Runa216 said:
Would you like a breakdown? I just wrote 13,000 words just ranking the bosses and throughout it I couldn't help but notice a tonne of little things that kept building up and compounding exponentially. I'll give you the cliffnotes version, though: 1 - ADP. I know it gets beaten down all the time but it's a real problem. Basically, the dodge roll function doesn't work properly if you don't pump like 20 levels into ADP to increase your agility stat. Using items and pretty much everything else is affected by it, too. Far too often, because of the lack of i-frames there are WAY too many instances where I dodge but take damage anyway. 2 - On from that, the hitboxes are terrible. Again, I know people keep bringing it up but it's a problem for a reason. The game should be fair with what looks like it'll hit you and what will hit you. When an enemy can shoot a laser beam and I'm on the other side of the room and it still hits me, that's bullshit. When I'm BEHIND an enemy and he stabs AWAY from me and I still get grabbed by his attack, that's bullshit. Combine that and the ADP/iFrames and it's just a whole lot of cheap difficulty that is frustrating without any of the fairness that makes the balance so important. 3 - for some weird reason, sometimes even with the above two issues when you get hit there's no visual representation of it. No character flinch, no subtle vibration or sound effect or animation or light effect. There were way too many times where I dodge rolled or was away from an attack so I thought I avoided it...then I got no indication I got hit, but then I noticed that my health was completely gone. 4 - The combination of those three aspects means that even with the bosses that are well designed, they aren't fun to play. the lack of i-frames, the shoddy hit boxes, and the tendency to not give proper feedback when hit mean that even bosses that could have been fun in Dark souls 1 or 3 or Elden Ring are still shit because the game is fundamentally broken. and since so many of these problems overlap, it gets exponentially worse the more you play. 5 - there's way too many instances where the game is just 'haha, fuck you, this is dark souls pissant, suffer'. Like, so many of the levels just swarm you with enemies, not giving you an opportunity to properly do crowd control, too many instance of instant death holes, too many shit gameplay mechanics, too many obtuse puzzles (Even for the famously obtuse dark souls series). The whole point of these games is that they're challenging but (mostly) Fair. Dark Souls II on way too many instances just said 'fuck it' and threw every cheap bullshit tactic at you just to make you suffer. The balance is hard, this game fails there. 6 - Honestly, I knew Dark Souls II was notoriously bad for the boss run-backs but I didn't realize just how many of the bosses were that bad until I was actually doing analysis on every boss in the game. Even mostly good bosses like Sir Alonne and the Smelter Demon were completely destroyed by bullshit run-backs. I did a thing about all 41 bosses in the game and like 30 of them were notable for the shit that you had to do just to get back to the boss, and this is a clearly intentional design philosophy. Because fuck us, I guess. And that really is the over-arching problem with Dark Souls II. It really does look and feel like exactly what it is, a game that was made to imitate Dark Souls without actually understanding what was good about Dark Souls. It was a game made by a team that knew Dark souls by its 'prepare to die' reputation but didn't understand the underlying philosophy that dictated why all the other games have resonated so deeply, and that is the feeling of overcoming adversity. A game can be hard but it has to feel fair to not feel cheap or frustrating. Cuphead will kill you relentlessly and has no time for failure..but so many of the design elements of that game made it so that getting right back in didn't feel frustrating or infuriating. Dark Souls and now Elden Ring have done a lot of things to make the game HARDER but still make it so that there's less frustration. The boss runback thing is especially egregious because Dark souls, Bloodborne, and even Demon's Souls to a lesser extent had options to open up shortcuts because they knew that nobody would want to run a gauntlet of enemies and traps every time they wanted to fight a boss. You earned your access to the boss, now you can more or less run to it. There are exceptions but for the most part, Dark Souls and Bloodborne and Dark Souls III and especially Elden Ring were pretty good about making sure that the boss runs were decent. With Dark souls II those instances were the exception. It's fine if these issues don't bother you, personally. Everyone gets a subjective opinion about what they value. But these are objective truths about the game's core mechanics, fundamentals, design philosophy, and over-arching intent. Personally I don't know how anyone can play a game so broken and cheap to its core and genuinely not see what the big deal is. | 
