jfc this is the most boring fucking game I've ever played in my life. It's not fun getting one-shotted by something that you don't know about until after its killed you at least once. There's nothing interesting about worldbuilding that's all made up of intentionally vague YoU hAvE tO fIlL iN tHe BlAnKs YoUrSeLf nonsense. There's nothing noteworthy about weapon upgrades that require you to look up a guide to see what's worth investing materials in and what's not.
And already some of you have doubtlessly gone down to comment "lmao git gud". Motherfucker it's not about difficulty. You know what was a difficult fucking game? Sekiro. That game is hard as balls and I absolutely love it, precisely because its designed in a such a way that it fixes everything about Dark Souls that sucks.
In Dark Souls, every single time you rock up to an enemy, you know exactly how you're going to defeat it. You're going to learn the patterns of its attacks, dodge at the appropriate time, and hit it in the intervals between. This is interesting once, but doing it over and over again for fifteen bosses is boring, repetitive bullshit.
In Sekiro they fixed this. Instead of literally just dodging every single attack, you have a dozen different defensive options that you have to learn and apply to different attacks. Instead of knowing how every single enemy encounter is going to go down, you have a bunch of different ninja tools that have different effects that you can experiment with.
And yet the geniuses of the gaming sphere all bashed their head cavities together and decided that SEKIRO was the bad one. The best game in the whole fucking genre, now sidelined because these morons confused a repetitive grind for difficulty. And as a result Elden Ring, which was supposed to be the masterpiece of the whole thing, is just another bland endurance test.
Personally I like Dark Souls because it rewards curiosity, patience, obsessive experimentation, anticipation and of course jolly cooperation
It juggle multiple vibes and themes while maintaining a coherent gameplay design, and the narrative hints at an entire universe just out of sight and actually rewards you if you're paying attention lore wise
The controls give your character a weight and solidity that makes combat FELT, instead of that vague feeling where your character is just a ghost sliding across some polygons
The "grind" as you call it is a testbed for different play styles, a way to build experience, get certain timings down, build anticipation and create some consequences for impatience and recklessness, which compliments the "weighty" feel of your player character
Level design is quite literally genre defining, music subtle and perfectly timed for maximum effect
It's a damn good game, and DS2 is even better
Hexers of the world unite!