Dark Souls 2 is sometimes seen as something of an odd-one-out in the trilogy. It was a more experimental and open-ended approach to the formula that strikes a lot of comparisons with the original Demon's Souls.
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As it is with the nature of these games, how you play it will drastically affect how long it takes you to beat the game. Zooming from one boss to another will make the game shorter than if you methodically clear out areas looking for treasures and secrets. Then there's the allure of New Game+ to keep you engrossed in the game's beautifully dark world.
How Long Does It Take To Beat The Story?
Dark Souls 2 has a ton of content. It has a lot of areas to explore and bosses to fell within, but not all of them are required to beat the game. According to howlongtobeat.com, which crowdsources its completion time estimates, Dark Souls 2 takes around 45 hours to beat. This is without doing extras such as side quests or farming for certain materials.
Your mileage may very well vary, however, as skill, patience, and experience will play a part in your completion time. Newcomers to the franchise or the genre might find themselves coming up against more roadblock bosses which eat up a lot of time as they plod through the game. Conversely, veterans will likely have much shorter times.
How Long Will It Take For Completionists?
Completionism in a Dark Souls game is defined by different players in different ways. The absolute extreme of completionism would likely involve collecting and upgrading every weapon, maximizing stats, beating every boss, and going through multiple cycles of New Game+ just to make sure you can acquire everything. This would take hundreds of hours.
If simply taking into account looking for every treasure, felling every boss in the game, and taking on the three large DLC areas, it looks like a completionist run takes around 120 hours.
Dark Souls 2 Vs. Dark Souls 2 Scholar Of The First Sin
The upgraded version of the game, Scholar of the First Sin, came with a lot of changes. Some make the game more player-friendly, and some make it harder — for example changing around the locations of some enemies and locking the DLC areas behind certain bosses.
According to howlongtobeat.com, this upgraded version alters how long it would take to beat the game. Compared to the vanilla version, Scholar of the First Sin takes eight hours fewer to beat the story, clocking in at 38 hours, and you can add about two hours more to complete a completionist run with DLCs and all bosses.
Dark Souls 2 Speedruns
Speedruns in Dark Souls are a whole other game. They involve large content skips, going out of bounds, and incredibly intricate menu controls.
The two most popular categories are any%, which simply involves reaching the end credits, and All Bosses, which requires the player to beat every boss in the game. In addition, Dark Souls 2 and Scholar of the First Sin are treated separately by the community.
The table below has information from speedrun.com and shows the current World Records at these various speedruns (as of writing).
| Dark Souls 2 | Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin | |
|---|---|---|
| any% | 00:14:20s | 00:54:18s |
| All Bosses | 02:07:37s | 02:15:33s |
NEXT: How Long Does It Take To Beat Dark Souls 3?
