Released in 2014, Dark Souls II is an action role-playing game developed by FromSoftware and published internationally by Bandai Namco Entertainment, first arriving on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in March 2014 and then on Windows in April. A year later, Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin broadened the game’s footprint with an enhanced release and a reshuffled world state that many runners treat as its own distinct competitive environment.
As a speedgame, Dark Souls II rewards players who can combine tight movement with controlled aggression, because the run is fundamentally about converting time into power as efficiently as possible. Its structure supports quick reroutes and resets, and its early branching lets runners pick the fastest path to the tools they want, whether that means a safer setup, higher damage, or a route that minimizes required fights. The game’s defining “optimization puzzle” is often less about a single fixed line and more about choosing the most efficient sequence of travel, bosses, and soul gain to reach late-game gates and end the run cleanly.
What makes Dark Souls II feel distinct from nearby Souls speedruns is how much the game encourages “routing by economy.” The world can be approached in multiple orders, enemy and boss behavior can be manipulated for consistency, and the game’s version landscape matters in a practical way because base game and Scholar routes are shaped by different placements and encounter rhythms. That combination produces a scene where the core identity is stable, but the route philosophy stays interesting: get strong quickly, move decisively through a flexible world, and use the game’s quirks, including wall and fog interactions that the community has historically explored, to turn a long RPG into a tightly planned sprint.
In the first wave of Dark Souls II speedrunning, record-keeping looked a lot like a community bulletin board. Runners shared early personal bests and “route labels” in public threads, swapped links to VODs and uploads, and compared times using both real time and the game’s internal clock while norms were still being negotiated. One early example is a long-running compilation thread on Reddit’s r/DarkSouls2 community that logged RTA and IGT side by side, collected links to runs, and even shows the scene debating what footage should be considered “standard” for verification, like showing credits or a clean end point.
Those early routes quickly converged on goals that matched the game’s progression gates. A “Million Souls” approach showed up as a practical early Any% concept, reflecting how Soul Memory thresholds can replace parts of the intended boss progression in certain route plans, and the shorthand in community posts made it clear that runners were already thinking in terms of repeatable templates rather than one-off playthroughs. As the scene matured, those ideas were formalized into clearer category definitions and a stable rules language through the SoulsSpeedruns Wiki and the public leaderboards on Speedrun.com, which preserved distinct end goals like defeating the end boss for Any% and alternative objectives built around major progression milestones.
Timing standards also tightened as soon as runners started comparing across different hardware and load behavior. Because load times can vary sharply by platform and setup, the community settled on an “RTA No Load” convention that removes only loading screens, typically displayed live during the run via the LiveSplit plugin. In that standard, timing begins during the New Game loading screen before the opening area and ends on the first fully black frame after the final boss outcome for the category, creating an end-to-end method that stays comparable even when raw loads differ.
Version identity became part of the game’s historical backbone, too. The base game’s leaderboards distinguish between legacy-stable patch baselines and “current patch” categories, which helps keep older routes comparable instead of forcing everything into one evolving ruleset. On top of that, the later re-release, Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, developed its own competitive ecosystem with separate leaderboards, reflecting meaningful differences in world state and route logic rather than treating it as a minor update.
As Dark Souls II speedrunning matured, runners gravitated toward a handful of shared “home bases” that made the scene easier to join and easier to preserve. Speedrun.com functions as the public record for both the original release and the reworked Scholar of the First Sin environment, giving the community a stable place to publish categories, rules, and ranked results while also hosting guides, resources, forums, and submission tools in one place. Alongside that, SoulsSpeedruns has served as a central knowledge hub, with a wiki structure that keeps category logic, routing conventions, and timing standards readable and revisable as the scene evolves.
Day-to-day culture tends to live where runners can iterate quickly. Discussion that once scattered across long forum threads and public posts increasingly consolidates into real-time spaces like Discord, where routing questions, moderator clarifications, and new tech can be stress-tested in conversation before becoming “official knowledge” in a guide or wiki page. Visibility and teaching also flow through streaming, because attempts, resets, and experimentation are easiest to learn by watching, and Twitch has long been a natural bridge between private practice and public documentation.
Verification culture in the Souls scene is shaped by two overlapping layers: site-wide expectations and game-specific standards. On Speedrun.com, submitting a run generally means providing clear video evidence that allows moderators to see what happened and confirm the timing endpoints. For Dark Souls II specifically, community timing norms are also documented in detail, including the widespread use of RTA No Load conventions and the expectation that the run display the appropriate timer methodology in the recorded submission. This blend of public leaderboard review plus clearly written timing and evidence expectations helps keep the competitive record legible across platforms, capture setups, and routing styles.
