Underrated as hell!!!!!!!

Way better than everyone says it is. Get 18 ADP, and you're all set.

I kind of love games by B-teams (although I'm sure no one at FromSoft conceived of DS2's talented creators that way). If DS1 is as grand and austere as a mosaic in a Byzantine church, DS2 is a Brueghel petit genre scene, full of silly little human figures of varying detail and quality who notheless elicit in aggregate an emotional reaction in the viewer. This intimate focus on personal tragedies achieves a greater poignancy than the more cosmologically minded entries in the series.

Doesn't deserve the hate it gets.

Dark souls 2 but insanity , fun

My favourite Souls game so far, distinctly better than Demons and DS1. I liked the level design and the difficulty felt just right, with some pretty hard optional bosses (the two snow pets took me several hours). I liked the ambush-oriented enemy placement. My main problems were the two final bosses (two of the easiest fights in the game) coupled with a fairly limp main story. The whole Aldis thing felt perfunctory and was obviously tacked on. Oh, and Frigid Outskirts really needed a bonfire.

The creator of this game thought that to make a souls game it only had to be hard, so this is what it is, just a hard game, a very very hard game.

The best thing Scholar does is include the DLC areas which are the best parts of the base game by far. I think some of the remixed enemy and item placements are a slight improvement overall even though sometimes they are much worse. However, minor fixes and the inclusion of DLC can't save an ultimately flawed experience. This is the definitive Dark Souls II experience and the version of the game that I would recommend, with the caveat that it is still the weakest Souls entry.

Took everything good about Dark Souls and replaced it with enemy clusters that you have to kill 10 times before they go away.

Honestly, just as good as the other Souls games, despite the (frankly undeserved) bashing it gets from much of the fanbase. Arguably has some of the best PvP mechanics in the franchise, despite the gimmicks that were soon patched out (mundane dagger, anyone?). The DLC zones (the Brume Tower chain and the walk down into Shulva) are absolutely breathtaking.

The DLC areas are super obnoxious in their difficulty spike , do not enter unless you want to feel rage on levels previously unfathomable. I'm one trophy away from pointlessly plating this , I buffed the opening firepit to NG++++++++ and you need to kill this NPC there and in the 2nd hour of the fight I gave up in a HUFF

Dark Souls 2 always had some issues, but it was still a more positive than negative overall experience for me. Scholar takes that and runs it into the ground. The new enemy placements seem designed to be as annoying as possible, and I've never really minded things like that in anything else in the Souls series.