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.
Did you try a Magic build? That may be more your style.
Anywho, I do think that what you're asking for out of Dark Souls is something fundamentally different than what it actually is. In my opinion, Sekiro shares far more with older games like Tenchu, the Ninja Gaiden series, & maybe just a little bit w/ Metal Gear Rising than it does with most other games in the "SoulsBorne" lineage. It is at base a "Ninja Game" first & foremost, and I think it really only gets considered as similar to the rest of From Software's catalogue due to shared developer parentage, and similar control formatting.
Conversely, it's well known that the "Souls'" both Demon & Dark, are spiritual successors & reimaginings of the old King's Field games. Now anybody who knows anything about the history of JRPGs could tell you at a glance that King's Field is obviously a console-centric adaptation of old Wizardry & Ultima-style CRPGs, in particular Ultima Underworld. In fact FromSoftware themselves specifically cite the commercial success of the Japanese port of the original Wizardry game for their 1990 pivot to videogames development (previously they made commercial business software). Just as well, Hidetaki Miyazaki has expressed in the past that he draws just as much influence from TTRPGs like Dungeons & Dragons as he does other videogames in terms of his own games design philosophy.
Put another way; although this is rarely addressed in discussions of the games themselves, the "SoulsBorne" series in fact shares a direct "genealogical-design" link with Morrowind & Skyrim. Which I think is probably most self-evident in Elden Ring & reveals the whole game about why that specific game seems to work so goddamn well. They've been perfecting, incrementally, what Bethesda has been fumbling with trying to implement wholesale for the last 20 years; which is the question of how to correctly adapt the Ultima-Wizardry CRPG framework to console gaming.
This also, I think, explains what some of your problem in "getting into" Dark Souls might be. A lot of people try to approach the games like they're action games & get clowned on, they're not. They're Western-Style RPGs that happen to have been developed in Japan, and you need to approach them with that mindset I think, in order to really get any mileage or enjoyment out of them as games.
My love of TTRPGs and the Souls series goes basically hand-in-hand. They really do feel very similar, down to having to learn a whole system to be able to play them adequately.
This is a FINE note.
It really shows. Old school D&D, before they invented rests and gave everyone a ton of magic powers, was largely about smart use of your resources. You had only so much HP, so much healing, so many spell slots, and you had to stretch that until you could get to a safe spot where you could hole up for 8 hours straight. And the whole time each encounter was using up your resources, so you had to try to be smart and tactical about how you were fighting, what challenges you took on and what challenges you evaded. Dark Souls nailed that deliberate, measured gameplay. Especially early on you've got to be thinking about what you're doing and where you're going so you can make it to the next bonfire before you run out of arrows or estus or whatever. It's one of hte most dungeon-crawly dungeon crawler games out there.
Damn, the effortpost looks good on you, comrade :stalin-heart:
Turn Sekiro into an openworld Tenchu game. PLEASE.
It could be so perfect. I also really want to see ninjas interpreted in their daytime unmasked hidden in plain sight activities.
Anyway good post. I haven't played the other Souls games though don't shoot me!
Indeed, people forget that Demon's Souls was meant to be a direct competitor to Elder Scrolls, I don't know what was Sony thinking though