Finally, the scene preserves knowledge in a way that mirrors how runs are built: experimentally first, then formally. Wiki pages and category rule write-ups capture “what counts,” while guide sections, pinned resources, and shared tools capture “how it’s done,” including practical runner infrastructure like splits and community-maintained utilities that smooth out repetition and practice.
The leaderboard structure for Dark Souls II is built around version context first, then category goals. The original release and Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin are treated as separate competitive environments because the re-release changes enough enemy and item placement to make direct comparison unfair, so their categories live on separate boards in Speedrun.com and are documented in the SoulsSpeedruns Wiki. Within the original release, the “main family” you see reflected on the public leaderboards is Any%, Any% Current Patch, Old Souls (Current Patch), All Bosses, All Bosses No DLC, and All Achievements, with the important wrinkle that some categories are intentionally tied to an older patch while others are defined around the current patch. Scholar mirrors a similar set of core goals on its own board (Any%, Old Souls, All Bosses, All Achievements), and both versions also have community “category extensions” for challenge formats that sit outside the main competitive record.
What the community is measuring is primarily a load-removed real-time standard, not pure in-game time. Because load times vary heavily by platform and setup, official timing is “RTA No Load,” typically displayed live via a plugin in LiveSplit, and leaderboards commonly display both load-removed time (often labeled LRT) and raw RTA as reference. For Dark Souls II runs following the standard ruleset, the timer starts during the New Game loading screen before the opening cutscene in Things Betwixt and ends on the first fully black frame after the final required kill for the category, which makes the endpoint consistent across capture setups.
The big rule decisions that define leaderboard identity mostly revolve around patch policy and the restricted versus unrestricted split. The scene deliberately separates “old patch” categories from “current patch” categories to preserve glitch availability and route logic that differ across updates, and current-patch categories (plus Scholar categories) are further divided into Restricted and Unrestricted rule sets. In practice, that split is closely tied to performance and glitch policy: runners are expected to lock to 60 FPS using tools like MSI Afterburner and RivaTuner Statistics Server, and Restricted categories constrain techniques such as Parrywalk and FPS manipulation that are permitted in Unrestricted. Beyond that, the rules emphasize clean timing and verifiability: manual timer pauses are forbidden, and runs are expected to show the correct timer method; certain advantages like pre-order weapons are disallowed; and broader “no external tampering” expectations apply outside a small set of community-approved exceptions.
Dark Souls II speedrunning evolved by turning a sprawling RPG into a set of repeatable economic problems. The earliest mature routes focused on reaching late game gates with just enough damage and just enough souls, then trimming travel and boss order until the whole run felt like one continuous decision chain. Over time, that logic hardened into recognizable route “families” that prioritize different efficiencies, including routes built around extremely lean early progression targets and routes that loop high value bosses with Bonfire Ascetics to push Soul Memory quickly and open the game’s critical gates.
On the technical side, the biggest paradigm shifts came from movement and boundary breaking discoveries that changed what “skipping content” could mean in Dark Souls II. The classic example is parrywalk, a riposte cancel state that allows air walking and makes out of bounds routing possible in many areas. The older patch form was effectively open ended and flexible, and later updates removed it, which is part of why the community preserves distinct patch environments for some categories. In the current patch landscape, a narrower version of parrywalk exists with a fixed short duration and stricter movement limitations, which still reshapes how unrestricted routes think about walls, fog gates, and height changes without returning fully to the older patch era.
As the fastest lines became more aggressive, the scene also built guardrails that improved comparability and consistency. A major stabilizer was the restricted versus unrestricted split on current patch and Scholar, which formalizes whether techniques like parrywalking are in bounds and standardizes how runners handle performance variables by requiring a 60 FPS lock with framerate visible. That structure lets the game support two parallel identities at once: one where routing is constrained toward cleaner execution, and another where the run is allowed to lean harder into glitch driven traversal.
Tooling matured alongside the routes. Timing moved toward a standardized load removed method, and the community built increasingly sophisticated support around it, including customizable autosplitter scripts that can track different route variants without breaking on repeats or warps. Practice also became more technical, with offline focused utilities that support testing and debugging setups and help runners iterate faster when a new strat needs hundreds of repetitions before it becomes stable.
