Hey all, I really started playing the souls games with Bloodborne. After that I picked up DS3 and eventually DS1. I had originally skipped DS2 because I had heard how it was polarizing.
Now I’ve played through all the mainline games a couple of times at least plus plenty of other souls-likes not made by FromSoft but I’ve only played through DS2 once, last year I went through all the games in order, just for the fun of it and along with it my first time playing through DS2. I tried not to let the previous discourse color my thoughts too much and it’s since had more people coming out to defend many aspects of the game recently.
Overall I liked it, it certainly wasn’t a terrible game and I feel like it did a lot of neat things that are unique to the game but… I still also had more than a few areas and moments that made the game feel like a slog, it was the only one where I didn’t decide to go through all the DLCs. By the time I made it to the end I was ready to move onto a newer game with some improvements.
I’m positive there are tons of things I never found or experienced. I went through it mostly blind and it was a casual run through since I was just playing all the games. I’m not saying I won’t go through it again but it’s probably the lowest on my list of souls games for a replay but I’ve also heard that Scholar isn’t the best enhanced version.
TLDR; I thought Scholar of the First Sin was fine but overall had some frustrating moments. The next time I’m thinking about going back to old games though do you all think it’d be worth picking up the base version of the game and playing through it instead?
Unless you already own the base game, it’s not worth it since the differences are pretty minimal. SotFS introduced the Aldia pop-up moments, includes all 3 DLC areas by default, and shuffled around several enemy spawn locations (the most notable ones being in Shrine of Amana). Aside from those things, it’s the same experience
Oh alright then, I figured there was more than that because I thought some people didn’t like the changes in scholar. Those mostly seem pretty straightforward, enemy placement was generally the thing I hated though Shrine of Amana was so brutal.
Honestly the two things I hated the most was some enemy placement felt brutal, it felt like there were more than necessary sometimes and they followed you for so long that it felt like you couldn’t run past anything so you had to fight everything all the time.