I've been replaying this in its Scholar Of The First Sin incarnation; here are some impressions after several years, and several similar games from FromSoft. There will be spoilers sprinkled throughout...if you care about spoilers for an 11 years old game.
First, technicalities. I'm playing on PC at 4K@60fps and this gives DS2 a much better look; I played it back on PS3 in its vanilla form, and the difference is quite noticeable. The abrupt and sometimes changes in lighting are still there, but are much better handled and feel much more natural. The high resolution makes some textures shine (I didn't know hollows had scribbles on their skins, I though it was decay), and the new lighting makes certain things stand out more, like solid ground in the Shrine Of Amana. The motion blur effect also looks better than in DS Remaster.
This doesn't change DS2's overall bland design, and uninspired locations still look unispired, and possibly look even worse. It really highlights how some locations in DS2 have good, even excellent, ideas that are never brought to fruition. The lightsourcing is still hit-and-miss, at times torches give an incredibly reddish tone to the series and in a few occasions unlit areas are actually more readable than lit areas.
There are still a couple of bugs, which range from innocouos (corpses falling with the sound of a huge splash while raining), to game breaking (enemies and bosses freezing in place...which is nice until that happens to your allies during the Ivory King fight).
Now, the game.
For those not knowing, Scholar Of The First Sin is a remix of vanilla DS2 with different enemy placement, more red phantom NPC invasions, revised storylines for some NPCs (linked to the aforementioned invasions), a new boss with related storyline, all three DLCs included, and a new way to access them.
The revamped enemy placement not only makes some locations less annoying to go through, but also provides a smoother progression in number and intensity of encounters, and the Pursuer now lives up to its name. Some of the new placements don't really make sense to me (like Drangleic Castle hosting enemies from all over the game, and exploding hollows in Dragon Aerie), and some bosses have been reused a bit too many times (Gargoyles, Dragon Riders, Flexile Sentry). Some areas are basically brand new thanks to this change; Dragon Peak is sprinkled with neutral dragon knights that won't attack until aggroed, and the game does give you a hint about that: a simple bow gesture when you enter their line of sight, but it's so subtle it's easy to miss it when there are other hostile enemies in the room. The Undead Crypt now has a nifty mechanic about light and invading NPCs, and the Shrine Of Amana is much easier to go through with characters without ranged options. Some areas, like Aldia's Keep still feel undercooked, and boss fights haven't changed: way too many knights with a similar moveset and creatures that are there to increase the number of boss encounters more than anything else. DLC fights fare much better, and I wish you could skip the base game to play the DLCs alone.
DLCs aren't perfect, at times their level structure even more maddening than the base game...looking at you, Crown Of The Old Iron King. But then you get to the Ivory King and almost everything is forgiven.
The new boss is built up throughout the game, though it does have some nebulous requirements to meet. If you don't sequence-break anything, it should be easy to meet it, but you never know. It does feel a bit tackled on, and this highlights what is probably DS2's biggest problem: lack of cohesion. There are a lot of things at play here: the Dark, the giants, the curse, Milfanitos, Aldia, dragons, the Emerald Herald...some of them are connected, but this is probably the orst told FromSoft Soulsborne game, and not because of nebulous storylines, but because everything feels so undercooked.
Unlike vanilla DS2, which gives you all required items to access the DLCs, you have to find them in Scholar Of The First Sin. Two of them are basically found as you go through the game, the third is in a hard-to-access area that in the base game didn't hold anything useful, so you might wander around a bit before finding it.
Scholar Of The First Sin is a marked improvement over vanilla DS2. It doesn't change the overall experience much, and in my book this still remains the weakest of the Soulsbornes, but if you want to play DS2, this version is the way to go.
First, technicalities. I'm playing on PC at 4K@60fps and this gives DS2 a much better look; I played it back on PS3 in its vanilla form, and the difference is quite noticeable. The abrupt and sometimes changes in lighting are still there, but are much better handled and feel much more natural. The high resolution makes some textures shine (I didn't know hollows had scribbles on their skins, I though it was decay), and the new lighting makes certain things stand out more, like solid ground in the Shrine Of Amana. The motion blur effect also looks better than in DS Remaster.
This doesn't change DS2's overall bland design, and uninspired locations still look unispired, and possibly look even worse. It really highlights how some locations in DS2 have good, even excellent, ideas that are never brought to fruition. The lightsourcing is still hit-and-miss, at times torches give an incredibly reddish tone to the series and in a few occasions unlit areas are actually more readable than lit areas.
There are still a couple of bugs, which range from innocouos (corpses falling with the sound of a huge splash while raining), to game breaking (enemies and bosses freezing in place...which is nice until that happens to your allies during the Ivory King fight).
Now, the game.
For those not knowing, Scholar Of The First Sin is a remix of vanilla DS2 with different enemy placement, more red phantom NPC invasions, revised storylines for some NPCs (linked to the aforementioned invasions), a new boss with related storyline, all three DLCs included, and a new way to access them.
The revamped enemy placement not only makes some locations less annoying to go through, but also provides a smoother progression in number and intensity of encounters, and the Pursuer now lives up to its name. Some of the new placements don't really make sense to me (like Drangleic Castle hosting enemies from all over the game, and exploding hollows in Dragon Aerie), and some bosses have been reused a bit too many times (Gargoyles, Dragon Riders, Flexile Sentry). Some areas are basically brand new thanks to this change; Dragon Peak is sprinkled with neutral dragon knights that won't attack until aggroed, and the game does give you a hint about that: a simple bow gesture when you enter their line of sight, but it's so subtle it's easy to miss it when there are other hostile enemies in the room. The Undead Crypt now has a nifty mechanic about light and invading NPCs, and the Shrine Of Amana is much easier to go through with characters without ranged options. Some areas, like Aldia's Keep still feel undercooked, and boss fights haven't changed: way too many knights with a similar moveset and creatures that are there to increase the number of boss encounters more than anything else. DLC fights fare much better, and I wish you could skip the base game to play the DLCs alone.
DLCs aren't perfect, at times their level structure even more maddening than the base game...looking at you, Crown Of The Old Iron King. But then you get to the Ivory King and almost everything is forgiven.
The new boss is built up throughout the game, though it does have some nebulous requirements to meet. If you don't sequence-break anything, it should be easy to meet it, but you never know. It does feel a bit tackled on, and this highlights what is probably DS2's biggest problem: lack of cohesion. There are a lot of things at play here: the Dark, the giants, the curse, Milfanitos, Aldia, dragons, the Emerald Herald...some of them are connected, but this is probably the orst told FromSoft Soulsborne game, and not because of nebulous storylines, but because everything feels so undercooked.
Unlike vanilla DS2, which gives you all required items to access the DLCs, you have to find them in Scholar Of The First Sin. Two of them are basically found as you go through the game, the third is in a hard-to-access area that in the base game didn't hold anything useful, so you might wander around a bit before finding it.
Scholar Of The First Sin is a marked improvement over vanilla DS2. It doesn't change the overall experience much, and in my book this still remains the weakest of the Soulsbornes, but if you want to play DS2, this version is the way to go.
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