The dreamworld of Dark Souls 2 is uniquely broken, illogical, and elegiac.

Dark Souls 2 is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, March 11, 2024.

Dark Souls 2 has, since shortly after release, been an odd duck in the franchise.

It is the only From Software game in the Souls lineage that Hidetaka Miyazaki did not direct.

By the time Dark Souls 3 rolled around, its predecessor’s reception had distinctly cooled.

It often, though not always, fills out the bottom of “Every Souls Game Ranked” lists.

Dark Souls 2’s plentiful pleasures derive from the ways it is most distinct from its predecessors.

To talk about those pleasures, it is best to start at the beginning.

All of the Souls games (plus Elden Ring) start with a cinematic that sets the stakes.

You are one of the corralled undead, an unkindled, or a tarnished.

Even if your character is from a distant land, you occupy a specific textual place in the world.

There is a prophecy, or a religious order, that involves you.

The path to a throne is laid out before.

The opening cutscene focuses on being a kind of tone poem.

The player, rather than a footnote in a history of gods and kingdoms, is the principal subject.

You are cursed, have lost everything, and have made your way to Drangleic to forsake your curse.

Your cause is not noble; you are not tied to anyone else.

You are descending to a world of death, to free yourself from this accursed life.

This gives Dark Souls 2 a metafictional quality.

If you wanted to be glib about it, you could call it an isekai.

It doesn’t step out of the fourth wall or, directly anyway, implicate the player.

Instead, DS2 hovers in a melancholic desperation.

You, like some many others in Drangleic, are looking to restore yourself.

But this land’s ancient history is like quicksand.

It pulls you in.

The more you resist or fight, the more it tightens its hold on you.

Every Souls game is bleak, but DS2 languishes in it.

Take an empty throne and imprison yourself or wonder about the endless world again.

It’s a horrible dream, but not quite a nightmare.

Worlds and time are compressed.

In Dark Souls 3 there are recognizable places still, though corrupted or built over.

In Dark Souls 2, there are only ever echoes.

In Dark Souls, Blighttown is below the sewers of the Undead Burg.

It literally undergirds them.

It is the world below the world.

Replay Dark Souls 1 and you’ll enjoy the simple and profound delight of its legible world.

Dark Souls 2 does completely abandon this idea in some sense.

The Gutter is DS2’s Blighttown equivalent, but it does not map easily into the world.

you’re able to see Blighttown’s struts ascend into the earth that upholds The Burg.

You cannot map Drangleic, not in the way you might Lordric or even The Lands Between.

It is not a comprehensible landscape–parts of it are even cloaked in dreams or memories.

It is a psychic world, not a material one.

Still, DS2’s most memorable location is Majula, the seaside town that acts as a hub.

As you find and help characters in the world, they’ll make their way back there.

Majula is in perpetual sunset, the light yellows the waves and jutting, spear-like rocks off the shore.

Mejula’s theme is plaintive and bare, buffeted by long stretches of hum or silence.

One wonders when that sun will finally lower on the horizon and what will be waiting in the dark.

Majula is the games friendliest location, but you will find other companions and shelters out in the world.

One of them, Lucatiel, is the soul of DS2, though your encounters with her are fleeting.

Her story is not unconventional within Souls.

Plenty come to Drangleic or The Lands Between or Lordric to seek a cure for some curse or disease.

She, like you, came from somewhere else.

She, like you, seeks to end her curse.

She, like you, loses her mind in this forgotten, dream world.

Her history is distant and diffused and she loses more of it every day.

Lucatiel’s tragedy is utterly mundane: wanting something so bad and losing yourself to find it.

Dark Souls 2 will not be forgotten.

It has now garnered plenty of passionate defenders.

It was certainly never really loathed, at least in the aggregate.

I only worry that games wont steal from it, the way theyve stolen from Souls generally.

I want more dream worlds, more impossible places.

But whatever the future holds, Dark Souls 2 remains.

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