The problem with the "area variety" for DS2 is that it often feels like all the areas were designed in a vacuum before being linked together, so the world doesn't feel like a single, natural location like it does in any of the other souls game. You have some areas were its daytime and you go through a tunnel and its suddenly the dead of night, the scale for certain locations don't quite match up to others, like how the game has you "climb" that huge idol in Iron Keep that's waaaaaaay bigger than the area you actually traverse, and there's more than a few areas that are simply not very interesting or over in a flash and very much feel like padding for the sake of making the game bigger/longer than the first one.
I wouldn't call DS2 a /terrible/ game, but it definitely has the weakest overall design, like the team had way too many ideas and tried to execute all of them instead of trimming the list and focusing on less. The whole torch system is the biggest most glaring example: back in the beta for the game, the lighting was so low that you could barely see inside certain areas and made some places work like the Tomb of the Giants from there first game, were you couldn't see shit without having a torch handy and using up your free hand with in. In the final game, everything is so well-lit that using torches is completely redundant and unnecessary. A bunch of thought and space went into putting things in the game that would be great if well-executed, but ended up sorely undercooked.
Get 105 AGI asap. The game feels sluggish as a motherfucker without extra I-frames.
Totally forgot this. The decision to tie the speed of your animations to Adaptability is as
as they come. Completely worthless stat that was purely added for tedium's sake given its not an issue in any of the other games.
