with throwing water and defender but every other boss receives health generation as a bonus and that is only true for the Loudon's island boss mirtha requires you to burn the windmill that this is stupid in my opinion does not change the fact that there is more behind it than just adding healing as for the fume knight it requires you to just fight him in the one side of the arena that doesn't have a statue near it I agree on the Maronite though which is a boss that can potentially summon a real player to the fight but to be honest in this case the real problem is not that the boss can be here but that there is a real player to begin with even if this one doesn't use here's a real human can coordinate his attacks with a Maronite making it very unfair in my opinion it was a nice idea but the balancing in this case can become an issue he then talks about the fact that you get a lot of souls in the game which means that you can pretty much scale everything you need and he doesn't like it because it means that you are not responsible for your spend skill points since you can level far more and yes that is true I mean I don't understand why you are not just using the souls to buy stuff like armor or anything different if you don't like it I'll give yourself the challenge to spend only half the souls every time I mean this is basically what other games would alter by giving you a difficulty option in the menu Dark Souls 2 trust the player to choose his own difficulty if he doesn't like to spend this amount of souls then he can just not do it in the end it is subjective so I can't say it's wrong but I don't get why you're actively choosing a play style that you liked less if you have the option to do it the way you want I guess the common answer is that you use what the game gives you but at the same time I don't suspect you to always choose the lowest difficulty option in a game just because it gives you the option right or that your summon fire every boss just because the option is there and while we are added this is the same argument I would use when we argue about life gems as people probably know life gems were often labeled bad for the game because they destroyed the challenge since you could have 99 of them in comparison to they around 10 Estes you normally have but again why not ignore them if you don't like them extra credits made a good video about how Dark Souls 2 allows the player to create his own difficulty by giving him a lot of options to make it harder or easier for themselves and all these options were not just included in a difficulty slider button gameplay mechanics which they rated as being good so why do you think it is a bad thing to have all these options in a game why are you playing the game in a way that you seem to dislike when you have the option to play as you like the only real counter-argument to life gems in my opinion is that from software may have designed bosses and probably even areas around this system as the player can have 99 healing items bosses would have to be designed to make a of damage to still be able to kill you but again this is something that would need proof for example by testing the damage of these bosses my whole argumentation on this point can also be used for the section about the huge number of titanite slips you can get in the game so that you can level more weapons to their maximum strengths giving you more options however the design is actually even more and more less favored if you analyze it correctly and not just look at the number of titanite slabs because while it's true that you are getting a lot of slabs the number of chunks you're a crier over the game is fairly low if you don't fund them of course therefore Dark Souls 2 makes it even more important to think about your weapons and being responsible with your choices as he calls it since you can get stuck with weapons at plus 6 plus 7 or +8 if you don't have enough chunks and this means that your weapon can be a lot weaker if you don't plan this correctly yes you can later by infinite chunks but for that you have to defeat thrown watcher and defender which is small less than the last boss of the game so I don't really understand his criticisms since it's even more in favor of his old standard then it gets a bit weird I mean I know this is a subjective section of the analysis but why are we arguing about the description of a ring now also side note did anyone else think the description on this ring was [ __ ] stupid like purely from the perspective of actually being able to use tangible information this is just dumb I mean in principle this is the same as with a DP which begs the question why he thought it was an objective point back then but even more importantly why is it a problem with this particular one why is it not a problem for example that the clones the ring doesn't tell you exactly how much them in our regeneration it gives you well probably because it also existed in Dark Souls 1 so it's obviously fine there in the end I think it is not a problem that they don't give you the exact probability since this is not Diablo and they want to immerse you a bit in the world which is also done by descriptions moving on from that strange criticism he then talks about human effigies and he thinks it is not a good idea to knock off health for dying since losing souls is punishment enough which is fine I don't really get why it's okay in Dark Souls 3 and it's ambering mechanic to be honest just because it feels like a bones to him it's the same thing in principle because a lot of can kill you in only two or three hits as long as you are not ambit but whatever what I don't understand are the following two statements my personal issue with effigies is that players who are new to the game have a strong chance of running out and suffering for it there isn't much a player can do when they run out of these things since the vendors who sell them are very few and far between so that as a result just seems to be punishing for the sake of punishing on the flip side you have the veteran players who grab the ring for it as quickly as possible nullifying 50% of the effect and then you have them playing through the game without using effigies after all F G's act as tokens to attempt our clicker now this is another contradiction in just two sentences you cannot say that it is too much of a punishment and then directly after this that you don't need any effigies if you just grab the ring because for those of you who don't know this ring is located in one of the first areas even if you should decide to go to this area as the latest of the four ways you will find this ring before you have finished 50% of the game so you cannot have it both ways from my perspective I would say that the first statement is more true since I don't find the ring to be dead good to begin with because it doesn't just reduce 50% of the effect it also takes away a ring slot so it's not like this is just a bonus I consider myself a veteran player and I never use that ring because I just don't need it I use some every cheese and I still have more than enough to do dark Lucca in the end which by the way is probably not something a new player will discover in a blind one to begin with we will come back to that point later in the video but I wanted to set it up here already in the end I don't think it is too much of a punishment even for newer players it can be but so can losing all your souls in general I even like that system because it is an example for combining story and gameplay which is not often seen in games to explain this the story of Dark Souls 2 is a more personal one of an undead being cursed and going hollow and that system wants to present this process of going Hollow I think that is something to praise since it makes use of the game as a medium a lot of games are just putting story and gameplay together even if it doesn't make any sense like in the first game of the Tomb Raider reboot so I'm always happy to see a developer go this way after that we open with the sentence that we will now come back to objective issues so let's come back to some more objective issues I'm interested to see how this will go when I look back at the last object of criticism of the game but let's see so what is he starting with the repair system was a bit of a joke in Dark Souls as a series in that you only