Dark Souls II is an amazing game, and I'm surprised I haven't given it a recommendation until now. To be forward, I believe this is the best Dark Souls out of the entire series, though that doesn't mean it doesn't have flaws. For single-player content only, I would suggest getting Dark Souls II over Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin Edition, as I believe the new changes and additional enemies add a bit more ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to the game than I'd personally like. For some people, this is a welcome upgrade and believe it makes the game more challenging than the original version of Dark Souls II. I'd recommend looking into the differences and deciding for yourself. For me, It adds too many enemies in places, and in turn, those areas become complete annoyances.


So, if you were to want an offline single-player experience, I would probably recommend this one. However, one of the greatest things about Dark Souls II is it's online: PVE and PVP. Unfortunately, FromSoft decided that splitting the online playerbase with two different games was a good idea. This means that if you want to play with friends, recruit summons, participate in arenas(if they are still active), or invade, then for all intents and purposes this game is mostly dead in that regard. So, if you want the online experience(which isn't as big as it used to be, though thats a given assuming the game is over 6 years old now), go and buy Scholar of the First Sin. Scholar of the First Sin is the latest edition and using SteamCharts you can get an idea of how big the player population is.


As of my writing, Dark Souls II has a 335 player average in 30 days, where as Dark Souls II: SOTFS has a 30 day average of around 2,600 players.

Despite how split people tend to be on this game, I do believe it's best entry to get into the Souls series. As someone who couldn't get into the original Dark Souls, this truly was the game for me.

I don't really have too much I want to say on the game other than it's amazing and one of my favorite games ever and I highly recommend it if you didn't like Dark Souls 1 or just want a change of pace, but I would like to touch on the DLC briefly.

To people who knock Dark Souls II, there is one resounding opinion they all have: the DLC is really good. And guess what?
They are right! The DLC is absolutely AMAZING. Each of them have you exploring a completely different landscape, almost like a new universe within a universe. Giant areas for you to explore that almost feel like a whole new game on it's own. They come with their own bosses, items, areas, enemies, everything! The most important thing to highlight as well is the level design and world design in each of these. As great as the original game is, the DLC blows a lot of the areas out of the park. Not to mention they all up the challenge of the game considerably. It's definitely worth playing if you enjoyed the base game or are looking for something more. The replayability in this game was --and still is-- quite huge.