Now that Fault has cursed her very soul in exchange for five cheap levels I give the Abyss Watchers another go and manage to barely squeeze out a win.

Back at the shrine my high hollowing and game progress seems to have caused a mysterious lady in armor to appear. Apparently she thinks hollowing is pretty nifty and has plans for making Fault queen of the world or something. Plans that start with marrying her off to some nobleman or other.

I consider playing along but decide to check the wiki first to see just what this side quest involves and discover a full page of instructions on dozens of fiddly little things that have to be done at just the right time in the plot or else you spoil the quest forever. That’s more pressure than I want to deal with in an open world RPG so I politely wave goodbye to the creepy lady and add “Remove The Undead Curse Before Things Get Weird” to Fault’s to-do list. (To do so I need to find a hidden item I already know about and then gather up five levels worth of souls all at once which might be a bit trickier).

But how about some good news? Fault has finally decided to replace the last few bits of her thief armor and is now sporting the Fallen Knight set (but with her trusty Lordric Helmet and Gauntlets). This particular set is an amazing piece of medium armor but is most notable for having a dusty brown cape that looks kind of like a trench coat from behind. So if you want to pull off the hard boiled detective look here’s your chance.

According to Google noir is “a genre of crime film or fiction characterized by cynicism, fatalism, and moral ambiguity.” which sure sounds like Dark Souls to me.

Anyways, with the Abyss watchers out of the way Fault can head to the catacombs which are full of regenerating skeletons with extremely aggressive attack patterns. Fault’s lack of faith means no holy weapons which puts her at a big disadvantage when it comes to fighting here.

So instead of fighting I just dodge roll my way between bonfires and head straight to the boss.

Now normally this would be a horrible idea. The Luck Knight gimmick means we usually want to be over-leveled for bosses but skipping an entire area worth of XP has left us a bit on the weak side.

But don’t worry, the next boss is a gimmick boss and thus requires practice more than stats.

Basically he’s a giant skeleton who is only being tied to this realm by those big gold bracelets he’s wearing. Breaking bracelets does huge damage to the boss and smashing all three is a guaranteed victory. Admittedly it takes some experimentation to figure out how to best attack the bracelets without getting smashed but once you’ve got thing figured out this guy is easy.

With the Chapel of the Deep out of the way Fault heads back to the poisonous (but leech free!) swamp and messes around with some signal fires in order to open the path to the next boss: The Keepers of Farron.

They’re another one of those interesting multi-stage boss fights. In the first stage you fight multiple keepers at a time, which can be a blessing or a curse depending on whether they decide to all focus on you or instead fight among themselves.

Finish off the boss and there’s a surprise cutscene where the blood from all the keepers comes together to reanimate a single super-keeper who lights their sword on fire and sure fights a lot like a certain Bloodborne DLC boss.

Fault makes no progress here.

Obviously I’m going to need to grind for some levels.

Or do I? One of my Firelink buddies keeps mentioning something about drawing out true potential. Fault finally lets him do it and receive a free stat point in exchange for being saddled with the good old undead curse from the first game. Now every time Fault dies she becomes slightly more Hollow. It’s just as gross as in the first game but fortunately Fault is wearing a full helm so nobody can really tell.

Like most RPG protagonists Fault will do almost anything for more pluses.

The good news here is that the more hollow Fault gets the more power her buddy will give her. This means I can earn up to four more bonus stat points just by jumping off the nearest cliff again and again.

But that hardly sounds sportsmanlike so instead I head back to the Farron Woods and take an elevator hidden in a certain tower in order to reach the top of the crumbling ruins of a once great highway bridge. Lurking here is an optional mini-boss: a washed up Stray Demon from the first game. Where Dark Souls demons were beings of fire and chaos this one has cooled down to mere rock and dust. Doesn’t mean we can take things easy though; it still has an axe bigger than Fault and while it can’t spit fireballs it can spit rocks.

Clearly this is a great place to die a bunch and rack up some hollowing.

Instead Fault emerges victorious on her second try.

Ok, new plan. Back to the Chapel of the Deep to fight those two giants that were always stomping around in the muck. You know, the ones you were clearly meant to outrun and out-think on your way to the boss.

Fault kills them both in one try without even resting at a bonfire in between. As powerful as they are they can’t really attack things near their feet and they telegraph their few stomping moves way too much.

So my plan to get Fault killed in honorable combat is apparently a bust. Time to just run around and let things maul her to death until I qualify for all five bonus points.

Fault has finally finished gathering up all the obvious free goodies in this part of the game so it’s back to the Chapel of the Deep to do some good old classic dungeon crawling and beat the next boss standing between us and the Lords of Cinder.

This particular boss fight is actually kind of neat. When you enter the room you are faced with a horde of hollow priests, one of which is glowing red. Killing the glowing one does damage to the boss and causes the glow to jump to a different priest.

So you worship a being called Saint Aldrich, Devourer of Gods? Fascinating! Do you maybe have a pamphlet I could read?

About halfway through the fight the glow will stop jumping from priest to priest and instead manifest as some sort of evil Anti-Pope surrounded by a handful of extra tough Anti-Bishops or something like that (I’m a bit fuzzy on the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Church of the Deep). On my non-gimmick file, where I did dungeons out of order and was extremely over-leveled, I finished the fight without seeing what the second half really involved.