really had to repair your weapon once every two hours or something and that involved leaving whatever you were doing at the time and walking over to a blacksmith hitting repair and then getting on with the game again in Dark Souls 2 they made it even worse now your weapon degrades very fast but resets for every time you sit at a bonfire the repair system really and he's already stating that it is worse than Dark Souls 2 within in Dark Souls 1 ok I don't think I have to go into too much detail here he explains that a repair system is bad because you usually don't realize that it's even there and that you have to go repair some stuff after fighting certain enemies yes that is true but that does not mean that it is worse than Dark Souls 1 at least not objectively I mean even if you don't realize that your standard is not objective here he is just comparing to system saying one is worse by not even mentioning that Dark Souls 1 system and that some players would get stuck and Blighttown because their weapons were broken and there was no way out at least here he should have noticed that it's not objective but subjective he also mentions that this leads to you just going home and repairing everything therefore having no effect but he seems to forget that the exact same enemies and then just respawn so I don't even know where he's going with this argumentation I mean you can kill them 10 times so they don't respawn anymore but I don't think he meant that also why isn't he at least trying to see what the developers were going for since you can't defeat the enemies without your gear breaking you have to equip different gear either before or after you kill these enemies this is usually gear that is not leveled that much or that you are just not used to yet which can be challenging for certain players if it works depends on the person of course but I don't think I have to say more about that to show that it is not objective however another thing that I find a bit odd here is that he says the following there is no in-depth and challenging canek it is simply there because somehow this is a realistic thing that happens in life that we have to have in this game I mean I just said how it can be challenging but even without that didn't you say this it is so annoying to listen to people tell you what isn't fun change fun for challenging and we have the exact same situation because if something is challenging or not is not an objective fact but comes down to the player I'm only highlighting this because he criticized terrorists in his analysis for the same thing but let's just move on to the next topic which is the focus system again as with hitboxes and AI he's only showing examples when the game doesn't target the enemy the player wanted to while saying that it is worse than in other souls games now in my time with the series of souls games this little features worked wonderfully but Dark Souls 2 somebody dropped the bloody ball when designing this thing this alone is problem enough that are already short but in the case of the focused system there's the addition of it probably working as intended the choice which enemy to focus comes down to certain factors like the distance to the enemies or the direction of the camera and also the character himself which is probably why the system targets enemy behind you when you lock-on while rolling since the character's view is to the peg this is by the way also happening in Dark Souls 1 we voted and it's Allah now so you can't do that hello or you get fed great you get fed to the beast so why you stop locking on behind me you scrub lit the thing is that there could be even more parameters for the system but neither I nor mall or know exactly what is going into that decision or how important its weight is and that is true for Dark Souls 1 and also Dark Souls 2 so in comparison to hit boxes or the AI this is something that might even work as intended you can dislike how it works but that is again subjective especially if you want to compare to other games however at the end Mahler says this also for your notes if your immediate response to this is well I didn't notice anything or I didn't happen to me I think it works fine then you're missing the point this thing is unfinished and it's causing trouble for select players which makes it an objective problem but I mean at least he is stating his standard here and since it is a subjective one I can't argue that it is wrong however I come to question how I can find the system to work wonderfully in the other games when I showed that it is creating problems for select players shouldn't he call it bet there as well if there is a standard or is that standard solely for Dark Souls 2 again moving on he then talks about a system combined with the focused system and this is that you can miss your attack while being locked on I will not talk too much about it since it is something that was explained a lot of times in his comment section already but this system is intended for those who don't know in Dark Souls 2 you can redirect the swing of your weapon by holding the left analog stick in a certain direction while attacking the idea behind this is that large weapons are often too slow so enemies especially in PvP can just move away before the weapon swings to balance that you as a player has the option to redirect this ring to still catch them it is a system to balance slow and fast weapons I mean if you don't like it just don't touch the left analog stick while attacking I don't know if he purposefully ignore that or if he hasn't even noticed it in 7 playthroughs that he did for his own video series furthermore Dark Souls 2 changes what actions get queued if you click a tech before your character turned his body for example after coming out of a roll or from an attack animation then you won't turn before attacking in the end they just changed how it works now if you like that or not is your opinion but it is not an objective criticism even if your standard is that the attack should go where the target is by locked on as a point can be made that it becomes more challenging since you can't just spam the attack button and just to make sure that it doesn't say that this is just a so opinion here's his conclusion to the point unfortunately this is yet another inconsistent or unfinished aspect to the game in the end both changes that you can aim your weapon with a left analog stick and the different cueing of actions are changes that you can either like or toned there are good reasons to dislike them but nothing of that is objective and I find it very strange that Moeller even thinks this because Peck when he criticized terrorists he said the following in response to her is stating that a player should not get hit while healing is it possible that some players aren't good at identifying times in which to heal when others are and this is a skill in which to learn why is learning when to heal considered a skill that is necessary to master the game while the both mentioned above found I really would like to hear more less explanation as to why he thinks one of the skills is considered to be learned by the players while the others are objective flaws in the design of the game following this is a short section about the backstep mechanic and as always before I make some points of my own I just show Marla's conclusion to make sure that this is not just his opinion but that he states this as effect stop pretending that the system works in some consistent way it bloody doesn't this thing doesn't work properly it is yet another entry into the cavalcade of hilarity that is the design choices of Dark Souls 2 and we still haven't finished yet now I have to say that the wording in these two statements is actually correct for his type of proof since properly and consistently implied that the system is always working as it should at any given time so it is enough to show examples to prove the opposite as I mentioned before however there are a few examples that are just wrong and no I'm not only talking about the fact that the jester chest piece makes you immune from being back stepped but let's start from the beginning and just to make sure I will not include any PvP back steps because there we also have the problem of the netcode which makes the argumentation problematic if we just want to talk about the system itself