Dark Souls 2 Storyline How Does It Continue From Darksouls 1
Understanding the Lore of Dark Souls 2
From the King to the Emerald Herald, we attempt to make sense of Dark Souls 2's story.
To understand what's going on in any Souls game requires you to be some cross between Indiana Jones and Professor Layton."
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about the Souls method is that it isn't linear, but thematic. Dark Souls II contains hints of connections to Lordran for sure – in the basement of the Majula mansion you'll find what looks like a cracked Lord Vessel, in the Blue Cathedral you'll find the Old Dragonslayer boss based on Ornstein, and even the original game's Slumbering Dragoncrest Ring ("once used in the land where Drangleic is now") can be found.
There are many more links. But Dark Souls II's connections to the original game are not about finding the 'a-ha!' piece of the puzzle that confirms or disproves it – rather it's about the repetition of some of the original game's ideas, but from a new angle. If Dark Souls was about discovering that you're part of an endless cycle, Dark Souls II is about the nature of repetition – and the desire of great individuals to break free, and challenge fate. So we come to King Vendrick and the player character.If Dark Souls was about discovering that you're part of an endless cycle, Dark Souls II is about the nature of repetition"
Seeking the king becomes what Dark Souls II is 'about' – but it's worth pausing on that for a moment. Because it's not why you came to Drangleic, is it? As you progress through the game you see every NPC gradually losing their sense of purpose, forgetting what they came to this land for – and for you it's really no different. You come to break the undead curse, but end up following a path laid out for you by the Herald. We'll return to this, but first Vendrick.
King Vendrick and the Giants
Vendrick seems to have been a chosen undead, though not necessarily the one you played in the first game. From Chancellor Wellager we hear: "He vanquished the four Great Ones, and built this kingdom upon their souls." Sound familiar?
King Vendrick
Drangleic flourishes for a time, but is at some point beset by the undead curse. Vendrick first of all tries to pretend this isn't happening by locking up the victims, and when the jails were overflowing to simply get rid of them in other ways. From the Warped Sword description: "Long ago, the dungeons overflowed with the accursed, and the King commanded a contorted sentry to deliver those who had no cells to a faraway land, and make sure they were never heard from again."Vendrick, alongside his elder brother Aldia, is consumed by trying to find a solution. It is during this time that a queen turns up, alone, from a distant land and in the words of Drangleic Castle's Chancellor Wellager "warns him of the threat of the Giants."
Vendrick crosses the seas and defeats the giants to acquire something of great power, which the King's Ring suggests was yet another great soul: "A powerful soul is like a curse. And Vendrick, King of Drangleic, used a powerful soul to keep the curse at bay. King Vendrick sought greater souls, and made the Giants' power his own, but even still, the curse overcame him."
Vendrick returns – but the Giants, consumed by vengeance and with wills of steel, follow. They lay siege to Drangleic Castle, Vendrick's armies are destroyed, and the kingdom begins to fall. What exactly causes the destruction of Drangleic? The Giants do their part but are stopped, in typical Souls 'screw the timeline' fashion, by the player character in a series of flashbacks.The Giant's Stone Axe description: "The giants were eventually defeated by an unnamed hero; but, alas, victory came all-too-late." Too late? Perhaps because, while cities can be restored over time, the undead curse has Drangleic and Vendrick in its grip, and something far worse has manifested.
The Queen, and the Dark Soul
"Fearing something wicked," runs the description on the Thorned Greatsword, "the King fled the Castle and never returned." When you eventually find Vendrick in-game, he is "wasted away, a shadow of his former self, but still [holds] something dear." This description comes from the King's Soul, which is not with the hollowed-out Vendrick but hidden away in the Shrine of Amana.
The thing he held dear? The only item in the room where you find Vendrick is the King's Ring, a golden engraved band with a design that bears some resemblance to the Lord Vessel. It opens three doors in the game; one leads to a giant's corpse in the Forest of Fallen Giants, another leads to Aldia's Keep, and the third leads to the underground Throne in Drangleic Castle.
