Talin_Warhaft: Sounds good, but just remember, Dark Souls 2 enemies are finite I think. Don't keep losing souls or dying. Your health bar gets decreased with each death as well. Definitely a difficult game.
I've got almost 70 games, but I just can't decide what to play.
Yeah, the enemies in Dark Souls II only respawn a certain number of times. Maybe 12? Something like that. The only way to get them to respawn after that is to move on to NG+ or use a bonfire ascetic, which essentially makes the area connected to a bonfire raise to NG+. I actually thought this was a really neat mechanic, and it certainly incentivizes playing carefully (so as not to permanently lose one's souls). But it also offers some reprieve. I remember one boss kicking my butt time and time again, and the run up to the boss arena was grueling. Worse, it was difficult for me to just run past enemies, so I had to go through and kill all the enemies in one segment of the run up. It was tedious and frustrating, but after doing it over a dozen times, I had despawned all those enemies, make subsequent runs less annoying. I can see the mechanic being bothersome to people wanting to farm for souls and/or items, but farming has never been my thing, so it never bothered me.
The health bar thing, on the other hand, was something that greatly bothered me when I first played the game. I had played Dark Souls and beat it twice, so I was accustomed to the inevitability of death and the learning experience it provided. However, I found DSII's health mechanic to be unnecessarily punishing. I hated that every death was even more costly than in the first game and made the game just a little bit more difficult by reducing my max health. It annoyed me to no end, and I almost quit the game several times because of it. Once I adjusted my expectations, though, and got better at playing, I discovered that the health reduction was less of a problem than I had initially thought. Plus, even though the human effigies (which restore humanity and thus restore your max health) are somewhat limited in quantity, the game does provide a means later on of restoring your humanity if you run out of effigies, which I thought was a nice touch.
All in all, though I did not finish the game (that had more to do with the fatigue that resulted in too many missteps in stat allocation, which resulted in a poorly optimized character), I do consider it a good game. For all its weird design choices and rough edges, it did a lot of things that I liked, and it tried things the rest of the series didn't. Plus, now that I have more experience with the series as a whole, I think this coming run will go a lot more smoothly.