wordybird

Occasionally I have words.

Headspace of someone with too much time and not enough sense. See the sideblog for my FF14 quarantined ramblings. Find me on bluesky (wordybird) and Twitch (wordiestbird) for the time being. Good luck with everything.


beamsplashx
@beamsplashx

for all the talk there was of dark souls 2 being made by fromsoft's "b-team", it often feels more like each game has its own individual b-team making the bad parts, since those bits are so rough compared to what's done well that it's hard to conceptualize the same team doing both


beamsplashx
@beamsplashx

DARK SOULS 1: has a stat which explicitly raises your defense in game where damage is high, and there's no respec to undo it once you realize it's worthless
FANS: lol yeah its got some jank
DARK SOULS 2: has a stat which improves your dodge, which you can check by pressing the "tell me what this stat means" button, you can raise it once you find out about it, and you can respec if you don't want to gain more levels to get it
FANS: how is anyone supposed to figure this out????

hard to hear them saying the last bit since they said it as they stepped on that tree branch near the crimson set in blighttown that forcibly slides you off to your death for no apparent reason and it was never fixed

i don't like the AGI stat, but that's just DS2's iteration of the patented Aspect of a From Software Game That Sucks. if anything, all their games could at least take the upside of that and let you get even better i-frames than usual if they're not gonna fix how they do hitboxes. balteus may as well be shooting the watchdog of the old lords at you

so can you tell that i was invited to be on a dark souls podcast once which was put on indefinite hiatus and i had no outlet for all my prepared talking points


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @beamsplashx's post:

i don't think it's additive, even when you consider the choice of raising it to get even more i-frames than you did in DS1, since the dark wood grain ring in DS1 effectively did the same thing. when i played mods that made it effectively default to 100, i really didn't feel like i was missing anything

I'm not sure if any of my gripes are really valid as such, but it was the only game in the series I had no fun playing, and didn't finish. I kept going for a while in the hopes that it would eventually click with me, like the first one did. I needed several attempts to finally get DS1, but I never hit that point in 2 before I just gave up.
And I've had no desire to give it another shot when I could just do... something else.

My entire problem with 2 wasn't AGI, it was Soul Memory. I played all three Souls games (and Bloodborne/ER) to PvP, and Soul Memory is a wall that stops you from doing things like low-level PvP, which was among the best parts of those games due to build diversity.