Vendrick, we can speculate, is trying to keep someone away from these areas. The queen's true form is only revealed when you have the King's Ring and enter the room containing the Throne of Want, whereupon Nashandra reveals herself (in a super-cool touch, you defeat the throne guards and then she enters the fog gate – that is, the player is her final boss).
Dark Souls II makes much of the recurrence of "ineffable" souls – ineffable meaning something that cannot be described. The four Great Souls in the game are influenced by the original game's Lord Souls, with some having a firmer through-line than others; Brightstone Cove and the Duke of Tseldora, for instance, are so strongly associated with Seathe the link seems almost causal. So who is Nashandra?"The old one of the Abyss was reborn in death, split into miniscule fragments, and spread across the land. The tiniest of these pieces, precisely due to its size, was the first to restore its form." That's from the Chime of Want created with her Soul – the Bow of Want has a slightly different last line: "The smallest of the pieces, sensing its own fragility, yearned for what it lacked."
Manus, Father of the Abyss
Nashandra is the smallest part of what remains from Manus, which may make her the Dark Soul – trying to reconstitute itself, to gain power, to become more whole. Did she sense the remnants of those ineffable Lord Souls in Drangleic, and in Vendrick a means to re-assemble them? Did he finally see through her plot and escape?And you finally deliver what she desires in a neat bundle, all the while thinking you were going to become king. Kind of easy to forget that you never came to this place to seek the king or the throne. Time to meet the puppetmasters.
Aldia, and the Emerald Herald
"They say that she is the last firekeeper. But they say a lot of things." - Royal Sorceror Navlaan
"King Vendrick condemned his own elder brother to the mansion." - Aldia Key
Aldia, Vendrick's brother, helped found the kingdom of Drangleic but eventually lost interest in its affairs. He had something grander in mind and was a man concerned with results, not methods. Aldia's Keep is one of the places Vendrick has sealed shut with the ring he holds dear.
In Aldia's Keep you discover all sorts of things; enemies you fight throughout the rest of the game, clearly the results of experiments undertaken here, the piled bodies of dead giants, and in the entrance hallway a reanimated dragon skeleton. There are tonnes of petrified dragon bones lying around, Royal Sorceror Navlaan locked away in a corner (for my money the most fascinating character in the game) and, at the end, a guardian dragon. Defeat this and you find the Dragon Aerie.
Royal Sorceror Navlaan
The Emerald Herald turns up here, her voice somehow different (younger it seems), and gives you a feather. "The child of the dragon, sequestered away from the world, imagined a world of boundless possibilities from the mere sight of a feather."Leaving aside the possibility this suggests of the whole of Drangleic being in the Herald's imagination, or Priscilla's, we can also discover from speaking to her outside the Throne of Want that the Herald's name is Shanalotte, and she was created "by ones who would attempt to cozen fate herself." Cozen meaning trick, and the trick failed.
It's worth here recalling Crossbreed Priscilla, the guardian of the Painted World of Ariamis in Dark Souls – who also seemed to be a human / dragon hybrid, most likely created by Seathe. Is Aldia following in these footsteps?
The Herald is a human / dragon hybrid. Aldia's intent seems clear. Dragons are 'everlasting,' they have souls but are free of desire – the 'true' dragons are kind of like rock formations rather than living things. Humans have souls but suffer from the undead curse, where memories wither away over time, and because of this have the desire for both power and freedom. Perhaps some combination of the two might result in balance.
More to the point, what happened to Aldia? At the end of the Dragon Aerie is an Ancient Dragon – "Yet another stands before us... then so be it. For the curse of life is the curse of want." Note 'us', a collective pronoun. Two souls in one body, or simply a regal turn of phrase? This is no dragon, anyway – defeat it and you acquire a Giant's Soul and a Petrified Dragon Bone.