so what I could figure out doing my playtime of both Dark Souls 1 and 2 was that the system was obviously changed when you got into the back step position in Dark Souls 1 and hit r1 then both you and your opponent would enter an animation together where the back step was played this led to the fact that circle strafing enemies and looking for the back step was one of the most powerful strategies both in PvE and PvP which is why they changed it in Dark Souls 2 now first of all let's talk about the range for the back step to be initiated from my experience I had the feeling that the window was larger than in Dark Souls 1 the wiki does not state that to be honest but it states that the window seems to be moved to the left shoulder of the enemy while it was the right shoulder and Dark Souls 1 in the end they never save that is true or not we would probably need to look into the code to be completely sure but aside from that there's one major difference that is easily noticeable and that is that you now have a start up animation that has to connect to the enemy first which is the punch with your fist the thing is now that while starting that animation the enemy can still move out of range or another enemy can just take its place if the punching animation does connect with an area that is considered a backstep area then the animation gets played if not because the enemy turned moved away or another object was in the way then the back step would not start this can be seen in some of the examples already so this is the explanation for these I guess that is also the reason why the enemy gets turned around sometimes because the game detects you hitting the shoulder which is considered a back step area and I admit this can look a bit strange however this is not everything that is important for backstabbing and while I'm not an expert that knows all the secrets to this I have found two important things myself that he probably just missed and I also found one by researching so let's start with recovery animations there are a lot of times when the first back step does not get initiated and you just attack the enemy this leads to the enemy getting staggered and then going into a recovery animation as far as I have found out during that animation and probably a short time after it the enemy will be back step immune I guess they included the system to counter chained back steps that were present in Dark Souls 1 it was probably more important for PvP but that would explain why they included it however the second point is even more important and I'm pretty confused by malla doesn't know this since it was present in Dark Souls 1 as well and that is that you cannot back step while having your shield up I'm not entirely sure why this is the case I assume they want back steps to be more of a risk reward system and that they want you to actively lower the shield before going for the back step but this is one of the most common mistakes in the footage that he provides the last point that I only read about online is that you seem to not be able to perform back steps by having the weapon in the left hand I didn't see him doing it in this footage but I wanted to mention it in the end a lot of these things are just designed decisions that you can either like or dislike however that doesn't make them objectively bad but since there are examples where I'm not able to explain why the back step wasn't initiated I agree with Mahler that the system is not working consistently or properly there are issues but there were also some mistakes by providing proof I just hope that in the future such systems are researched a bit more to make sure that this doesn't happen one last thing I want to add here is that Mahler said the following but thank god this pathetic system didn't in fact Dark Souls 3 because this is ludicrous which is not entirely true as you can see in the background there still seems to be a startup animation which leaves the enemy time to escape the back step but they changed the animation and also that even if it doesn't go through you are at least doing significant damage with your weapon that just as a little side note to the topic which will also become important later the next section is then about some smaller fuck-ups as he calls it but I can reassure you that we are now past all of the significant errors in the game it is time for a few smaller fuck-ups so I hope I will get through that one quickly as well he starts by criticising fragrant branches of your and before going into his argumentation I give a short reminder of what they are there are several stone statues and dark swords - that sometimes even hinder the player from traversing a certain area the only way to get rid of these is by using a branch that is a finite resource so what a smaller think of these fragrant branches of your were a mistake in scholar they literally locked off areas arbitrarily while also providing both useless items and imperative paths for the game while almost maniacally keeping the information on whether or not a statue would actually lead to these things from the player I cannot see that he implies this to be subjective so he again thinks this to be an objective criticism I assume the standard here would be that you should always know what you get when using items again this is an assumption since he's not really stating it he is then arguing that there are a lot of statues and you do not know if you get something out of it by freeing them and since they exist the same number of branches as statues you might not be able to unlock everything especially if you kill an NPC before finishing his quest line now to be fair this is true for one statue that provides you with the key to free a blacksmith that can make you which is not even that important since there's a second trader who can make you and for the rest of the statues you can usually make an educated guess what you get out of freeing them and to have to think when to use certain items can be a fair standard as well candid for the most some might even say that a fair standard is that the game should have secrets that you have to search for like ash lakes so that would even appreciate that the blacksmith who can make is that hidden in the end it is purely subjective so let's move on to the next topic which is next up we have the increase in stagger time on the headshots which is just a weird and frustrating change I mean he's admitting that this is purely subjective so let's go straight to the next thing which is him saying that what else is there the graphics can [ __ ] up and frankly look ugly as hell I mean the [ __ ] up is an object of criticism since it's a back but that some things can look ugly or even gorgeous as he's saying later is purely subjective again while framing it as being objective I mean seriously do I even have to say why graphics being called ugly or gorgeous in both ways it's not objective moving on there's a criticism that there's a hole in harvest belly that kills you but you cannot be sure if you can jump into or not since there are similar holes where it is possible and he also says that wasn't cool you could have used the graphics to do something there game to give us a clue then again maybe I missed something ignoring that tone yeah you did prism stones which can be even be bought from shark WA the cat then he is talking about certain animation bugs I don't list them all here yeah they exist but I don't really get why you would call it inconsistent but you know it's it's fine it's not even really a problem I actually like these things but I mean like everything else is just inconsistent I mean yeah back as small as an inconsistency in the game but why not just call it a back probably because the most common counter-argument would be that all games would have some sort of box and therefore focusing on these little things feels like nitpicking just to say something bad about the game again I'm not saying that he chose the language to get exactly this reaction but it feels weird to me to call backs inconsistencies but that might just be me he also adds that there are problems with getting stuck inside enemies or walls which I would consider being a hitbox problem to be honest and this was already discussed at length so I don't see the point and telling us that again but beside that the next section focuses on