BLACK SOULS II Review Summary

Masterful, Profound RPG Experience: Players overwhelmingly praise the game as a masterpiece, highlighting its exceptional storytelling, deep lore, and challenging gameplay. Many consider it one of the best RPGs ever, offering an unforgettable and emotionally impactful experience that resonates long after playing. The game is seen as a significant achievement, particularly for an RPGMaker title, often surpassing its predecessor.

Strategic & Engaging Combat System: The combat system is widely praised for its ingenuity, strategic depth, and significant improvements over the previous installment. It offers a challenging, turn-based experience with diverse tactical skills, status effects, and freedom in build customization, often described as Souls-like in its precision. Players appreciate the engaging mechanics, well-adapted boss fights, and how it encourages strategic progression over excessive stat-stacking.

Deep, Dark & Philosophical Narrative: The narrative is lauded for its intricate, multi-layered storytelling that explores profound philosophical themes like nihilism, existentialism, love, and despair. It skillfully weaves together twisted fairy tales (especially Alice in Wonderland), Cthulhu mythos, and Dark Souls-like allegories, creating a cruel yet beautiful world. This thematic depth, combined with strong character interactions and tragic elements, provides a deeply immersive and thought-provoking emotional journey for players.

Abundant Content & High Replayability: Players commend the game for its massive content volume, extensive branching plots, numerous side quests, and multiple endings, including secret routes. The 'New Game Plus' cycles are highly incentivized, offering different playthroughs to discover hidden truths and extend the experience. This extensive content contributes to high replay value and a lasting sense of discovery.

Distinctive & Appealing Art Style: The game's art style is consistently highlighted as unique, appealing, and greatly improved from the first game, with more detailed and polished characters and sprites. Its abstract and distinct aesthetic perfectly fits the dark fairy tale and horror themes, and the charming character designs, including the adult content, contribute significantly to the game's overall appeal and emotional impact.

Unplayable Without Patch/Censored: The game is widely reported as unplayable, broken, or severely censored without an external patch, especially on its Steam release. This necessary patch often needs to be sourced unofficially, and without it, essential content, features, and even basic progression are missing or locked.

Confusing & Disturbing Narrative: The game's story is frequently described as fragmented, opaque, incomprehensible, and emotionally disturbing, leading to player confusion, lack of engagement, and strong rejection of its themes and endings. Some players perceive the messaging as shallow or overly dark without sufficient depth.

High Difficulty & Poor Guidance: Players consistently report extreme difficulty, confusing navigation, and a severe lack of in-game guidance, making progression tedious, frustrating, and often requiring external resources. The combat system is also perceived as significantly harder and unbalanced, contributing to a high probability of defeat.

Broken Achievement System: The achievement system is buggy and problematic, with issues such as achievements not unlocking correctly, only displaying after specific endings, or not being granted when importing old save files. Some players dislike mandatory losses for certain achievements.

Inferior to Predecessor: Many players feel this sequel falls short of the original game, citing a less engaging story, weaker individual character development, and a less effective covenant system. They also note missing content, fewer gameplay options, and a worse soundtrack compared to the first title.

Extensive Replayability & Endings: The game is designed for extensive replayability, offering numerous endings, including 'H' and 'true' endings, that require specific actions and multiple playthroughs. New Game Plus cycles further enhance replay value with altered events, stronger enemies, and additional content.

Souls-like RPG Mechanics: The game is heavily influenced by Dark Souls, featuring classic RPG progression, exploration, and combat mechanics like weapon switching and enchantments. It introduces a 'break' system for combat, diverging from a mandatory dodge, and includes specific skills and item use.

Fragmented Narrative & Alice Quest: The game's narrative is fragmented and not explicitly handed to the player, requiring active exploration and deduction. Players control an amnesiac protagonist searching for an important figure named Alice, with the story continuing from the first game and often being convoluted.

