Introduction
Crown of the Sunken King is the first of three planned pieces of downloadable content for Dark Souls II, which aim to further enrich the already big action-RPG from From Software with more areas, enemies, bosses, items and spells.
Coming only a few months after the release of the vanilla game, Crown of the Sunken King doesn’t just have to stand on its own merits, but also demonstrate that these DLCs are meaningful additions to the game in the same way Artorias of the Abyss was for Dark Souls, and not fluff for the completionists and the compulsive buyers. Did it manage? Keep reading to find out.
Level design
The Crown of the Sunken King DLC adds a new area, the Sanctum City of Shulva, and a minor story event to the main game. Just as hinted by the message on the monument in Majula, Shulva, the meat and potatoes of the DLC, can be accessed from the Primal Bonfire in the Black Gulch, located immediately after the Rotten boss fight. While all the content of the DLC has been included in the recent patch for the game, to open the door that bars the access to Shulva you’ll need a Dragon Talon key that’s unavailable in the main game and gets automatically added to the inventory of the DLC owners. Compared to the seamless integration of Artorias of the Abyss it feels like a step back, but it has the benefit of being slightly less arcane and more easily accessible for players that are in the middle of their playthrough, or want to make a new character for the DLC.
That’s not to say that players that don’t own the DLC can’t get a taste of it. Aside from the obvious ability to play in co-op and PvP with and against players that possess equipment and items from the DLC, it’s also possible to place a summon sign in the starting area and get summoned to help in a side area called Cave of the Dead, and even obtain some DLC-exclusive items from doing so. While in the PR blitz that preceded the release of the DLC this was touted as a full-fledged alternative challenging route, it’s actually a fairly small piece of the DLC, and unfortunately one of its least appealing areas. There’s something frankly puzzling about From Software and Namco Bandai’s decision to use this area to showcase the DLC to players that are on the fence. It’s certainly designed for co-op, but it’s also a short Black Gulch-like gauntlet that doesn’t really mirror the qualities of the DLC’s level design, doesn’t include its best enemies, and ends with the worst boss encounter in the Crown of the Sunken King, a challenging but cheap fight against three enemies that I wouldn’t recommend soloing to anyone (it’s possible, but it makes for a fairly tedious battle).
Luckily the rest of Crown of the Sunken King does much better and more interesting things in terms of level design. In fact, I’d be surprised if anyone found anything controversial in me arguing that it’s the best area of the whole game when judged by this parameter. The very first vista you encounter in the DLC, after using the Dragon Talon and walking through a short ruined corridor, does an excellent job at foreshadowing the kind of level design you’ll deal with for the 3-4 hours it takes to complete it: an intricate maze, part natural cavern and part ancient quasi-mesoamerican complex, which beckons you to explore with plenty of items and structures in plain sight. In truth reaching those items and structures often requires a significant amount of work and some ingenuity on the player’s part, as the DLC areas make a much larger use of puzzles, traps, side paths and shortcuts than the main game. The environments expand, horizontally and vertically, in a way that is difficult to find in the main game, save for a few exceptions (i.e. Forest of the Fallen Giants) that still don’t execute as well as the DLC, and feel like they’re meant to be explored and conquered in a more free-form way.
Simple puzzles can often solved by hitting some switches in the environment, which can have a variety of effects: raising and lowering platforms, moving rotating doors and activating traps being by far the most common. So far, so standard, but the way these simple environmental interactions are integrated into the actual gameplay and level design is worthy of praise. You could initially raise a platform to get access to an object just to realize it also offers a handy escape route, or that it blocks the line of sight of enemy archers. It’s a nice twist over the series’ level design that wisely avoids overstaying its welcome and complements the Indiana Jones atmosphere of the ruined environments rather nicely. Puzzles aside, the DLC areas also feel strong in their own right, with multiple paths to reach your objective, relatively large side-areas, nice loops and shortcuts, and a few nasty traps that can be also used to your advantage against the enemies and even invaders.