But now that I’m trying to Luck Knight my way through a level appropriate boss fight I had the pleasure of discovering that the Anti-Pope and his buddies can work together to summon a cursed mist that auto-kills you if you don’t finish the fight fast enough. (Surprise! Fault did not finish the fight fast enough her first time.)

Last time Fault cleared the road of sacrifice by killing a giant evil wizard. At this point the game actually opens up quite a bit and we now have two different bosses we can tackle in whatever order we please. Or… we could ignore that and instead run around grabbing treasure from all the new areas we’ve unlocked.

We start off by heading towards the Chapel of the Deep and looting a corpse that happens to be wearing a full set of herald armor. Which means… PANTS!

Yes, the herald pants not only have better defense than the deserter’s trousers they also go all the way to the end of Fault’s legs which leaves us looking like a proper adventurer and less like a bedraggled street urchin forced into a life of crime. Which technically is exactly what we were, having started the game as a thief and all. But no longer! We’re actually starting to look like a proper Luck Knight.

This is what happens when it’s 11:30 at night and you suddenly remember you haven’t done your daily sketch.

To celebrate I head back to town and find that one of our NPC buddies is now selling a small shield with 80% damage reduction instead of the pathetic 60% we’ve been using. Eventually I hope to have the stats for a 100% shield but for now this is a big step in the right direction.

Fault then head back to the Chapel of the Deep and discover it’s literally crawling with maggot infested zombies and all sorts of leech monsters. Getting hit by them leaves you covered in tiny parasites that slowly fill up your bleed meter. When it maxes out you take major damage.

Fortunately a high luck score increases the size of your bleed meter which means Fault can walk around covered in leeches for quite some time before taking damage… which actually doesn’t sound like a lucky experience at all. But it does give us all the survivability we need to grab some estus flask upgrades and various other trinkets before putting the chapel on hold in search of a less disgusting place to go treasure hunting.

Last time Fault made a friend. This time it’s back to stabbing people along the road of sacrifice and things are actually going pretty well. Fault started the game as an under-leveled, under-equipped thief with a crippling build gimmick. Fault is now a properly-leveled pseudo-knight wielding a +3 fire rapier that almost makes up for her crippling build gimmick. Which means I’m actually making pretty good progress without constantly dying.

It’s a little disappointing that fire weapons don’t actually look like they’re one fire.

Fun fact: There are actually two exits from the road of sacrifice. On my first playthrough I completely missed one of them and wound up completely skipping an entire early-level dungeon in favor of jumping straight into mid-game content. Didn’t find the other area until I ran out of bosses to fight and did some extreme backtracking. This time around I’ll be avoiding that little slip-up and fighting the bosses in the actual “correct” order.

Last time Fault finished up with the Undead Settlement, so we rejoin her today as she enters the cheerily named “Road of Sacrifices”, which I think is supposed to be a path that was used for transporting undead prisoners from one horrible part of the DS world to an even worse part the DS world. At the moment it’s full of crow monsters that would be a real pain to fight if they didn’t have such a bad habit of standing right beneath plunge attack enabling ledges.

Manga Studio has some pretty nice watercolor effects that would be really useful if I actually knew how to paint

The third monster crow Fault kills also happens to drop an item that will completely change the course of this entire playthrough… or at least it would if any of the NPCs back at Firelink knew what to do with it. Instead it’s just going to sit in my inventory mocking me until much much later in the game. And no, I’m not going to tell you what it is. If I have to put of with the frustration of not being able to use it you have to put up with the frustration of not knowing what it is.

Halfway through the area we also run into a traveling knight. Fault and the stranger quickly bond over their shared enthusiasm for helmets. I can only imagine this is the start of a classic Dark Souls style NPC quest that I will undoubtedly fail to complete because step 4 will involve going to a secret area while holding a secret item and then backflipping twice between the hours of 3 and 4 in the morning.

OK, I exaggerate but I don’t think I’ve ever finished a dark souls NPC quest without “cheating” through the wiki. (Although to be honest I don’t think the developers intend you to find all these secrets on your own. DS is a very community based game.)

Last time Fault killed several dozen heavily armored knights but failed to find even a single pair of intact knight leggings. So for now she’s settled on wearing a big heavy helmet and is pushing on ahead through the Undead Settlement.

Not that there’s really much to do in the Undead Settlement aside from saving a few NPCs and collecting some upgrade materials all of which can be done pretty quickly if you know where to look. After that there’s really nothing preventing you from dodge rolling past a few mobs of enraged zombie villagers and taking the elevator down to the next area.

I’m a big advocate of the Hanna-Barbera approach to adventuring

On the other hand I happen to know the Undead Settlement has a bonus boss that’s absolutely terrifying until you find the weakness in their attack pattern at which point it becomes free XP. And boy could I use some free XP.

So off I go to manipulate the AI of a giant tree.

If anybody wants to know the trick to killing the giant cursed tree it’s this: Get to the second stage of the fight and then stay barely out of range of its melee attacks. This will usually result in the tree trying to crush you by standing up really tall and then falling over. The huge windup on the attack makes it easy to dodge and afterwards the enemy will be stunned for several seconds during which you can stab its zombie arm weak spot repeatedly. Can be a bit tedious if you don’t do a lot of damage per hit (That’s my Fault!) but it’s pretty easy to eventually win.