the sound and he says that it works fine for the most time I mean he also mentions for me and then we have the sort of you know suitable sounds for everything in the game and the ambient sounds which again you know they're mostly on point in this game but other than that there wasn't really anything noteworthy for me on the good side of things so this includes that this is a subjective opinion I would also consider that this counts for the criticism of things like the splash sound of the water or the not fading boss music then though I am asking myself why he's including so much stuff that even he is considering subjective when he said but when I am discussing measurable functionality and the effectiveness of a project and its aspects your feelings aren't relevant however he then talks about things that seem to be bugs the first one being a back where the ambient sound is just muted to be honest I've never encountered that so it might either be patched or had something to do with your sound settings just ignore my German commentary in the clip and just listen to the waterfall in the background yes mention build Putin's file on Christmas time and the same also goes for the staggering sound of bosses as for combustion this is not even a back it just plays a different sound if you hit the target here the sound for not hitting the target and here for hitting the target so yeah basically all the possible objective points yeah either wrong or at least from me not reproducible so I'm not sure what happened here I will just gloss over the next section as he says himself that this is just nitpicking and that the error message for losing internet connection is too big or that the end credits are unskipable though I want to say here that he's not even stating that the length and the fact that the credits aren't capable is just his opinion anyway what's with the huge unskipable credits from Dark Souls 2 more importantly however what's with the huge unskipable double credits from scholar of the first sin you literally have to sit through the slow-moving list of every last person involved with development on both Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls to score all the fish sin why the sad part of all of this is that whatever quality of life changes made by the game to reduce wasted time is literally undone by this horrid mistake I mean I would have never assumed it but it isn't a section that is supposed to be objective right I don't know if I just missed him stating that this is subjective he said it would be nitpicking but nitpicks can also be objective so this leaves us with the idea that he considers it to be objective I'm not saying that is what he meant but I'm only analyzing what was said not what might have been meant as you might already notice my responses get shorter and shorter and the reason is that there's not really much to talk about anymore and this is because we are reaching the end of the video he is now talking about the b-team argument which just means that a lot of people in both in Dark Souls 1 did not develop Dark Souls 2 like for example Miyazaki himself I mean this is not really criticism it is just effect hey finally something objective again that sadly doesn't involve anything related to the gameplay directly and this is it he is finished analyzing the game as he says it and will now show the results so that means that this video is finished as well and I can go into my own conclusion right well not really because there are several things to talk about since he is now also including stuff that he said another video he first talks about combat and most of that like hitboxes are a I was already covered in this video but he's then also adding some stuff that I want to go more into detail but since it's not really part of this video I want to keep it at least a little bit shorter first life gems I covered this already by talking about the amount of souls and upgrade materials in that you don't have to use them so I won't make that point here again second spam he made an argument in an older video where he said that there's a lot of spam in the game now he mentioned that the number of enemies and Dark Souls 2 can reach often between 3 and 15 so I assume that spams means at least 3 enemies for him and yeah that is true for certain instances though all that excludes just pulling enemies by slowly going forward but we will get to this the problem is that he's also making the point that the sperm in combination with the ambushes are more apparent in Dark Souls 2 within Dark Souls 1 this is an experience that does indeed happen in Dark Souls 1 but they are very few and very far between I am sorry what have you played Dark Souls 1 the game literally consists of spam and ambushes for the most part upper and lower undead burg spam enemies all the time same for the depths Blighttown the Great Hollow and the painted world of ariamis this is even present and anor londo and that all is not even including the endgame areas like Darkroot garden and basin new londo lost izalith the duke's archives the catacombs and everything from the dlc i think only sends fortress and most parts of anor londo don't use them primarily to create challenge and uh Nalanda seem a stretch since they are often three silver knights in the same area which you already consider spam and the same goes for ambushes I won't go through all the areas again there are ambushes every rare and a lot of times also combined with spam making this a spam bush as you called it however I want to point out a specific ambush example while traversing the depths you will find that there are boxes that contain rats that are waiting inside these boxes to jump out and ambush you Rhett's can destroy these boxes but they are rating for you as an ambush who put them in these boxes or other rats that intelligent so in conclusion tax Holtzman does not have less spam or ambushes than Dark Souls 2 at least in the Defiant way please explain more what you mean at the number of enemies in the spam in general higher because there are also moments with a lot of enemies in Dark Souls 1 or do you mean that the enemies included in this bam are usually stronger than what is used in spam for Dark Souls 1 the way you presented it however it cannot be called correct and I also want to criticize how you presented the topic in the video there were three instances where you showed how the player was spam bushed as you called it while making it sound like it was not the players fault seriously you even sped up the first proof because otherwise people would see that the players just looting the area while ignoring other hollows slowly standing up the same in the next clip where you can see that even a turtle very are followed which means he just ran by all the enemies before and then the last example the frigate outskirts then again perhaps you lot are still unconvinced so how about you check out this little gem of gameplay I was on my first ever approach to this area and decided to attack what looked to be a knight little did I realize that I was playing Dark Souls 2 and this man had about five times the health of my own with a pet unicorn standing ready off screen to swipe me off my feet so naturally I looked for cover in order to protect myself and what ensues the Spanish [Music] now I don't want to defend the area I find it boring too big and the spawning horses are just unnecessary in my opinion even if we consider that area was supposed to be a co-op area but how is running forward proof that the game forced you in an ambush why are you not running back from where you came where it should be safe I mean the same happens if you just run forward in Dark Souls 1 how is that the game's fault and to be honest this shows another huge problem because it's not like you say that the game forces you in these moments with sperm you can avoid most of it by just moving forward carefully and pulling enemies as it was possible in Dark Souls 1 and I mean didn't you say this you simply need to explore carefully as is the mantra of the games themselves and you will be rewarded in this world that they have cultivated directly for you so why not use that attention to avoid the spam instead of just running into it but I'm getting too much into this so let's just move on next striking and yes most enemies to attract longer than in the