[Dark Souls 2] Alright, cleared the Gutter and the Black Gulch, killed the Rotten, broke into Drangleoc Cadtke and hit up the first bonfire there. Also swung back to the well to get the Dragon’s Talon, because this is Scholar.

I think the gutter sucks; those fucking huge dogs are such a pain in my dick

However I do think there’s ONE cool thing about it

Which is that it’s absolutely full of lightable torches

Which means that if you light these up as you go, not only are you creating a trail you can follow through the scaffolding on future runs

Even though the map is insanely convoluted, you can look at an area of it and see a lit torch and say ‘oh yeah, I’ve already cleared that out’

That’s good design! It’s like the only piece of Torch-related design that still works after they gutted the lighting model

Cleared the first trip through Drangleic Castle. Did the Looking GLass Knight in one.

And man...Drangleic castle is cool but it's also kind of lame

like, it looks super cool

and it's got some cool level design, with lots of looping back and opening shortcuts to ensure that any individual run is nice and short

but then you stop and think about it and like. WHyu are there Desert Sorceresses here?

Why is there one Alonne Knight hanging out on a roof

why is there a room with masks on the walls that shoot poison arrows at you

Why are there Manikins?

where are there multiple rooms flooded with acid (????) with acid-spewing siege engines pointed inwards (???????????????)

There's no fucking thematics at work with these enemy placements

there's no sense of, 'what the fuck HAPPENED here', or of it being a real place people lived in

it's just a grab-bag of random enemies thrown together

plus some traps that don't make sense

hey murkrows wanna hear something fucked up

After turning Iron Keep into a hellish slog and generally cranking up the difficulty in the early and mid-game pointlessly, the Scholar version of Drangleic Castle is actually...significantly easier?

Like, take the room with Nashandra's portrait in it

in OG DS2, there's three of the knights with the big towers shields in there: two in the front and another one in the back

In Scholar there's only two, and they're petrified as statues on one wall of the room. YOu only need to activate them at all if you want the items in front of them, otherwise you can just run right through that room totally unmolested

I'm sad they gutted the lighting model it was scuh a cool idea

On the one hand, yes, but on the other hand I suspect that I would have found it extremely annoying in practice