Dark Souls 2?

oh fuck off. I am enjoying Dark Souls 1 right now and playing it while sometimes glancing at a guide. There are so many situations where you beat a boss/area etc and it looks like you are supposed to move on trough the closest door that just opened but in reality you should go back and do a different area if you don't want your shit absolutely kicked in a hundred times.

Just fucking trust me on this one: Drop that guide ASAP. Your first run has to be blind otherwise you're going to be missing on some very cool moments. At most just use a guide on your second run to figure out stuff you missed.

Time and space move strangely in Drangleic, Curse Bearer :^)

No, seriously, time and space are actually warped in this game. They started subtle with the Tower of Flame. You see it way, way off in the distance from town, but it's a super short walk through the sewers to get there. You see it again at the Keep and again in Amana.

But seriously, that probably pisses me off the most about this game, and the thing is that it could have easily made more sense (assuming that you were forced to keep the same areas). The Lost Bastille/Sinner's Rise should have been at the top of Earthen Peak, and the Pursuer's eagle/No Man's Wharf should have lead to an Iron Keep with slightly less lava and volcanoes everywhere. That last one especially makes sense considering how the Iron King is apparently some ruler over a completely different kingdom and land, so why the flaming fuck is he in Drangleic.

Realistically, it was probably just lazy game design. They came up with a bunch of cool zones, some probably left over from the previous games, and couldn't really find a good way to match them all up. For me, it added a surreal element that wasn't there in DaS. Sure, you see phantoms because of overlapping timelines and whatnot, but the dimensional weirdness of the world doesn't really show up otherwise.

As I can understand the game was supposed to have demons souls like arches and you was supposed to hunt kings. Which they kinda did in dlc. And in ds3. And basically same thing happen in ds3 in case of merging lands. Everything was just gathered together by hurr durr, but it looked better and therefore was okay.

I feel like I'm seeing this whole 'the idea that Dark Souls 2 is shit is just a meme' stuff pop up more and more often at the minute, yet nobody ever explains why it isn't.

Welcome to internet arguing, where you just call whatever the other side says a meme and call it a day.

I hated 2 because the levels were visually uninspired, super linear, had basically no significant verticality or loops back on themselves, and way too many enemies and bosses were bland looking soldiers in rags and/or rusty armor with the same left-right-down three swing combo.

From what I played so far, it's because while it does take two steps backwards in many regards, it also makes a few improvements like with hollowing, the covenants, and general organization, and also tried to do some new things with various degrees of success like Pharros Contraptions, Bonfire Intensity, lighting, and so on. DSII attempted to try new things, and while many weren't successful, at least it tried. Dark Souls III played it as safe as humanly possible, recycling as many ideas as possible from the previous games, and still managed to bungle that and even went backwards on some of the very few things II actually improved upon. I can at least say for a crappy game that tried to do something new that at least it tried to be apart from the others, but a product which is as safe as possible really needs to step it up.

I don't really agree. DaS2's rendition of Blighttown was more interesting than the original. Amana, the Ash Lake parallel, was just as good visually, even if the level itself was fucking awful to play through. Heide's tower was fine, Majulah was fine. There may have been too many/too much forest area. You're right about them not being geometrically interesting, which could be blamed on the abundance of bonfires making intrazone shortcuts redundant. The game was definitely not great, but being a little worse than a really good game (DaS) still makes it ok.