Dark Souls II, the Misunderstood Sequel: Drangleic, Majula and Vendrick

2026-10-24 · 9 min read · Dark Souls II

Every long-running series has the entry that its fans argue about forever, and for Dark Souls it is the second one. Released in 2014, directed by Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura rather than Hidetaka Miyazaki, Dark Souls II spent years being described as the one that missed the point. The world does not connect the way Lordran did. The bosses are numerous and frequently forgettable. An elevator at the top of a windmill takes you up to a castle built over a lake of lava.

All of that is true, and none of it is the whole story. Dark Souls II is the strangest game in the trilogy, the most experimental, and the one with the most melancholy setting FromSoftware has ever built. It is also, quietly, the game whose ideas show up most in Elden Ring. This is the case for taking it seriously - including the parts that genuinely do not work.

The case against, stated fairly

Start with the complaints, because most of them are earned. The world map is a series of branches rather than a knot. Dark Souls taught players to expect that a door opened in the Undead Parish might drop them back into Firelink Shrine, and Dark Souls II mostly abandons that, sending paths outward from a hub and rarely bringing them back together. The geography is also openly impossible in places. The Earthen Peak elevator to Iron Keep is the famous example, and it became shorthand for everything people felt was careless about the sequel.

The boss roster is the other common target. Dark Souls II has more bosses than either of its siblings, and a lot of them are large armoured humanoids with a weapon and a slam. The Pursuer, the Dragonrider, the Old Dragonslayer, the Looking Glass Knight, Velstadt - several blur together in the memory of anyone who has not played in a while. Some of the gank fights, like the Ruin Sentinels or the Royal Rat Authority, test patience more than skill.

And then there were launch problems. The original PC release tied weapon durability to the framerate, so weapons broke roughly twice as fast at sixty frames per second as they did on console. It was patched, but it was emblematic: the game felt less finished than Dark Souls, and it was easy to conclude that the team had not understood what made the first game work.

Majula, the best hub in the series

Against all of that, set Majula. You come out of the opening tunnels of Things Betwixt, round a corner, and the game opens onto a cliffside village at permanent sunset, with a broken stone sea wall, a well-worn bonfire, and music that sounds like someone is trying very hard to stay hopeful. Firelink Shrine was a place you rested. Majula is a place you come home to.

It fills up as you play. Lenigrast the blacksmith opens his forge once you buy the key to his house from Merchant Hag Melentia. Characters you meet or rescue elsewhere in Drangleic, like Rosabeth of Melfia or Licia of Lindeldt, drift back and settle there. Sweet Shalquoir, the talking cat, sells rings and gossip. Crestfallen Saulden sits by the bonfire and tells you that there is no point. The Emerald Herald stands at the cliff edge and is the one who turns your souls into levels. The pit at the edge of town, which most players stare into for hours before they find a safe way down, is the cleanest piece of vertical foreshadowing in the trilogy.

Dark Souls II also let you warp between bonfires from the start, rather than gating it behind the Lordvessel. That decision is the root of the branching map. If players can teleport anywhere at any time, there is less reason to design physical shortcuts back to the hub. It is a real trade-off, and it is the same one Elden Ring would later make, with fast travel available from the outset and a world built around it.

The systems nobody else tried

Dark Souls II is the trilogy's laboratory. A lot of what it tried was never repeated, and some of it deserved better.

Hollowing reduces your maximum health with each death, up to half, until you restore your humanity with a Human Effigy. It is harsh, and it gives death a weight the other games lack.
Enemies stop respawning after you have killed them enough times. It ends grinding a single hallway, and it means persistence wears an area down rather than just your patience.
Bonfire Ascetics let you raise the difficulty of a single area to a higher New Game cycle, independently of the rest of the world.
Powerstancing lets you wield two weapons of the same class at once, with its own moveset, years before Elden Ring made paired weapons a standard feature.
The torch is an actual tool. Several areas are dark enough that carrying one changes how you play them, and lighting sconces permanently brightens parts of the map.
The Adaptability stat affects your invincibility frames while rolling, which is the least popular design decision in the series and the most frequently cited in arguments.

Not every one of these is good. Tying roll i-frames to a stat made the early game feel sluggish for players who did not know about it, and it is the single biggest reason people bounce off the game. But the willingness to change fundamental rules is the reason Dark Souls II feels different from the other two rather than like a remix of them.

