JoeTheDestroyer's Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin review

Great review! From reading your game progress posts, to watching reviews / reading comments on Youtube, I had gotten the impression that this definitely isn't the stronger of the two Dark Souls games. I do feel a little reassured that its strengths appear to outweigh its noticeable weaknesses, though.

I will say the issue with the hit boxes concerns me... How did you eventually overcome that? Did you have to alter your strategy specifically to those two foes? I'm glad it's just those two, so I doubt this will stop me from picking up the game myself eventually. I'm just curious.

I'm still plucking away at Demon's Souls... so this won't be on my radar for a while anyway.

Thank you for reading!

The hitbox thing thankfully only affects two bosses (Fume Knight and Sir Alonne), and neither of them are required for completing the game. They are, however, part of a couple of segments that were DLC in the standard version of Dark Souls II.

For Fume Knight, the hit detection wasn't the main concern with this guy. You can get screwed over now and then, but the main problem with fighting him is he has a buff he can activate given the right circumstances. The tricky thing is learning how to prevent the buff from occurring and trying to take him out as quickly as possible.

Sir Alonne is doable even with the hit detection issues, but you have to dodge like crazy, especially avoiding that impaling attack. Considering the prize for defeating him is a katana that's not even the best specimen of its type (the Blacksteel Katana is much better and can be obtained much sooner than this encounter), it's almost not worth the stress of defeating him without help. For most of the boss battles in the Dark Souls games, you can summon AI partners to aid you in battle. I've had to do that a time or two throughout both games, and that's what I did for Alonne. I don't remember which phantoms you can summon, but they helped graciously. For the most part, I stayed back while they distracted him and would swoop in now and then to take a few shots before slinking away.

Good luck getting through Demon's Souls! That game kicked my teeth in more than a few times. It's neat to check out the throwbacks to Demon's in the two Dark games, as well as Bloodborne.