Dark Souls 2 is the funniest one

The first time I tried to play Dark Souls 2 was a few months after I first played the original Dark Souls. I got about ten hours in and defeated the first major boss before giving up.

At the time, nothing about the game felt right. Dark Souls had a dense, interconnected world that kept surprising with how everything layered on top of each other. It had understandable equip weight and dodge roll mechanics. It had fair traps you could avoid with close observation and quick thinking. The enemies generally did not pivot in place mid-animation to hit you.

Dark Souls 2 had none of those things. It still does not. But it's been the better part of a decade since I last tried, and I've played every mainline Souls game since (minus Demon's Souls). I'd heard for years how people like Austin Walker or Noah Caldwell-Gervais loved it. Perhaps it deserved another shot.

The other reason I decided to do it is the last weeks of 2025 were tiring. I was feeling exhausted, ineffectual. Still am. From Software's modern catalog fulfills the fantasy of standing against the indifferent world, being beaten down, and getting back up until you drive a blade into its heart and eat its soul. I needed something like that, needed to pretend even for a while that if I had enough smarts, luck, and pluck, I could succeed. I find Souls games, including Bloodborne and Elden Ring, to be strangely calming and low-effort to play due to this and other reasons.

I think a major milestone in understanding how best to approach these games is your reaction to dying during a corpse run and losing a bunch of souls. Is it annoying to feel like a bunch of progress was erased? Certainly, and I still feel that way myself. What comes after that, though? You're back at zero. You've got nothing to lose. You can just start again, or even go somewhere else. Explore all you like, or fight the boss over and over! So what if you die again? You're at zero souls! It's freeing, in a way.

Consequently, one of the most controversial things about Dark Souls 2 is the way the Hollowing mechanic works. Each death cumulatively reduces your maximum hit points, down to 50%. The effect can be completely reversed by using a consumable item, but they aren't that easy to come by. So you inevitably die, and every time you die the game becomes harder. You can't keep rushing a boss because now you die in one hit instead of two, die to two hits from mobs during the runback instead of three. The freedom is replaced with dread and exhaustion, which is narratively appropriate with the concepts Dark Souls 2 explores but just plain mean on a gameplay level.

"Mean" might be the word that best encapsulates Dark Souls 2. It shoves you over, kicks you while you're down, then douses you in gasoline and puts a lit match in your mouth. No wonder I fucking hated it when I'd only played 1, a game that genuinely fits the "tough, but fair" descriptor. Dark Souls 2 is not fair and has no intent to be. One might say it's evil, even.

But now I'm older, wiser, more experienced. I've been tempered by the likes of Yharnam, the Lands of Shadow, Ashina Castle, and even Pharloom. I know the tricks and how to deal with them. Most importantly, I know how to find the humor in a difficult game. That accumulated experience completely transformed how I approached and considered Dark Souls 2.

Some would say I'm a coward for playing a spellcaster who inches through each map, blasting things from range either with magical spears and orbs but also with a bow and poison arrows, summoning two or three other dudes to gang up on every boss. I would simply say I'm using Ashina Sword Style. If the game is willing to fuck me over at every opportunity, it deserves the same treatment.

Here is a real scenario that occurs about 60% through the game, in Aldia's Keep:

You come across a long hallway, pitch black. If you want to permanently expend a limited consumable to light up the hallway, you can (you should). Giant trolls with a few thousand hit points will lumber towards you if you're spotted. They aren't too hard on their own once you know how to dodge them, but their attacks can smash open other cages holding basilisks, which can instantly kill you with their petrification gas. Enemy spellcasters are also hidden behind the paintings lining the hallway. They'll pop out when you're not expecting it and start blasting while you're fighting other shit.

You duck into a side room, with a door too small for the trolls to enter. From here, you can safely plink at it with projectiles while it futilely moves back and forth in front of the door. Eventually, you deal with all the enemies in the hallway and walk all the way down to the end. Right as you start to open the exit door, another troll punches through the wall, damaging you with no prior warning. You desperately roll away and duck into another side room that's closer to the exit. The side rooms are safe from the trolls.

...Unlike literally every other door in the hallway, this one is destructible. The troll smashes through the wall again. You probably haven't quite had a chance to heal, so you roll away again. There is an open pit in the floor. You fall in. You are now in a cage with two giant dogs. The floor is acid. All your equipment breaks and becomes useless as the dogs pounce.

You respawn. Your maximum HP is reduced. Everything is broken and the souls you need to fix it are stuck in the acid pit.

This multi-layered "fuck you" design is everywhere in Dark Souls 2. It's infuriating and exhausting. And, if you're in the right mindset, it's hilarious.

The line between "this is the worst" and "this is so funny" is extremely thin, and I think mostly a matter of expectations. When you're not expecting a trap and then you drop into a pit and five guys gank you, it's just bullshit. When you're very slowly and carefully moving through every room, picking off enemies one by one, and you catch the trap just early enough to avoid certain death? The tension deflates; it's a punchline. Oh-ho, Dark Souls 2, you scamp! You thought you had me! I have skillfully avoided your rake placed to smack me in the face, and now I shall open this chest which most certainly will not have a novelty boxing glove spring out!

Every Souls game has a certain amount of these moments of slapstick comedy, but usually judiciously placed (everybody remembers the swinging trap in Bloodborne). They are simply constant in DS2. Like many of the game's other aspects, it feels experimental. The series really pushed the "difficulty" angle in their marketing ("Prepare to Die" et cetera), and it's almost like DS2 turns the dial all the way up to gauge what threshold the audience is willing to endure.

It turns out I'm willing to endure about 0.85 Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin's worth of fuckery. There comes a point where the exhaustion of checking every corner overtakes the fun of overcoming the challenge. I only made it across the finish line thanks to interesting lore and cool areas making up the difference.

The Shrine of Amana might be the perfect encapsulation of Dark Souls 2's identity. You descend deep, deep beneath Drangleic Castle, down into the roots of the Archtrees from the dawn of time that support the very world itself, like Ash Lake in the first game. There's a whole temple complex across multiple giant caverns, beautiful even in its flooded ruin. Bioluminescent plants and fireflies shine off the shallow water, and strange beings called Milfanito - seen nowhere else across the entire series - sing a never-ending dirge for the undead.

Off in a quiet corner overgrown with roots is a door only openable if you've slain the pitiful Hollowed ruler of Drangleic, King Vendrick. It leads to a barren cavern housing Vendrick's armor and his soul, not upon a king's throne, but on a simple chair. Unlike his tomb in the Undead Crypt, decrepit though it may be, this is not a place of honor.

But also. The area is flooded, so you move at a snail's pace. Priestesses across the entire cave can see you and will shoot you with homing magic missiles. There are instant death bottomless pits in the water that you can only see by torchlight, but the light also draws in the hordes of lizardmen lurking in the depths. Rolling to dodge in the water extinguishes your torch. If you aren't sniping enemies to death one by one, it's trivially easy to be overwhelmed. And at the end is a big stupid skeleton frog that punches you for 80% of your health in one hit.

There is a lot to like about Dark Souls 2 and I definitely have a new appreciation for its many strengths. I also can only handle being the butt of the joke for so long before I'm fed up. I'm glad I finally played it and closed the book on the full Dark Souls series, but I'm content to shove it in a proverbial drawer and never touch it again.