Drangleic and the king who gave up

The story of Dark Souls II is told in the same oblique style as the first game, but its subject is unusually specific. You are a cursed Undead drawn to Drangleic, a kingdom that once seemed to have solved the problem every Souls game is about. Its king, Vendrick, built a great kingdom, fought off the curse for a time, and then, sometime before you arrive, simply disappeared from his throne.

What you piece together across the game is that Vendrick waged a war against the Giants across the sea, that the Giants came to Drangleic in retaliation, and that the war ruined the kingdom. The Forest of Fallen Giants is littered with their petrified bodies. Use the Ashen Mist Heart on the old Giant corpses there and you step into their memories, watching the war play out from inside it. The cause of the war is left deliberately muddy, and much of it points back to Vendrick's queen, Nashandra, who appeared at court around the time everything started to go wrong.

Nashandra is a fragment of Manus, the Father of the Abyss from the first game's Artorias DLC. The three DLC crowns introduce more of those fragments - Elana in Shulva, Nadalia in Brume Tower - which makes Dark Souls II's backstory as much a sequel to Oolacile as to Lordran. She manipulates the Undead player toward the Throne of Want, because a crowned monarch of the Undead would serve her ends. The Emerald Herald, who has been guiding you since Majula, turns out to be bound to the same story in a far more sympathetic way.

Vendrick himself is in the Undead Crypt, hollow, pacing in circles, his crown gone. He is an optional boss with a huge health pool and a defence that drops with each Soul of a Giant you carry into the fight. You can kill him without those souls, but it is a grind, and the game's message is clear enough: the king you are walking toward stopped trying a long time ago, and you are not supposed to admire him for it.

Dark Souls I is about a god who refused to let an age end. Dark Souls II is about a man who tried to escape the cycle, failed, and walked away.

Aldia, and the third option

The 2015 re-release, Scholar of the First Sin, added more than a graphics update. It remixed enemy placements throughout the game, moved several encounters, and gave a much larger role to Aldia, Vendrick's brother. Aldia appears throughout the new version as a shrouded figure who talks to you about the nature of the curse, and his experiments explain the twisted creatures of Aldia's Keep.

He is also the source of the trilogy's most interesting ending. After the Throne of Want, Aldia becomes a final boss, and if you defeat him you can choose to sit on the throne as every previous monarch did, or to turn around and walk away from it entirely. The second choice is the only time in the original Dark Souls trilogy that the game asks whether the cycle itself should be refused, rather than which version of it you prefer. That question becomes central again in Dark Souls III and, in a different form, in Elden Ring.

The DLC is where the game proves itself

If you want the strongest argument that Dark Souls II's team knew exactly what they were doing, play the three Crowns DLC. Crown of the Sunken King sends you into Shulva, a sunken city built around a sleeping dragon, Sinh. Crown of the Old Iron King takes you up Brume Tower, home to the Fume Knight, who is still one of the best duels in the series, and Sir Alonne, a samurai-style knight fought in a beautiful hall. Crown of the Ivory King takes you to Frozen Eleum Loyce, a frozen city whose king walked into the chaos below his kingdom to hold it back.

The DLC areas are interconnected in a way the base game is not, the bosses are distinct and memorable, and Brume Tower in particular is one of the best-designed areas in the trilogy. They are what happens when the team got another year with the engine and the systems they had built.

Why it is worth a second look

Dark Souls II is not the best game in the trilogy and no sensible defence of it says otherwise. But it is the most interesting one to replay now, because so much of what it tried has come back. Fast travel from the start, two-weapon movesets, an open structure with a hub at the centre, a story about a ruler who failed. You can see the first draft of a lot of Elden Ring in Drangleic if you look.

It is also the most melancholy setting FromSoftware has built. Lordran is a world of gods in decline. Drangleic is a world of people who remember that things used to be better and have mostly stopped hoping. Lucatiel of Mirrah, worried that she will forget herself; the Emerald Herald at the edge of the cliff; Vendrick walking his circles in the dark. Those characters have stuck with players for a decade, and they come from a game supposedly made by the wrong people.

Try it on Soulsdle

Dark Souls II has the largest boss roster of any game in the trilogy, and it shows up accordingly in Soulsdle's Classic mode, where 41 of its bosses are part of the pool, the Crowns DLC included - against 26 for Dark Souls and 25 for Dark Souls III. In the NPC mode, Majula is the location to try first: more Dark Souls II characters are filed under Majula in the game's data than under any other location.