I honestly don’t understand the ESRB’s games rating system. I’m sure that they have a very particular set of criteria that triggers a specific rating slapped on the box.

However, I really don’t understand why Dark Souls II is getting a T rating after its precursor, Dark Souls, was rated M. The confusing thing is that the ESRB’s descriptions of the two games have almost no differences.

Between the two games, the only difference in terms of what the ESRB calls “content descriptors” is that DS2 has mild language where as Dark Souls does not. Both games share the blood and gore, partial nudity and violence content descriptors.

As for the actual rating summary, there is only one line in the board’s explanation that seems to have any difference. The summary for Dark Souls says that combat includes “large splashes of blood” while Dark Souls II only features “small splashes of blood.” Apart from that, it doesn’t seem as though there is a significant difference in the content of the games. Looking at the video that’s been released, that’s more differences than I can find.

Whether this change in rating is indicative of the ESRB being more lenient when it comes to ratings of violent games or really a case of the amount of blood in the last game triggering a higher rating than this one is something that we may never know. I guess that we’ll have to wait for another sequel to get a different rating before we can reach a conclusion.

Dark Souls II is due for release on March 11th on PS3 and Xbox 360. The PC release is still TBA but hopefully we can still get our hands on a copy of that for review.

Source: ESRB