Ancient Dragon
Someone's been cooking up dragons, the obvious question being did Aldia turn himself into one? The dragon covenant in Dark Souls allowed players to begin this transformation, suggesting it is possible, and in the cave of the Duke's Dear Freja is the corpse of the Ancient Dragon that oversaw this covenant (check the Ancient Dragon soul description). This raises interesting possibilities about the Duke of Tseldora and Lord Aldia being intimately linked – but we don't have all day. So instead we'll finish with the Bone Shield, which is as much confirmation as the Souls games will give you:"The peculiar figure known as Lord Aldia kept Giants in his manor, and attempted to recreate a dragon, but after some time, was not heard from again."
Meaning, and Meaning Less
"But then from the ashes the flame re-ignites and a new kingdom is born, sporting a new face... It is all a curse." - Straid of Olaphis
You could spin interpretations of Dark Souls II around all day. Are you a pawn of Aldia or Shanalotte? She seems very keen for you to get with the Throne of Want, but then so does Nashandra – who seems to have links to neither.
Vendrick's intentions are lost to time. He seems to have reached satiation point with great souls, perhaps realising the futility of trying to cozen fate, and almost accepted his decline – doing what he could to save the world from Nashandra beforehand (and locking himself up behind Garl Vinland 2.0, which gets my thumbs-up).
The most interesting main player, to me at least, is Aldia. It seems Aldia saw in the dragons a way to escape desire – the 'want' so often referred to – and through this break the cycle. Shanalotte was clearly a first attempt, one in which Vendrick had a hand, but she was a failure – because her human part still desires freedom from the curse, an end to her journey. She still wants something.Dark Souls II is about cycles... but what it's also about is the nature of a cycle – that is, remaking things."
The real pattern of Dark Souls II, and this is perhaps why the ending offers the player no choice, is in the nature of repetition. So much in this game is a distorted echo of what has gone before, whether that's Manscorpion Tark and Tarkus, the design of Nito and the Rotten, or the Lion Mages that never made it into Demon's Souls being resurrected as enemies in the shaded woods.
Dark Souls II is about cycles, as has been widely discussed, but what it's also about is the nature of a cycle – that is, remaking things. Everything in this game is in some sense a replica. Vendrick like Gwyn tries to have his own Age of Fire, and later shut away the curse, but fails. Aldia experiments like Seathe, creating countless hybrids before eventually trying to resurrect the dragons, but fails. The Lost Sinner tries to light the First Flame, as so long ago the Witch of Izalith tried to rekindle it, but fails. Even Nashandra wants to bring about her own Age of Dark.
The game is full of recreations of items long gone – too many to list. Certain armour and weapons are replicas, or have something off about them, like Creighton's helmet: "Perhaps it is a finely-crafted imitation." Under the Grave of Saints in NG+ you find the missing fourth firekeeper, Anastacia of Astora, who kept Firelink's flame alive, her set reading: "Although by now gray with soot and nearly unravelled, its fabric was originally pure white."
Whatever your actions, or the actions of the other long-ago heroes that have become legends in this world, the cycle continues. "Straid spent several lifetimes as stone" and in that time kingdoms rise and fell. "It is all a curse."
Kingdoms rising and falling is one thing. But making the sequel to perhaps the greatest game ever made in Dark Souls? That's another. Is Ornstein now an 'Old Dragonslayer' because he's aged, or because he is literally a returning asset from the original game? Dark Souls II is a sequel about making a sequel; a game about repetition where the real chin-stroker is how you can possibly top the preceding act, without being merely an echo of what has gone before – or, much worse, somehow tainting it.The conclusion in-game is, surely, that you can't; but you can try lots of things to hide it. History is doomed to repeat itself with different configurations, but always the same overarching pattern – and where Dark Souls offers the player at the end an ambiguous choice between the age of fire and the age of dark, here there is none. It is as if Dark Souls II wants to emphasise that choice is really just the illusion of choice. And is that really so awful?
Perhaps Fromsoft are being too hard on themselves. After all, Dark Souls II is very good. Very good indeed.
Rich Stanton is a freelance writer who spends most of his life in Lordran and occasionally Drangleic. Check him out on IGN or Twitter.Source: https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/05/06/understanding-the-lore-of-dark-souls-2