Earlier this year, when first-time and veteran Souls players alike were polishing off their first or sixth playthroughs of Elden Ring, I was watching carefully. As I knew they would, they started looking backwards, asking which earlier Souls games were worth revisiting. But I wasn’t trawling those Twitter threads for the standard replies, the obvious insistence that yes, you should try the first Dark Souls if you haven’t, and that yes, Bloodborne’s lack of a PC port is a heinous crime. As a Dark Souls 2 fan, I was seeking the other sickos.
However outcast or reviled we might be, I knew there’d be others coming out to bat for Dark Souls 2 in 2022, emerging from their wells to shame mankind. And I wanted to hear, after eight years, why they still insist it’s not only worth playing, but the true peak of the Dark Souls series..
We can say it: Dark Souls 2 is the black sheep among its sequel siblings. It’s always been a weird one to digest, not least because it didn’t have series creative director Miyazaki at the helm. The absence of the fanbase’s mythologized auteur left the sequel little room for error before certain purists wrote it off as a poor imitation. A graphical downgrade between its reveal trailer and release (opens in new tab) didn’t earn back any good will, and it wasn’t the only flaw for those tallying marks against the game.
