Easily my favorite Dark Souls game. The story is definitely my favorite, and having a world connected like a mad man's mind was extremely enjoyable. This game is also brutally unfair, coming to enemy placement and ♥♥♥♥ like the Royal Rat Authority (honestly I hate that boss but good thing it's in the very corner of the game and you don't need to fight it, because it literally gives you nothing for beating it). But the rage this game gave me made me fall in love with it even more, because it beat the ♥♥♥♥ out of me in the worst ways but the gameplay was too fun to not figure out how to overcome it.

DS2 also has my favorite combat mechanic, which is power stance. Going from DS3 to DS2 and learning about power stance made me have a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ BLAST. Power Stance in DS2 is what DS3 should have had, instead of very few and specific weapons have a unique dual wield instead of a 2 hand, which now I hate.

For all the love I have for DS2 SOTFS, I would never recommend this game to ANYBODY. If you want to play DS2, go play the original. Save SOTFS for if you fall in love for the og, because if you try and hop directly into SOTFS like I did, you will probably hate the game and never even try to enjoy it.



Big Edit: So the game doesn't really get affected by the shutdown of the servers, It's still a fantastic solo game and invasions, I felt even when playing online, weren't as impactful as they are in other games. Every time I got invaded before it was like a minor inconvenience instead of a strong opponent you had to overcome. I don't think however that the servers being down is a good thing, because after hundreds of hours (many of them not counted since steam can't track hours anymore for ds2), the lack of people to play with has gotten boring, the challenges stay the same, ect. This really only affected me after hundreds of hours though. I miss pvp but I'll still play the ♥♥♥♥ out of this game.