previous games but if they're disco Tibet is up to the player so subjective forth the plunging attack which she thinks is inconsistent in its damage output ignoring that there is a system in Dark Souls 2 that defines the damage by how much of your weapon goes in through the body of the opponent or maybe even the time but he also seems to criticize that it can miss okay that is true but how is that the game falls again for you missing the plunging attack pail it can completely miss and end up staggering you for a short period of time basically rendering you helpless and punishing you for even trying it regardless of how accurate you were again what does he think it should always hit as long as you lock on disregarding from rare you'll start this is such a weird argument especially since it was the same in Dark Souls 1 which he uses as a reference if you don't line up the plunging attack correctly you will miss it but going on he criticizes that you can do a lot by circle strafing okay that is true for certain enemies not all but how is this an objective criticism again I mean it reduces the challenge but that doesn't have to be bad the next section he talks about the exploration part where he mentions the fall damage again that we already covered but he also mentions that there are long way and that the design is boring I mean I hopefully don't have to tell anyone at that point why this is just an opinion right the same goes for the fact that you can easily sneak up on the enemies if you come from behind I mean why should they feel your presence Dark Souls not part of the DBZ universe he says the storytelling is as poor as ever rich is subjective again since a lot of people actually like this sort of storytelling Dark Souls is one of my favorite methods of storytelling which is to say not telling it he then rambles about the long credits again and how the game has the longest elevator rides I mean at least the elevators can be considered a bit more fair than the credits argument which to be honest is just ridiculous at this point last in the exploring sections are the black bars and cutscenes which can look a bit stupid I agree but this is again just subjective stop pretending like this is objective seriously this is something everyone should notice and just to make sure I just don't show how he says that this is his opinion he has the clip and let's not forget their choice to add a cinematic set of black bars that laughably cut off characters heads in cutscenes like did nobody [ __ ] check this the next section then considers resource management which we already covered and I think it gets ridiculous at this point but how can anyone consider the following statement and objective criticism next up is resource management which considering the inefficiency of implementation with effigies repair healing and extremely generous amounts of levels the system's at hand are unfinished and unbalanced I think you're already noticed that even at the beginning of the video at least tried to be objective we lost that focus nearly completely after the section about the AI this has just evolved into a rant about things smaller doesn't like and that would be fine if he wouldn't claim it as objective to be honest I cannot understand how he wrote this part of the script we worked it recorded it and then edited it without ever thinking that this might just be his opinion but we are not done another new criticism is about the ferrous lock stones for those who don't know in the single-player they basically work like branches of your in that you can use them to open certain doors which might give you specific items however these are also an important tool for one of the covenants and again mola is just ignoring the point of these lock stones you see there's a red covenant and in comparison to other pvp covenants it works differently in that while being in this covenant you can draw other players in a specific area into your world instead of invading theirs in addition to that since you are in the red covenant the enemies in the area will not attack you but the other player with the lock stones you can then open doors to free more enemies or just activate traps that you can then use against the people you draw in now I know that this can be a bit annoying for the single player since the player cannot know which doors in these areas contain just another enemy and which one an item but to just ignore the core mechanic of these lock stones is not the right way especially if since the only interesting item you can find is one weapon everything else is just consumables that you can find in other places as well and this brings us to the last section about the RPG elements Rey only talks about a DP and the abundance of souls and crafting materials all of that was already covered in this video so I'm not going to repeat that however he then goes into the following rent in fact that ends up being the argument for a lot of these issues Dark Souls 2 brings us an annoying mechanic but provides an additional mechanic to counter it for example you're going to lose health every time you die but you can use an effigy to counter it why not lose the effigies and lose the health loss you're going to lose health every time you die but if you wear this ring it'll counter half of it why not lose the ring and lose the health loss and that is what the setup was for back in the discussion about health loss Mahler presents it as of both systems just cancel each other out which is not true you lose health and you can counter that by using a human effigy that is true but human effigies are not infinitely available so that point doesn't make any sense you lose health but there's a ring that you use is that effect by 50% that is true again but ignores the fact that this takes up a ring slot that you might need for something different I mean in the same way I could say in Dark Souls 1 you lose your souls and humanity when dying but the game gives you a ring that lets you keep both even if you die like the things smaller brought up this is true but ignores the fact that this needs a ring slot and the ring breaks when dying this is such a weak argumentation and it reminds me of something what he's saying about the gutter is an unfortunate example of only presenting the positive side to a feature in the same way that saying thousands of spiders in your house is great because it will get rid of the Flies I love that editing gives me this kind of power or I can just be like hey you said this and then you said this is great yeah I agree he then does the same thing for a lot of other arguments which were more or less already covered in this video like a DP and abundance of souls for levers the option to aim the weapon while locked on here completely ignoring that it attacks in the direction of the locked on enemy if you just don't touch the left analog stick but hey why not ignoring object effects in an object of analysis right so are we done wait there's more he then goes into another argument about which gameplay elements were kept from rock swords - - Dark Souls 3 and which were removed another argument that is often presented is that they kept several aspects from Dark Souls 2 in Dark Souls 3 he mentioned some minor stuff like as the shots which he only considers a change and that I find very strange since he took a lot of time to explain why the addition of life gems had a detrimental effect to the point he even called it an objectively bad addition to the game so why is it change to the estus flask mechanic which lets the develop and know how many flowers the player has at any point in the game not considered an objectively good addition to the game but just a change however going on he also mentions the two additional ring slots how crafting works and being able to teleport from the beginning and he makes it seem like this was all that was kept in Dark Souls 3 I'm sorry aren't you forgetting a certain thing really important for combat a thing which is very similar to the first point you made in this video omnidirectional rolling by being locked on Ameena took so much time to criticize Dark Souls 2 for having eight snap points in the movement but are just ignoring the Dark Souls one had only four for rolling when being locked on that's pretty selective and what about the fact that they used the same weight limitations