So not too long ago I made a guide about how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awful this game is and to this day DS2 fans are filling their britches with ♥♥♥♥ over it and I'm really just starting to feel bad about it if I'm being entirely honest. The DS2 fan is a simple creature, not at all capable of forming any arguments or counterarguments, and in hindsight it was really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up of me to bully them when they are entirely incapable of defending themselves.

So with that being said I want to do what they are not able to do, come up with actual counterarguements for at least some of the things I ripped into the game for (Instead of only screeching "DASNOTTRUE" like them).

So here you go DS2 fans, you're welcome <3

A very popular criticism of Dark Souls 2 is the design of it's bosses, or more specifically how maybe 80% of them boil down to "Guy with sword". While technically speaking this is true it is just the argument of a reductionist. Take the Ivory King for example, the pinnacle of the Ivory King DLC. He is the closest to a "war" as a boss battle, with a hectic first phase of fighting off waves and waves of his charred Loyce Knights with untainted Loyce Knights you freed throughout your journey of Elium Loyce which then culminates in possibly the most cinematic entrance of a Dark Souls boss to date. Now is it far to compare this fight to say...the Flexile Sentry? No, not at all, because there's more to a boss fight than the shape of the boss itself. Sure a lot of the bosses are humanoids with a weapon but there's plenty of other things in a boss fight to make them unique from one another (Of course not to mention that Humanoid is a very broad term, is the smelter demon a carbon copy of the Last Giant? I mean after all they're both humanoids right?)

Overall point being that the complaint of lazy boss design falls on it's face because you can use reduction-ism to make anything sound bad. Lazy boss design isn't having bosses share a somewhat similar skeleton (Is Monster Hunter World lazy for using the same monster skeletons?). Lazy boss design would be something like doing a re-skin of a boss from an older game or doing a re-skin of a base game boss for a dlc or taking a boss and multiplying it and...oh ♥♥♥♥ wait nvm.

Another complaint about some of the bosses and how often some of these bosses are fought, the poster-boy of this complaint being the Pursuer. The biggest counter-point I can think of is the "Boss" fight with the pursuer (which, can be entirely avoided by fighting him before his arena) is more of a introduction to a recurring character rather than a Climatic battle. I admit I'm a bit hazy of the lore of the pursuer as I was under the impression that it was a type of nemesis deal/ the same entity hunting you throughout your journey but the whole 2 pursuers at the same time fight kinda throws a wrench in that theory so I assume it's actually a group of some special band of "knights" created to prevent you from reaching your goal, again not a lore buff tho. Point of this one being is that not all "bosses" are actually bosses (I know this sounds weird) but can be used as a sign of character growth or just have lore implications behind them. Think back to DS1 with it's Capra and Taurus demon spams (which defintly could have been handled better for sure), these were big bad bosses at the start of your run but as you grow stronger they just become run of the mill enemies. The flexile Sentries and Dragonriders fall under the same rules.

So Dark Souls 2 has healing items out the ass, no denying this, but is that really a bad thing? When you take into consideration the increased amount of BS you deal with when compared to DS1 or 3 the abundance of healing items seems less like a misstep and more like a counterbalance. It's a guessing game why the devs of this game decided to amp up enemy placement like they did but it almost seems like they had a revelation that "oh wow, this would suck with just 5 estus" and added in the lifegems to band-aid it rather than...well having a normal amount of enemies present across the game.

Another argument may come across as whataboutism but still seems valid to me is, sure there's a lot of different healing items in DS2 but what about humanities in DS1? You know the 99 full health items that people would spam in Multi (heaven forbid they also have 99 dual humanities). Humanities were anything but hard to find in DS1 so it's not like the healing system was hard to abuse, so really things like lifegems just seems like the lesser evil.

And finally, the most obvious argument, is if you don't like them don't use them lol. Of course this doesn't hold up as well in the early game where you only have 1-2 frankly ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ estus but once you get things going with the estus shards and bone dust lifegems and the like can easily be ignored. As far as host being on "babybitchmode" when invading the simple and hard truth is it's entirely in their right to be a lil ♥♥♥♥♥ when invaded. As an invader you sign up for it and if you don't want to then the PVP arenas exist (which are far more alive than invasions in DS2 anyway)...or at least they did before this newest PC hacker drama...rip.

Don't get too excited now, Adaptability/ Agility is 100% dumb as ♥♥♥♥ and there is no angle to even try and defend it. Soul Memory also kind of falls under this category but at least it had a reason to exist (an attempt to counter twink builds/ bullying newer players, sure it fell on it's face but noble goals).

What can at the very least be argued is the health decrease system, though this one is still going to be tricky because it ties into the whole can of worms that is artificial difficulty of this game. So I brought up earlier how the devs seemed to introduce other systems as a quick fix to their overzealous enemy placement and other than the already covered healing there is the "permadeath" of enemies in which after 12 or so times after dying the enemy ceases to spawn for that game cycle (which means it gains those 12 lifes back with a NG+ run or a bonfire ascetic). Now this runs the risk of overcorrecting the game now, as where is the challenge or drive to improve when you can essentially keep bashing your face into a wall until the wall eventually collapses? So to try and discourage this type of play the dev introduced a punishment system where your life bar is decreased every time you die by a small amount, eventually adding up to about half of your life bar. So it boils down to a fix to questionable system that was introduced to fix a questionable decision, when you try to pick apart one of these (in this case the hollowing system) you fail to see what that system does for the game as a whole