Trivia / Dark Souls II

• Ascended Glitch: Using the Small White Soapstone while Hollowed and successfully helping the host would occasionally result in the player being revived as human. This was an unintentional bug, but the effect became so popular that FROM opted to make it a full feature in the v1.03 patch.
• Celebrity Voice Actor:
  • Mild-Mannered Pate is voiced by Peter Serafinowicz, more widely known as the original voice of Darth Maul and a fan of the series.
  • The Emerald Herald is voiced by Ruth Negga, who's much more well known for her work in live action TV and films such as Preacher and Loving (2016).
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • YouTubers EpicNameBro and A German Spy were hired to help write the official FuturePress player's guide. They've both been kept on for the Bloodborne guides and Dark Souls Remastered guide.
  • Actor Peter Serafinowicz was such a fan of the first Dark Souls that he asked to voice a character in Dark Souls II. He got the role of Mild-Mannered Pate and provided the exertion noises for the male version of the player character (time stamp 2:04 to 2:40).
• Troubled Production: Whoo boy... the interview with the director in the Dark Souls II Design Works reveals why the game seems so damn convoluted and different from the first Dark Souls. The original director, Tomohiro Shibuya, was kicked off the team halfway through development for some unsaid reason. Yui Tanimura, the new director, had to salvage what all he could and re-purpose it into what became the final product.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: The credits inexplicably give the Emerald Herald separate "adult" and "child" voice actors, even though we only ever see her as an adult. This has lead to all sorts of rumors about seeing her as a child (mostly involve the Ashen Mist Heart), but there are no such lines even in the unused audio files. There are lines found in text dumps that imply that they were spoken by a younger version of her, but those were never even translated to English. (Source: http://illusorywall.tumblr.com/post/100174538929/dark-souls-2-unused-dialog-from-japanese-text)
• What Could Have Been: The game was originally meant to be open world, years before Elden Ring. It was definitely at the very least meant to be much larger in scope, before it was cut down to be able to be finished, which explains why Earthen Peak nonsensically leads to the Iron Keep. And there were parts of the announcement trailer that were starting to be made but eventually cut, such as the giant dragon skeleton the Chosen Undead is seen walking through. There exist images of said skeleton as an untextured model that never got used.

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