4. Inventory Management Still Lacks Obvious Features
There are many moments throughout Souls 2 where you get the feeling FromSoft were suffering something of a crisis of identity. On the one hand they have this unremittingly bleak, hopelessly futile world where any semblance of progression made is a total slog - yet fans lap it up and adore them for it, and on the other hand they've tasted bigger sales figures and a much wider potential audience awaits. Many things have been done to tweak the experience in favour of accessibility, yet one of the biggest omissions is still a 'friendly' inventory system. Some of the core appeal in these increasingly-hard experiences is the whole 'me against the world' mentality, something that only comes about through nailing every aspect on the player-side as perfect. It is true that FromSoft have rejigged the layout of the windows that pop up showing you what items you have, and have also implemented a one-button highlighting toggle so you can bring up information on any part of the screen. However, what is a ridiculous omission is the fact you cannot compare items when buying new ones from a merchant or blacksmith. Need to see if what you're about to drop 5000 souls on is better or worse than what you have? You'll have to back out of each purchase window, open your inventory, try and memorise a good six or so stats, and then compare them in your head with what's in front of you when you get back in. Absolutely ridiculous. Add in the fact that in DS2 the game no longer auto-adds health items or other abilities as you pick them up, instead requiring you to manually re-assign them should you have ran out, and it's another removal of something that could have previously saved your life, should you pick something up in battle and immediately need to use it.
