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.
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.