After writing my Dark Souls II review, I figured that my work with From Software’s black sheep ended. Unfortunately, not so! With the advent of three new, and very large, DLC areas, they continued to expand Dark Souls II long after I played it; by that point, I lost motivation to take up the mantle, considering such DLC does not usually integrate well with the main game (I imagine you traverse through some weird offshoot section, sorta like Artorias of the Abyss). Also, at ten dollars a pop, I thought the better of it and completely ignored a game I didn’t actually love in the first place.
Thankfully, waiting for Steam discounts and/or a “Game of the Year” edition proved prudent with the release of Scholar of the First Sin. An elaborately, and confusingly named, “director’s cut” of sorts, Scholar of the First Sin (heretofore shortened to SOTFS) contains a lot of distinct, interesting changes to the Dark Souls II core game. For one, every single area completely changes the enemy layouts in their entirety. Considering part of the challenge of a Souls game derives from new, unexpected enemy configurations, this functionally turns SOTFS into an entirely new game. Enjoy the surprise of dying from a random enemy ambush, or conquering more enemies than you thought you could at once!
In that direction, SOTFS has, in many places, simply added many, MANY more enemies in almost every section of the game. Their AI, too, seems either enhanced or more aggressive, as you’ll frequently find enemies that aggro from quite a distance – they also never “de-aggro”, and you must thus kill EVERY enemy. Considering the big groups they come in, that’s scary; “swarming” seems an appropriate word, since even regular enemies come in packs of two or three at the very least! On the one hand, this change does create a new, somewhat artificial, barrier to entry; on the other hand, Dark Souls’ combat system still doesn’t mesh all that well with multi-enemy combat, and that will turn off a whole lot of people. Still, that was true of the original version as well, so it’s mostly an acquired taste either way. The extra enemies also provide a new issue: you level up very quickly. I’m not sure whether later portions of the game bother to balance this out (considering how many Souls I already obtained, that’s likely a balancing move on From Software’s part), but it’s notable all the same.
I probably should also mention that From Software saw fit to move the item drops around as well, rendering most older guides and strategies for areas moot. This is especially true of Heide’s Tower of Flame – once an area only containing Old Knights with various giant implements of death, it now contains Heide Knights (seriously, why they didn’t do this originally I don’t know) and a big dragon of doom, like the original Dark Souls. In a sense, you can think of this as artificial gating of some of the more overpowered items in the game, but I’m not sure if that really fits with the spirit of Souls games (which don’t so much have sequence breaks as much as they encourage experienced players to find ways to mess around). I find Scholar of the First Sin more guided by comparison with Dark Souls II, and I’m not sure whether I prefer the more cryptic experience of the original.
Interestingly, since I didn’t remember the layout of the game very well (considering most of Dark Souls II consists of long, linear tunnels to a predetermined endpoint where nothing links except by bonfire), I’m still finding myself more surprised than I thought I would. Thankfully, they removed quite a few bonfires so far, which makes traversing areas with the new enemy layouts much more scary! Weirdly enough, the initial bad design actually works to SOTFS’s advantage in making for some great surprises.
As for the content which I haven’t encountered yet and of which I’m not familiar, I can’t say how well they integrated the DLC into the game in specific. However, it’s true that the name for the “remixed” version of Dark Souls II comes from a newly introduced character which (I hope?) clarifies the confusing story of the original game. I suppose saying anything more than that would spoil it for the majority of people reading this, but rest assured some new boss fights (and some surprising ones!) are introduced throughout the game.
Also, as a strange side-note, I harped on the durability of weapons in the original review; that seems to have been fixed in a patch a while back, and this also applies to SOTFS. Honestly, it’s a little disappointing they changed this, given I liked when the game forced me to use multiple weapons, but a glitch is a glitch that must be fixed, and that’s how things go.
So, basically SOTFS exemplifies my thesis that Dark Souls II actually was unfinished on release. From Software looked at the game, fixed the flaws in their original design, and decided to re-release the game in its entirety (also, it’s nice console audiences get to play the game in 60 FPS like us PC folk). So far, it seems a far more complete game, if a more difficult one in some respects. With that said, SOTFS also seems far more inaccessible than the original Dark Souls II, and a newcomer to the Souls series will certainly need to persevere through artificial difficulty spikes and other new factors to wring enjoyment out of the game. I’m not sure if I would recommend it, but I suppose that will take some time for me to play through the game in its entirety…again!