in Dark Souls 3 as in Dark Souls tomb and what about dual wielding weapons I mean yes they changed it to only have specific weapons for special combos by dual wielding but it is something that wasn't possible in Dark Souls 1 they just refined that system but about the fact that you have to level with a person that there are items to deal with invaders like the seat of a giant tree but about the fact that part of the back step mechanic was implemented in a new way but with Dark Souls 2 as a baseline again it is not the same it is refined but it is more close to 2 than one with its startup animation what about the fact that it now costs stamina to use spells or the fact that you can climb up ladders faster and let lose of it if you want to they kept the jumping button on a three it's a small change but you can now roll by sprinting which was not possible in Dark Souls 1 all these don't count but to be honest I'm more interested in talking about the supposed differences from Dark Souls 2 to talk Souls 3 to make it more like Dark Souls 1 I will show that section first and then I'll talk about it so let's look at the things the Dark Souls 3 dropped from ds2 to end up more similar to ds1 so we have effigies life gems and abundance of healing items Esther's healing over time movement ADP rolling animation in relation to equipped load fog will delay weapon repair poison damage fall damage chest traps the mimic appearance mimic behavior gear braking goof fragrant branches of your ferris Lock stones bonfire ascetics illusory wall activation torch mechanics power stance parry animation tombstones for NPCs soaked effect attack lock-on amount of levels to spend enemy respawn limitations plunging attack kick adding mobs in new game+ and backstep iframes so again we have a very poor attempt at trying to influence viewer or at least it seems like one since I cannot say for sure what his intentions are but since he's just reading all these statements very fast I have to assume that his goal is that the viewer might not realize that some of these are not actually true and I just added to the correct ones to make the list seem larger but as you know me by now I go through every point and I want to make clear here that I compare all these points to Dark Souls 2 and 1 because smaller said these changes were done so Dark Souls 3 becomes more similar to Dark Souls 1 first effigies yes effigies do not exist in Dark Souls 3 anymore but let's just compare what the new element the ambadas it heals you like humanity in Dark Souls 1 it allows you to be invaded like Dark Souls 1 it allows you to summon like Dark Souls 1 and 2 it increases your health like Dark Souls 2 it can only be used once and not Yui the state that it creates like in Dark Souls 2 you can change your state anywhere in the level like in Dark Souls 2 so in general embers seem to be a lot more like Dark Souls 2 than Dark Souls 1 though to be honest I would say they just took the best from both games and combined them but it was definitely not a change to make Dark Souls 3 more like Dark Souls 1 than to Second Life gems which is true and abandoning of healing items which is true as long as we are only talking about consumables because there are a lot of rings and weapons that have feeling effects in Dark Souls 3 also true is the ceiling over time snap point movement and ADP rolling in relation to equip load is just wrong it's the same as in Dark Souls 2 with you having fast roll until you reach an equip load of 70% and then effort roll until 100 percent in taxes 1 you have the fast roll until an equip load of 25% the meat roll until 50% in the fet roll until 100% forkball delay I guess it's true that it isn't a dark sorcery anymore but it was also present in Dark Souls 1 but to be honest I don't remember if that was only a problem in multiplayer weapon degrade system which I found out because this is clearly like Dark Souls 2 and nothing like Dark Souls 1 there's not even a fraction of an argument here poison damage in the amount of poison damage well I guess then it's true it's more in Dark Souls 2 because they don't really use toxic and have life gems fall damage which is partially true it is a percentage based again but then the percentage is based off your HP by being em but meaning that you can die from a fall because you have 30% less HP in your normal state also like Dark Souls 2 you can decrease the fall damage by leveling a certain statistic it's just not health any more it's dexterity also equipment load is important for the damage but that was true for Dark Souls 1 n 2 so it takes ideas from both but to be fair it's more similar to Dark Souls 1 chest strips which is true mimic appearance which is true for the most part though there is a Dark Souls to mimic in Dark Souls 3 which I guess would be a counter-argument me make a tech rep and wake up patterns isn't that the same point again if not please explain more what you mean all mimics can crap and again attack swords to mimic is in Dark Souls 3 kiyah braking goo is in dark sorcery it's a pyromancy it's called asset search fragrant benches of your firelocks stones bonfire ascetics and illusionary ball-breaking are all true torch mechanics is false though even if those aren't the exact same mechanics you can still use a torch to light the way and it is also used to get rid of maggots power stands as I said above while powers dancing in itself is not in Dark Souls 3 there are certain dual wielding weapons that have an additional moveset with l1 like the power stands in Dark Souls 2 so there's a small dark sword - than one where you couldn't even to end your offhand weapon which is also possible in Dark Souls 3 as it was in Dark Souls 2 by the way parry animation tombstones for NPCs and soft effects are true again now what do you mean with a tech lock do you mean that you can change the direction of your attack through holding the left analog stick in that case it's not really true since there's an option in the menu to change it to the dark souls2 option so the change is that you can now choose what you prefer levels to spend I mean yes it's less than in Dark Souls 2 but I also had nearly 30 levels more than in Dark Souls 1 so I guess it's more of a middle ground between the two enemy responding limit is true plunging attack is false since it's different to both dark swordsman and dark souls - and I guess I let Justice Sava explained this one very cool thing that you could do in the previous shows games was to launch a chemical attack on people by basically performing a crazy plunging attack from a high distance that killed both you and whoever you landed on not in Dark Souls 3 however in this game if you fall to your death the plunging attack won't even happen cake which is partially true you now have a kick again instead of a shield pêche but the mechanic is actually more like dark swords - you see when you kick the shield in Dark Souls 1 you got the ability to just attack while Dark Souls 2 in taxes we allow you to do a critical attack if you can make the opponent drop the shield aring mops and new ones in new game+ depends on what you see as new ones since you can collect better versions of certain rings in new game+ which is a new ones even if it's just a small one this was not present in Dark Souls 1 either so again they just took a middle route and last backstab iframes which I assume you mean being invincible while backstabbing which is true by the way for most of the animation in Dark Souls 2 you can only get hit during the beginning of the animation as far as I know and I mean you can't get hit during the startup animation in Dark Souls 3 as well I would say this is technically true but you should have to define it a bit more so in summary some of what was listed was just wrong like the equipment load and the weapon degrade system and a lot of other stuff was more of a hybrid between Dark Souls 2 in Dark Souls 1 those were not just changes back to how dark souls run works there were legitimate points in there but then again I also listed some additional legitimate points before that were only part of Dark Souls 2 and made it into 3 I think in general it is probably true that there's more of Dark Souls 1 & 3 but again most of the times they just refined the systems from both games in general this whole section was either badly researched or it was