5) Dark Souls II
Release date: 2014
So, we come to the ugly duckling of the tribe. Dark Souls II cops a lot of flack principally because the B team worked on it while series creator Miyakai was channeling his inner Chucky in Bloodborne. But you know what? B team or not, I enjoyed it.
Yes, Dark Souls II is nowhere near as groundbreaking as its forebear, nor as pretty as its sequels. But for sheer weight of stuff to do – action, inventory management, weapons, armor, NPCs, bosses, locations, lore, talking points – it can’t be bested. If Dark Souls introduced you to a world richly woven from silk cloth and unfurled gently before your eyes, Dark Souls II is coarse linen, nylon and polyester tossed together and made to stick. It shouldn’t work, but somehow it fits perfectly.
There’s a few reasons for this: for one, as we’ve established, it’s generous, even more so if you pick it up with its devilish DLC, which is really rather excellent. Two, it’s great fun online, and nails the PVP component of competition. Three, there’s just tons of variety here, and over 100 hours of content to pick at and chew over. I’ve beaten it twice now, once the ‘normal’ way and once by aligning myself with a covenant called the Company of Champions, which doubles the difficulty and makes the entire nightmarish experience even harder. Don’t fall for it like I did.
Taken as a whole, Dark Souls II’s component parts aren’t as good as the others. But somehow, these parts amount to more than the whole.