That said, it’s not all perfect. The DLC still makes use of poison and equipment corrosion as environmental hazards, and while it smartly avoids being frustrating with them, I can’t help but feel that side of Dark Souls II is a bit overplayed by now. Also, while strides have being made in terms of bonfire placement, I still have the feeling that From Software placed a couple too many, the biggest offender being the one in front of the Cave of the Dead, which effectively makes the shortcut you can unlock to more quickly access the area completely superfluous. Considering the lengths the development team went to make sure the DLC doesn’t feel linear and includes quite a few clever shortcuts, it’s a bit disappointing to see them shoot themselves in the foot like that. On the plus side, a few of the bonfires are cleverly hidden and will require a second more thorough run through the areas to be found by most players, punishing those that don’t spare some time for exploration with longer runs after death. Finally, another niggling issue I have with the level design is its reliance on platforming to access some hidden items and small alcoves. Platforming in Dark Souls II tends to be unreliable and not very compelling and can lead to quite a few untimely deaths that don’t quite match up to the series’ “tough but fair” difficulty mantra.
Enemy and Boss design
While the enemy design doesn’t show quite the same inventiveness From Software displayed with the level design, there are still enough interesting critters to call it an overall success. The main enemies in the DLC are the Sanctum soldiers, the last of the series’ many takes on the dregling/hollow soldier template. Compared to the hollows you fight in the Forest of the Fallen Giants, the Sanctum soldiers tend to be more difficult to stun and hit harder, but also have much less tracking to all their attacks, making it much easier for a player to roll behind them and backstab them, a characteristic they share with all the humanoid enemies in the DLC. Aside from that, and the occasional poisonous aura, there is actually nothing special to the Sanctum soldiers, and while they don’t really ruin the DLC, I could have done without them.
The other enemies luckily feel more inspired. Hex-using priestesses are often placed behind of lines of melee enemies or on strategic vantage points from which they can safely shoot at you. On top of that, they can also sometimes release a poisonous gas while dying. Later during the DLC, NPC-looking knights also make an appearance. Given they share their moveset with the players and have the typical “fat roll” of a character with a high equipment load, it would be easy to mistake them for another variant of the slow, easily dispatchable hollow soldiers. In truth, their attacks are fiendishly quick, and their slow rolls only give a small breather to players that would otherwise find it difficult to find holes in their defense. Luckily, when compared to the average Dark Souls II enemies they are rather easy to parry, giving players a reason to use a combat maneuver that often gets overlooked in the PvE segments of the game (and for good reason, I would add). There is also a new beast type that feels like a more agile, trickier take on the guardian drakes in Dragon’s Aerie, and a couple of other enemies whose tricks I don’t really want to spoil, but whose resistances and attacks will force most players to rethink their standard combat routine.
Speaking of resistances, it’s worth noting that most enemies in the DLC have very high defenses against elements and magic, which makes completing the DLC with a pure caster with no melee backup a fairly harsh proposition. It’s not impossible, and I can’t say I’m excessively worried about this, considering the vanilla title would often offer very little challenge to those builds, but it’s also true that it’s a fairly lousy balancing practice. And unfortunately, this isn’t the only lousy design decision in terms of enemies. There’s a couple of NPC invasions in the DLC, and while they both offer fun and interesting fights, the one that’s placed on the main path often crosses the line into the ludicrous. We’re talking about a pyromancer that has infinite casts of all his spells, can break out of its animations to roll at any time, and has a supply of poise that doesn’t match its light equipment. I won’t lie, beating him was gratifying, and there’s certainly a lot to love about the careful placement of the invasion, just before a water-filled area that raises your resistance to fire in exchange for sluggish movement and the chance to be spotted by the huge beasts roaming about, but seeing an NPC so obviously break the rules of the game ruins the idea of symmetry and the subtle storytelling behind the PvP mechanics integration. What makes it extra grating is that it’s clear that From Software put some effort into improving their NPC invasions and summons, as they now have better AI and even perform gestures, just as players often do. Looking online, some people even mistook them for actual players, which I’m going to take as an encouraging sign.
While normal enemies are important, what Artorias of the Abyss’ success taught me is that a lot of the series’ fans are often more interested in the boss design, and on that front Crown of the Sunken King delivers three battles of mixed quality. The good news is that, aside from the lazy battle in the Cave of the Dead which I covered earlier in the review (which includes a variety of issues with tracking, animation cancelling and generally cheap difficulty), both the bosses present on the main path are rather fun battles, if not quite yet at the level of the best in the series (and it’s difficult not to think of the series’ only other DLC, Artorias of the Abyss, as it offered four polished, inventive and unrelenting fights). Neither of the bosses is particularly inventive art-wise (the choice to recycle a certain model in one of the battles left me particularly disappointed as it cheapened a cool moment of the main campaign), but they both present interesting, polished takes on concepts we’ve already seen explored in the series before. In particular, the final boss makes for a really fun battle (probably my favorite in the whole game now) that is foreshadowed since the beginning of the DLC. During the fight the player is forced to continuously move around and keep the huge but surprisingly nimble beast in sight at all times, adapting to its move at the pace it dictates. It’s just disappointing that both battles are placed at the tail end of the DLC with no spacing between them. Pacing-wise it simply doesn’t work, and slightly mars the structure of an otherwise very well-designed DLC.
