Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin is an enhanced version of Dark Souls 2, including all DLC, (barely) enhanced graghics, DX11, a 64x executable, and some remixed enemy locations.

A tough campaign through a ruined land offers a repetative story and some questionable design decisions, but Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the FIrst Sin is a great game worthy of it's title, with diverse combat, exotic world and unique player interactions that the series is known for.

This Western-style Japanese RPG mixes fighting game mechanics with role-playing, complete with invincibility frames, dodges, punishes, and careful timings. The moveset of your fighter is determined by the weapons you choose, the armour you wear and the speadsheet you add numbers to. Weapons are varied between polearms, blunt objects, blades varying from daggers to longswords to Final Fantasy, talismans and magic staffs for miracles and spells respectively which range from fire to lighting to Final Fantasy, bows and crossbows ranging from shortbows to Final Fantasy, and gloves ranging from Mike Tyson to Ryu from Street Fighter, complete with a literal Hadoken. Armour ranges from light to heavy to Tetsuya Nomura, and shields range from bucklers to heaters to a mural of two messengers from the hereafter. Items of varying effects and abilities round off your equipment, and since you can mix and match armour pieces, up to six weapons and/or shields (two in each hand at any one time, plus two extra per hand to swap to), there's almost no end to what you can potentially create.

As such, Player versus Player, should they occur, interactions flow like a 3D fighter, with players dancing around the field with their unique fighters. And unique they are. Be they recreations of historical warriors, cosplay of their favorite heroes, scantily-clad waifu bait, buster-sword weilding over-compensaters, or nudists showing off, the playerbase has no end to the kinds of things you might witness. These people, called Invaders, are tasked with finding and killing the world's host player, to gain their souls and various other items related to the game's covenants. If you don't feel like fighting others, never fear, some may drop in to help you, be it getting through a tough patch, killing a boss, or repelling an Invader, reaping similar rewards. Covenants give players who engage in these activities, be they a help or a hinderance, incentive by offering rewards for their loyalty to the cause.

Regular enemies are not quite so graceful, but do manage to catch newcomers to their lands off-guard, surprising them around every corner. Not every enemy waits around corners, however. Some are invisible in fog. Some snipe you from miles away. Some hit you without actually touching you. It's not entirely uncommon to be unfairly hit, as per the games' apparent desire to live up to the Dark Souls promise of ensuring your death appears to superseed it's attempts at fair gameplay. Luckily, the game gives you limitless lives to try and try again, and these unfair moments are few and far between. Most of the time, death is you're own doing, reverting you to your last bonfire, which serve as checkpoints you'll respawn.

Death may be limitless, but it's not without it's detriments. Souls are collected from fallen foes, which serves as your currency, experience, and upgrade juice. Should you fall, a glowing green bloodstain is left near the spot you died, containing all the souls you'd collected, giving you a second chance to recover them. Die before you recover them, however, and they'll be lost forever. You'll be pushed back to your last rested bonfire, forcing you to fight all the enemies, which respawn upon your demise. Additionally, your health is reduced each time you die. Die enough, and you'll be left you only half a health bar to work with. As if that wasn't enough, when you die, you look like a zombie, meaning all those hours creating the perfect waifu will be wasted. There is an item to recover your lost power, but the item is finite. This feeds back to invations and helping others, as defeating a host as an invader or defending one as a helper grants you more of these items.

Not that death becomes a huge issue later in the game. Lifegems, a healing item, of varying quality drops from enemies occationally. Your Estus Flasks, a health potion, replenishes upon death or rest at bonfies. Between these two items, your potential health pool may was well be infinite, with only enemies capable of ending you in a single swipe or in a combo, or a drop from a high place possibly ending your life. This is a strange gameplay choice considering the intended difficulty and the story's intended impact. To have an item that directly contradicts the game design and story is odd to say the least, and it's not hard to acimmulate a surplus of these items either, making their inclusion all the more baffling.

Speaking of baffling design, far too many enemies boil down to a dude in armour, and too many bosses boil down to a taller dude in armour. Considering some of the very creative enemy and boss designs, such as a large frog with a skullface in it's mouth, a large bipedal humanoid with two upper bodies, and a voilent jack-in-a-chest, it's odd how many times I see the same boring knight. That's not to say some fights against these dudes aren't great, or that there aren't wyverns, trolls, walking mushrooms and scantily-clad waifus, but a little more variety could have helped tremendously, especially since most of them churn out roughly the same movesets. Learn to dodge one, learn to dodge them all. Some of these enemies pose some unique challenges, but these amount to gimmicks, such as remixing them with sniping mages, or by making them straight up invisible in a foggy forested area. The few enemies that divert from the tradition tend not to pose a huge threat, though some challenging mob fights keep you on your toes.

The locations you fight them in is sufficiently diverse to distract you. From a castle sinking into a volvano, to a forrest shrouded by fog, to a dark gutter, to a sinking kingdom of giants, to a rising castle of wyverns, you'll get your fill of vistas and scenery. A ruined castle surrounded by water while you bath in the sun in all it's glorious incandescence can be a true sight to behold. It's a shame that what follows is yet another baffling design choice; the level design. Falls you have no choice but to break your shins on, ladders that you can't climb from the midpoint, would design that doesn't make sense at the best of times. Not to mention how much the game relies on ambushing you. I don't mind the odd ambush, but it starts feeling a little bit cheap sometimes. Luckily, the game grants you access to a fast travel ability from the start that makes the level design an easier pill to swallow, but some individual areas aside, the level design is nothing special.

Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin is a great game at best and a good game at worst. While it may shift between these two more often than I'd like, good and great aren't bad choices to make. It's a game that'll keep you playing, but once it's done, returning may not be your first choice.