Dark Souls 2 is the best game in the series

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Dark 2 felt like a personal, intimate story about a man (or woman) looking for an end to their suffering. A wildly weird, complex series of events leads them toward becoming a Monarch or forsaking the Throne to find another way. On the face of it, it's opera, but dig just a little under the surface and what you find is a story about loss, fear, and identity. More succinctly, fear of losing who you are.

And with the SOTFS added bits, it becomes more profound and more engrossing, because neither the game nor Aldia are encouraging you to look at it in such basic "this is the bad guy who did this bad thing" way, but instead in a more philosophical, existential manner. You're not fighting a big dude in armour, or a dude who chose to link the fire (or end it), you're not even fighting the fire itself; you're fighting nature. More succinctly, you're battling the idea of nature.

This lends itself to probably the most optimistic ending in the trilogy, the one where you reject the Throne of Want and instead decide to forge your own path, to reach beyond the scope of light and the reach of dark for something else. Something perhaps new, perhaps different. Whatever it is, it has to be better than this endless cycle of light and dark, of triumph and misery, of life and death. Throughout the game we're shown that not only the cycle repeats, but entire civilizations and indeed people repeat. Reincarnation plays a pretty big role in the game, I think.

In the end the game leaves you optimistic that, even if it takes a thousand years, or a thousand cycles, there will be a way out. You'll seek it and, I think, find it, eventually. Such is your fate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pFdkkjGiEs