New Items and Spells
Compared to Artorias of the Abyss, the only DLC for Dark Souls (included in all PC copies of the title), Crown of the Sunken King only adds one miracle, one sorcery, and two hexes. While both the new miracle (Denial, a spell that closely resemble Second Chance from Demon’s Souls and can save a dying character, though only once) and the new hexes (Promised Walk of Peace, which mirrors the similarly named miracle from the original game, and Dark Greatsword, which does about what you’d expect from the name) are nice additions to the repertoire of spell casters, the only new sorcery included in the DLC (Focus Souls, a beam-type attack that does about what you’d expect it to do) feels superfluous and uninspired. Aficionados of pyromancy are also left wanting, though I can imagine this will be rectified in the next DLC, which seems to take place in the lava-themed Iron Keep.
Itemization-wise, From Software seemed to concentrate on quirky, special properties and trade-offs over quantity. There are swords with puzzling movesets, rings that give bonuses based on how low your maximum equipment load is, weapons that poison both the enemy and yourself, and this is just to cite a few. I’m not convinced all the offerings are appealing (and it’s likely From Software will further tinker with stats in the next patches), but it’s nice to see loot that offers genuine trade-offs and opens new options for unique character builds. The developers also added some more consumables, but the vanilla game already probably had more of those than it needed, so I can’t honestly say I care much for these additions.
Lore and Art
The Crown of the Sunken King environments offer a mixed bag of well-executed architecture and bland, empty interiors coated in a low-contrast muddy color scheme that can grow tiring fairly quickly, and are only occasionally punctuated by pink and white hues. There’s certainly something to be admired in the sheer size and scale of Shulva, but while the emptiness and murky color scheme can be justified to a certain extent, I can’t help but feel that From Software’s art team simply went overboard with them, and failed to bring their quirky sensibility to the environments. A few areas make an exception to this rule, though: the vista at the beginning of the DLC manages to counterbalance the muteness of the environments with careful composition, and both of the boss arenas on the main path are visually really well-accomplished, though I have to admit one of them reminded me a bit too much of the cave in which you fight the Skeleton Lords in Huntsman’s Copse. Most importantly, both arenas complement the bosses’ appearances, personality and patterns in an accomplished way, standing out in an otherwise fairly visually drab DLC, and that’s despite not making use of a huge amount of new assets.
While Crown of the Sunken King doesn’t offer much in terms of art, it does offer a fairly enjoyable simple self-contained story about hubris, fanaticism and foolishness, and how they can bring a civilization to an untimely end, told through the series’ well-oiled mix of environmental storytelling and item descriptions. Interestingly, From Software decided to almost completely reject dialogue and cutscenes for Shulva. There are no NPCs throughout the whole area, aside from mute summons and invaders, and the only few lines of dialogue belong to one of the three bosses, none of which get cutscene introductions. That’s not to say that the bosses don’t get introductions, as I especially liked the simple but effective way the final boss prepares itself for the fight, and I personally wouldn’t mind to see From Software going further down this road for their next projects. I have to admit, I suspect part of the reason cutscenes were avoided was the lower budget of the DLC compared to the main game, but if that was the case then I really feel adversity helped bring the best out of the designers at the Japanese studio.
Truth be told, there is at least a chatty person in the DLC, a key player in the main plot whose memory is now accessible from one of the vanilla areas of the game. It’s an interesting and well-executed scene that will probably be built upon further for the next two pieces of the DLC, but also one that frankly doesn’t really do much to enlighten the vague plot of the title, and will probably leave more than a few players scratching their heads. If nothing else, it further convinced me that From Software really knocked it out of the park with their voice casting this time around.
Conclusions
While perhaps not as content-packed and well-integrated as Dark Souls’ Artorias of the Abyss, Crown of the Sunken King offers a more understated but almost equally compelling addition to the action-RPG sequel, thanks to some strong level design that recaptures the elaborateness that was sometimes lost in the main title and offers a new twist on it, and some very fun enemies and bosses. Here’s hoping that the next two DLC are just as good, if not even better.
