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After you've spent dozens of hours methodically slaying things in Dark Souls 2, you become numb to its trademark difficulty (regardless of whether you feel that difficulty has risen or fallen since the original Dark Souls). You find yourself a decent weapon, you continue to tiptoe your way through unfamiliar areas, waiting for monsters or traps to slam you with a surprise death. Even if you do perish, though, you just get back up and do it again. Maybe you retrieve your lost souls. Maybe you don't. As your character becomes more and more powerful, the sting of losing your souls becomes less and less.
To that end, I have an admission: I stopped playing Dark Souls 2. After swinging the same sword for what seemed like the whole game, after defeating nearly every enemy with the same strategy – strafe behind, slash, repeat – it just got ... boring.
Having played through the "Crown of the Old Iron King" DLC, and the "Crown of the Sunken King" before it, I'm reminded of what makes Souls games special to me in the first place. It's not the difficulty, the crafty enemies, the traps, the tricks or the practical jokes, but the world itself. Its cavernous castles are daunting, its roaring dragons seemingly insurmountable. Everything is presented in grand scale, designed to make you feel small and insignificant. That might sound depressing, but the upshot is that Dark Souls, and the Crown of the Old Iron King, plants you in a massive, believable world in a way that only video games can.
And yeah, it's also pretty damned hard.
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