Fynn
is an EoFF Hero and/or Heroine
Radical Dreamer

That is good, are they fun to use?

Better than me, I got zilch done today.

Well good luck on getting some writing done today then!

The Uzuki is bound to be in there somewhere.

Yeah, I like when the DLC is not just costumes but also when it doesn't feel like it was yanked out of the main game. For Dark Souls 2, all three DLC involve going to another fallen kingdom and trying to collect the crown of their fallen king. The interesting lore connection here is that within the main game, the main "antagonist" if you want to call them that, is the former Queen of Drangleic who bewtiched the king and led his kingdom to ruin. The DLC deals with her "sisters" cause it turns out all four of them are the fragments of the major villain from the DS1's DLC, and all four of them seeked king's to bring to ruin and and gain the power to avenge their "father". What's kind of cool is the the story of these three other sisters. The first one is kind of a carbon copy of the main villain if she had succeeded, but the other two actually have some serious twists to their stories, with one reaching a kingdom that fell to ruin before she even got there and now trying to figure out what to do, and the other one actually being turned by the pureness of her king to actually drop her goal of revenge and instead take up his quest to keep the Chaos Flame (another nod to the first game) from spreading.

Each DLC deals with a new kingdom with a theme. The Sunken Kingdom which I'm currently playing is themed with Poison and Dragons, as the kingdom used to worship a great sleeping dragon who breathes poisonous fire. When he was awoken by an invading army, assumed to be the King's army from the main game, it laid waste to the kingdom. Each DLC offers two story bosses and a pure optional one, and I'm currently trying to complete the optional area first, but getting my butt kicked by the boss of the area.

How has your writing been going?

That's a pretty good setup for the missions, though I still feel Monolith needs to focus more on "less is more".

Yeah, the first of the three DLC is pretty groovy. It's got a puzzle aspect cause the whole area has secret doors and switches to raise pillars and what not. There is also a gimmick where some knights are super -powered by the souls of the dead and in order to actually really harm them without breaking your weapons after awhile involves hunting down the graves of the spirits helping them and slaying them. There is a really nasty corridor that almost turns into a stealth mission because of how many of these knights there are and trying to find your way into the mausoleum where their spiritual benefactors are. There is also a friendly NPC who helped you in an earlier area comes to invade you, and FROM did some interesting A.I. tricks to make this invader almost feel like another player, like letting him use gestures to taunt you and it's good about luring you into traps.

For the most part, they are three for three now on some serious quality DLC. Artorias of the Abyss and The Old Hunters were both some of the best highlights form their games.

A little mix and match like the original I take it?

I'm tackling the DLC for Dark Souls 2 at the moment, and as usual with FROM Software, it's really well done so far.

Man, too many sidequests.

I hear it takes quite awhile in XCX to do so, and then most people get it destroyed within the first ten minutes of unlocking it.

We could just record both, give them to him, and let him decide.

The bulk of it will be dealt with in the first week or two of February.

I just realized that next month is the 20th anniversary of Xenogears. I almost wish we could talk about that instead...