Type: Game
Score: 8.5/10
Dark Souls 3, my lovely boy. I've been meaning to write my thoughts on this game down at some point but I just hadn't gotten around to it until now and in the meantime I've beaten the game three extra times so my thoughts should be a little more coherent.
First off let me talk about this game's bosses because that's what most people think about when they think about Dark Souls. It has a better boss lineup that 1, 2 and Elden Ring. I haven't played Bloodborne or Demon Souls but by the looks of some clips it beats those two as well. Now while this is high praise I should point out I personally don't think FromSoftware is all that good at making bosses, there are about 11 great bosses in this game out of the 25 bosses total. This alone isn't a terrible ratio but there are also just a whole bunch of bosses that are straight ass, most people complain about Curse-Rotted Greatwood and and High Lord Wolnir but I want to complain about the Abyss Watchers here. These guys do not get enough hate, the first phase is the boss basically playing itself and the second phase is so comically easy that it's barely even a fight. Genuinely how do people like these guys?? Thankfully all the bad bosses in this game are easy to an almost comical degree but this is mainly because all the bosses in the game are pretty easy (though being easy doesn't mean a boss is instantly terrible contrary to popular belief, my personal sweet spot is somewhere between this difficulty and Sekiro's difficulty). People really love to overhype this game's difficultly, maybe it's to gatekeep or something, maybe I just can't comprehend their great minds but I only really struggled with Nameless King and even then I beat that guy in like an hour which is shorter than it took me to beat Lady Butterfly in Sekiro. One last thing about the difficulty, I was straight terrified going into the Pontiff's arena because I had heard so many horror stories about how hard he is and then I beat him first try. It was frankly fucked up, maybe I'm just the goat what can I say (it's 100% because I had accidentally overleveled).
The real sell of this game for me was the exploration, it's by far my favourite in this game, more so than any other FromSoftware games I've played. There's just so much shit to find and explore and with so much enemy and item variety it made exploring super fun and rewarding not to mention the game is really good at subtly funnelling you to where you need to go (except for getting to Archdragon Peak because what the fuck). I know this isn't particularly unique to this game but struck the perfect balance for me with the game's scale. I also really just think the world holds up well, my favourite parts are the more gothic, somewhat Bloodborne-esque areas but I just about enjoyed everything except maybe the fuckass poison swamps. Due to exploration being so enjoyable for me I did feel a little overleveled for many bosses however because after exploring so much I kind of naturally just became strong as shit.
I should probably throw out some miscellaneous complaints as I did with other FromSoftware games. Firstly, as is tradition for FromSoftware apparently, I didn't get Playstation glyphs when I plugged my controller in, only XBOX. It was annoying but expected at this point. What wasn't expected was that my controller straight up wouldn't fucking work until I used a tool to make it act like an XBOX controller which was a pain in the ass. I'm pretty sure Steam is meant to do that but it just didn't work this time round and also it really shouldn't need to fall on Steam's shoulders to do FromSoftware's jobs for them. I also hated how you couldn't pause the game, I have to assume it's something to do with the online functionality but as someone who played offline because I went insane reading the bullshit people wrote on the ground everywhere online functionality doesn't matter to me and I'd much rather they figured out how to make the game pause instead. Like sometimes shit just comes up when I'm in a dangerous area so I just gotta either die because quitting out takes too long. Anyways despite me being a big meany I really do love DS3 which is why generally I'm so harsh on the rest of the FromSoftware games because I know how much higher they can reach.