Dark Souls II: Slaying the Curse of the Sequel

Interestingly enough, one of the energy-loving editors over at the official Red Bull website has taken it upon themselves to editorialize about Dark Souls II and the importance of “slaying the curse of the sequel”. Read on:

Dark Souls 2, headed to Xbox 360, Sony PS3 and PC this spring, is not a direct sequel – or if it is, Tanimura doesn’t want to say where the stories crossover – but the setting is instantly familiar.

Your player has been cursed, and is on a quest to seek salvation from his agony, which appears to be of the Eternal kind, the kind that requires you inflicting it on others to be rid of. Lots of others. Lots of other gigantic beasts.

None of them want to hang around to chat much either: as the twisted evil step brother of the swashbuckling Elder Scrolls series, there are no lords and ladies to lead the storyline along in Dark Souls, no guards with terrible anecdotes about arrows to lighten the mood. Nobody will stop to regale you with yarns or burden you with sidequests: everybody just wants to slay you. Any storyline is inferred from the items you find, left to your imagination to flesh out – or should that be flay?

What we do know: this is not the decaying kingdom of Lordran of the first game. It’s still the high fantasy realm of Warhammer or The Lord Of The Rings however – if the entire story was set in the mines of Moria, took 80 hours to finish, and the balrog was the least of any intrepid explorer’s worries.