One of the most important milestones for Dark Souls II speedrunning was the shift from “runs shared around the community” to a standardized public record with consistent timing expectations. The SoulsSpeedruns wiki formalized the game’s load-removed standard and made it explicit that official timing is RTA No Load, displayed during the run via a LiveSplit plugin, with clear start and end points that make submissions comparable across platforms and setups.
Another defining milestone was the way the scene turned version differences into stable competitive lanes instead of constant arguments. The public leaderboards separate the original release and Scholar of the First Sin as distinct environments, and the modern ruleset further splits current-patch play into Restricted and Unrestricted formats. That framework made “what kind of run is this?” legible at a glance, and it also codified policies around FPS control and which techniques are permitted in each ruleset.
Route history has its own watershed moments, and parrywalk is the clearest example of a technique that reshaped what runners believed was possible. The wiki preserves both an “old patch” form and a “current patch” form with different execution requirements and limitations, and the restricted versus unrestricted split makes parrywalking itself a line in the sand for what the leaderboard is measuring. In practice, that meant whole route philosophies could pivot around whether the run is built for conventional traversal or for deliberate boundary-breaking.
The scene also reached a milestone when it began treating documentation as infrastructure rather than an afterthought. Category pages and technique write-ups turned scattered knowledge into reusable “how-to” language, including formal rules notes that protect verification integrity while still allowing practical runner needs like finishing after quitouts or crashes, and banning manual timer pauses. Over time, that kind of written standard became the backbone that lets new runners learn quickly and lets moderators evaluate runs consistently.
Finally, Dark Souls II has had a visibility milestone through major marathon showcases that signaled it could carry a long, technical run on a big stage. It appeared at Games Done Quick in multiple forms, including an SGDQ 2019 All Bosses (with DLC) showcase and an SGDQ 2015 run built around a “two players, one controller” incentive that highlighted community creativity as much as execution. Later schedules also show Scholar of the First Sin represented in GDQ programming, alongside smaller-format category experiments like Soup%.
Marksel – Any% – 23:25 – 6-4-14 – Platform/version: not specified in the early community archive (launch era) – Earliest “known WR” entry in a preserved early record list, capturing what the first standard Any% looked like before later routing tightened up
Bananasaurus_Rex – Any% – 17:11 – 6-13-14 – Platform/version: not specified in the early community archive (launch era) – A major early barrier drop that shows how quickly the route compressed once runners began sharing consistent boss order and execution ideas
Noobest – Any% – 17:10 – 9-10-14 – Platform/version: not specified in the early community archive (launch era) – A late-2014 “record era” marker from the same preserved list, useful for tracking how the scene stabilized before later meta shift
Distortion2 – Any% – 16:20 (LRT and RTA shown) – 9-12-14 – PC – A foundational Any% benchmark that later received mainstream recognition as a fastest-completion mark in Guinness World Records listings, and it remains a clean historical reference point for the early route’s maturity
ruhanzito – Any% – 13:39 (LRT) / 13:58 (RTA) – Date shown on leaderboard: 1 year ago – PC – A modern “Dragon Tooth” route showcase that represents late-stage optimization and consistency in the contemporary Any% meta
Stennis – Any% – 13:42 (LRT) / 14:03 (RTA) – Date shown on leaderboard: 2 years ago – PC – A key competitive-era result that illustrates how tight top-level execution has become in the same “Dragon Tooth” family of routes
FujoHoraire – Any% Current Patch (Restricted) – 48:48 (LRT) – Date shown on leaderboard: 2 years ago – PC – A defining reference run for the restricted “current patch” environment, attached to the “17000 souls” routing style that the category is organized around
cellar – Any% Current Patch (Restricted) – 48:48 (LRT) – Date shown on leaderboard: 1 year ago – PC – A notable tie at the top of the same restricted ruleset, showing how the category’s ceiling can become a game of incremental execution and risk management once the route is standardized
ruhanzito – Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin Any% (Restricted) – 51:19 (LRT) / 52:57 (RTA) – Date shown on leaderboard: 23 days ago – PC – A useful “SotFS-era” counterpart entry that helps readers understand how the re-release’s leaderboard identity diverges from the base game’s Any% structure
Distortion2 – All Bosses – 2:24:55 – 10 March 2016 – Platform/version: as recorded by Guinness World Records – A landmark long-form category benchmark cited outside the leaderboard ecosystem, useful as a “visibility milestone” for Dark Souls II speedrunning beyond Any%
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