really an attempt to trick the viewer into thinking that all of these are changes made to make darks or 3 more like Dark Souls 1 so I guess with this I showed what you asked here right for the people who are saying the ds3 kept many changes from ds1 to ds2 meaning that they must be better please revise your argument to clarify once again this section was about proving that there's more removed from Dark Souls 2 than 1 in 3 I know that's confusing but we're at the end of the video and this actually ends the video this time maula is now basically summarizing the series and what his conclusions are and I just want to show again that he believes all of that was objective what I can say objectively is that with everything considered throughout my almost ten our series Dark Souls 2 is a bad game it sinks below pie it has several incompetent pieces of design throughout many of the most fundamental parts to the game so there's no argument to be made that this might have just been his opinion he clearly thinks that this video was completely objective except from the few parts he pointed out that it isn't but let's come to my actual conclusion to be honest I've been thinking for a while but to actually say here because I'm not really sure but I think it would be best if I start with saying again that this video shouldn't be seen as a defense for Dark Souls 2 because in the end all I did was point out that most of these sections were not objective and sometimes added a different perspective but to be fair that doesn't make the points raised and violet a lot of people me included will agree with a standard set by mawla and he therefore provided good evidence as for why these people do not like the game i mean i'm similar while i don't really dislike it i feel it's the weakest of the trilogy as I already stated and that is because I agree with a lot of moral standards especially in the beginning of the video but that doesn't mean that this is an object of truth as I showed several times our standard does not have more worth than the one from the next person and we have to accept that again I'm still thinking about the possibility of an objective standard and how this one could be defined I provided an idea for one in this video but in the end this is a discussion that will still continue however coming back to the actual video if Mahler would have only stated his standards as being objective I probably wouldn't have made this video because as I explained before I thought similar while Pegg and I have to even thank mawla for making me think about my approach of what is objective and what is subjective this series of has really helped me to get to the point where now M which I of course didn't reach by myself but by actually discussing with other viewers from Mahler but coming back to the question why I made this video in the end and didn't just write in a comment about my idea of objectivity and subjectivity there are basically two reasons the first one is that I get the feeling that Mahler with the explosion of his channel got a bit arrogant in his stance he makes fun of other content creators which is fine but is then doing the exact same mistakes and I he needs to change this attitude before growing even bigger because his stance on objectivity and subjectivity is not just wrong as I showed but it seems that it makes him feel superior and I just hope that he can change that because after this whole video I still think that mala is one of the best analysts on YouTube because he puts a lot of time and research in his videos he makes them very understandable while also discussing a lot of points and he even includes jokes from time to time so for me losing this person to arrogance that comes from an incorrect stance would be said and I just want to include here that he expects from his videos to tell him when he takes the wrong path but people get lazy people slip up they downright run out of ideas or get really greedy so as they're trusting and attentive audience let them [ __ ] know the second point is that in the end the video did not just suffer from the subject to standards but a lot more problems the one that I noticed first and that made me just like the video was that he made the same mistakes he rightfully criticized terrorists for I mean I showed that when including his criticism and pointing out that it worked on his own arguments but I hope that this will help to spot these instances more in the future another problem that I had with a video and I can't believe that I'm saying this is that I felt that there was not enough research done I showed this in a lot of systems he often missed or even misrepresented at certain aspects of a gameplay system like the back steps fall damage or the list with things that made it into Dark Souls 3 and with all the work he put into especially playing the game seven times only for the series I'm really puzzled as to how this could have happened first I thought this was intentional to either show the game to be weaker than it is or because he felt he had to create a counterweight to her as very positive video but I actually think that there was another reason and this is that he was just biased I can't say for sure in which playthrough this happened but I think we can all agree on that mauler at some point was biased about certain mechanics and that he thought they were unfinished or were just inconsistent this was probably also happening since all the other viewpoints he showed where his friends who also seemed very biased from the start about the game and more or less disliked it and this probably led to the fact that he wasn't actually looking for an explanation anymore as for why the back step wasn't working for example and he just took it as being inconsistent this was especially apparent in the section where he talked about combustion because I don't think it takes a genius to notice that the sound was just different when hitting the enemy but since he was already settled that most systems were just buggy he didn't even think of another solution and in the end this is something that we always have to be aware of because it means that even if we do a completely objective analysis where we only state the effects it doesn't have to be accurate because we might have already selected the object effects based on our bias but yeah that pretty much ends the video I know I'm only a small youtuber and there's only a fraction of a chance that Mahler will actually see this I will try to message him via YouTube and maybe even Twitter but I don't have too much hope if I'm completely honest however if you are a viewer of Mahler I would really appreciate if you would try to help me get his attention because in the end it is a response to him first even if you think that I'm completely wrong and Mahler should just tear the whole video apart I would appreciate you telling him I mean this could give you some form of entertainment right at this point I also want to point out that I won't judge anyone for actually disliking the video if you think that I'm wrong in certain aspects or if you just didn't like it to be honest I'm even expecting it since criticizing other youtubers will always be a dangerous path but I would appreciate it if you could at least give a short comment what was wrong or why you didn't like it because this just helps me grow as a content creator and last but not least Mahler if you are actually seeing this I just want to say that I'm sorry if it sometimes sounded a bit schmuck to you I know that there were these sections I thought about changing them to make it more neutral but to be honest I just want them to be entertaining so I left them in the way they are I hope you are not mad for this I mean you did a similar thing in your response series so I don't expect this to happen but I think it should be said since a certain form of respect should be present even on the Internet and with that the video ends I'm thanking everyone who watched the whole thing even though it was very long and it was not even in German I'm also interested in your opinions on the video and my statements of course and I hope that we can continue the discussion in the comments section or also at another place this obviously also applies to mawla himself and with that I'm saying goodbye and I hope that I will see a lot of you in the next video again

