Quick Thoughts on Dark Souls 2
I’m a big fan of the Dark Souls games, and I’ve been eagerly anticipating the release of Dark Souls 2. Â I’ve only put in around 15 hours so I haven’t seen too much of the game yet. Had I not gotten the game two days late and restarted my character five times I would probably be farther along. Still, there’s a lot of interesting changes worth noting, both positive and negative.
Spells Require Stamina
This is actually a pretty big deal. Your spells still have a limited number of charges but they also require stamina to use. So after you run away or roll to the side to avoid a nasty blow you have to regain enough stamina to cast your spells. This is pretty much why I decided not to try playing a caster on my first go through.
Cool New Covenants
I really like most of the new Covenants they added to the game. There is a decent mix of co-op and pvp along with some new PvE covenants. There’s a Champion one, for example, that makes the game more difficult and disables all summoning so you have to do it yourself. Another interesting one is the Blue Sentinals, a PVP covenant that summons people to defend members of the Way of the Blue co-op covenant when they get invaded by enemy players.
Soul Memory
This a record of all the souls you have acquired. I believe the idea of it is to prevent people from making low-level characters with powerful gear to invade the worlds of new players. Some people also claim that this prevents co-op summoning if the range is above 500k or something like that. It seems that nobody is exactly sure about the mechanics of this but it sure is bothering a lot of people. (more…)
Presentation and Story
Pokeugenics
I’m a huge fan of Mario’s various RPG outings. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about the original Mario RPG, the Paper Mario Series (Which I actually streamed 2 summers ago), or the handheld Mario & Luigi series. I love them all. I have been trying to cram in as much of the newest M&L title in between Keen’s and my foray into Final Fantasy XIV. It’s the first in the series to come to the 3DS and the bar was already set pretty dang high by the last game, Bowser’s Inside Story. However, it doesn’t take very long to see that the game measures up fairly well.
Just like in past games you control both Bros. at once. Mario leads the team and Luigi takes up the rear. The A button is assigned to Mario and will perform all of his actions like jumping, hammering, etc., while B is used for Luigi in the same way. In order to traverse some of the game’s minor platforming elements you will need to time your jumps so that both Bros. stick together without getting separated. Bros. maneuvers are also back to help you get around and accomplish specific goals, but seem slightly changed as they are in every version. For some reason you will have to relearn your old moves along the way but you’ll still be doing stuff like using Luigi to hammer Mario into the ground. Interestingly enough, though, in this game in order to pound Mario into the ground you must be on soft ground, otherwise you will only shrink him. In BIS, for example, hitting Mario with the hammer anywhere would shrink him and in order to get underground they would stack up and spin-drill downward. In previous games before THAT each Bro would actually swap positions to hammer each other for those moves. It’s interesting how they make slight alterations to these. I got a little sidetracked there but the general gist is that it’s comfortably familiar.