Dark & Transgressive Themes: The game explores intense psychological, disturbing, and transgressive themes, reinterpreting classic fairy tales with mature content. It includes explicit elements, such as 'H endings' and Cthulhu-esque madness, creating a pervasive sense of perversion and delusion.

Dynamic SEN (Sanity) System: A unique SEN (Sanity) system tracks the protagonist's mental state, which erodes with violent acts or specific choices. Low SEN causes visual distortions, altered NPC dialogue, music changes, and can reveal hidden paths, profoundly impacting gameplay and story progression.

Multiple fullscreen solutions: Players can use Alt+Enter or the F1 key after launching the game for basic fullscreen and key configuration. For more persistent issues, an external tool like 'mtool's scaling function is recommended to resolve fullscreen problems.

DLC3 visuals improved: A newer game patch specifically addresses and fixes issues with the CGs (Computer Graphics) present in DLC3. Players experiencing graphical anomalies in this DLC should ensure their game is updated.

R-18 patch keeps achievements: Players can apply the R-18 content patch without fear of losing achievement functionality. The game's achievement system remains active even with the adult content modification.

Game runs smoothly: Overall, the game appears to run smoothly for players, indicating good general performance and optimization. This positive feedback suggests a stable technical foundation for most users.

Recommend BGM nostalgia patch: A specific BGM (background music) patch is recommended by some players who prefer the old version's music, finding it more catchy and enjoyable than the updated soundtrack. This is an optional enhancement for player preference.

Highly acclaimed, genre masterpiece.: The game is widely regarded as a masterpiece, receiving exceptionally high ratings (e.g., 9/10, 10/10) and strong recommendations. Players praise its plot, gameplay, and unique art style, considering it a peak experience in the RPG Maker or Lovecraftian horror RPG genres, often calling it an unforgettable 'masterpiece'.

Install essential content patch.: Numerous players emphasize that the Steam version requires an unofficial patch, often from otaku-plan.com, to restore censored content and ensure proper game progression. This is crucial for a complete and enjoyable experience, with many citing it as a 'must' for all content.

Purchase to support developer.: A significant number of players express that they bought the game on Steam primarily to support the creator, 'Toro' or 'Sushi Yuusha Toro', often after having played it previously through other means. They encourage others to purchase the game to show appreciation and contribute to the developer's work.

Play Black Souls 1 first.: A strong consensus suggests playing Black Souls 1 before its sequel for a comprehensive understanding of the story, characters, and overall context. This significantly enhances the experience of Black Souls 2. Players also advise playing the first playthrough of BS2 blind, then using guides for subsequent runs or to avoid major pitfalls.

Eagerly await next installments.: There is considerable enthusiasm and explicit requests for future titles from the developer, particularly a third installment in the Black Souls series (referred to as BS3 or 'Crimson Death') or 'Dead Red Hood'. This indicates high satisfaction with current work and strong demand for more content.

Dedicated player base support: Many players are veterans, having completed the game multiple times on previous platforms (e.g., DLsite or pirated versions), and purchased the Steam version specifically to support the developers. This indicates strong loyalty and appreciation for the game.

Mandatory unofficial patch: To experience the game's full R-18, uncensored content, players must download and install an external, often unofficial, patch. This process requires specific steps, such as running the game once before applying the patch, which can be inconvenient for new players.

Profound, impactful story: The game delivers a highly impactful and unforgettable narrative, exploring themes of irreversible choices, despair, loss of humanity, and tragic outcomes. Many players, even those initially drawn by erotic content, become deeply invested in the complex plot and characters, sometimes expressing intense emotional reactions.

Dark Souls-inspired horror: The game is frequently compared to the Dark Souls series due to its challenging difficulty, intricate map design, and dark, Lovecraftian horror atmosphere. It immerses players in a twisted fairy tale world with unsettling themes and immersive sound design.

Significant playtime required: Players can expect approximately 20-30 hours for the main story, with full completion potentially requiring over 60 hours. This suggests a substantial amount of content and replayability for dedicated players.