Channel: Modie

Views: 2,245

Rating: 3.984127 out of 5

Keywords: In Defense of Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the first Sin, MauLer, analysis, Modie, response, objective, Dark Souls 2, Scholar of the First Sin, assessment, critique, Joseph Anderson, hbomberguy, Content Creator, critic, english, complete, argument

Id: KWDGCjNIwmk

Length: 107min 44sec (6464 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/soulofpatates]

This is not promotion I do not know the creator of the video.

[u/[deleted]]

Good video.

Should be tweeted to him.

[u/ShutUpJackass]

Honestly I get what the guy is saying but I think it’s more down the realm of “he didn’t define this for THIS EXAMPLE I THOUGHT OF”

Like if I’m talking about 2D fighting games, it’s not the most productive use of time to bring in 2D fight in a 3D arena fighting games, for example you can’t compare Soul Caliber to Mortal Kombat because while they both have the 2D “facing each other” style of fighting, Soul Cal also has a whole additional axis of movement”

It’s like his Mario example for the snap movement, yes in the video mauler never says “hey guys I’m talking about what’s objectively best for these souls like games with full 3D environments”, but it can be assumed, because we are talking about DS1 and 2. While I get the argument that “it’s subjective because he said this is the best movement system but this different game in a different genre works better with DS2’s movement, so it’s not 100% objective”

It adds nothing substantial and while he brings up good points that mauler can improve on (like the beginning part of his Defense vid not being that relevant and it could’ve been its own video with the actual core video being it’s own thing) I find that the large majority of what was said isn’t as helpful as the author says it is

But it was a good watch and it got the old noggin thinking, plus he’s been the most respectful person to critique and understand maulers pov, I recommend viewing it

[u/ThePlatinumEagle]

If he made genuine mistakes, then fair enough, but I'm tired of people using singular examples of him being wrong to say "see, he's not objective at all and everything he says is wrong!". It's like if a scientist made a mistake, and you responded by devaluing their entire work and insisting that they aren't dealing in facts at all. When in reality making mistakes doesn't invalidate MauLer's entire style of critique. Hope this video doesn't do that.

[u/Reaps51]

I believe he is aware of it in some form - if memory serves me correctly he even concedes some aspects he tripped up on (like the backstab mechanic and a few other odds and ends)

[u/Cr0sley]

After watching it, I would also like to see EFAP discuss this.

Although the chances of it being covered seem slim.

[u/Gaia-Rai]

I actually find this to be one the most fair criticisms of MauLer I've seen. The long man is really good at reaserching and presenting points but I do find parts of his analytical videos where I do end up thinking, 'that's subjective, try again,' or 'that's not worse that's just different'. Video games can be a bit harder to make arguments for in regards to how mechanics effect player experience and one solution I find that could help get better data is to interact with people of vastly different skill levels going through the game, not just limiting it to people you know.