I struggle to find something that Dark Souls 1 is the best at.

Not gameplay, the character is locked in rolling 4 directions at a snail's pace. The bosses are for the most part extremely shallow and tedious, bar a few exceptions who would be average in a modern Souls game. The atmosphere, while nothing to scoff at, doesn't always keep the immersion up when you turn a corner and see 20 dinosaurs pasted in a line or 10 skeleton wheels rolling at you.

I feel like people sort of feel bad for Dark Souls and give it the consolation prize of "Best inter-connectivity...!". The falloff after Anor Londo is so noticeably bad that it should be studied.. oh wait it has. Look, I appreciate Dark Souls for being the catalyst for some of my favorite video games of all time, but the guy did not age that well. If another remaster/remake is to every be done, I hope that Fromsoftware actually tries to give their firstborn the quality that it deserves.

Anyone I ask has a different story to tell about their first playthrough of this masterpiece. They had different struggles, got stuck in different places, took different routes to objectives... they also found different items/weapons, some missed big locations because the devs were not afraid to hide whole levels behind layers of secrets like fake walls or using random abilities/items in random spots. The game doesn't hold your hand and lets you make mistakes and learn from them, bosses being the most obvious examples of this, with clearly telegraphed attacks that are punishing but, once learned, easily avoidable. The combat is slow and clunky, mistakes costly. The map is interconnected and full of different items that might be useful for different builds, which means exploration feels very rewarding. I would say the game is not for everyone, especially over a decade later when the genre it has started has evolved in more ways than one, mostly thanks to the same developer working on sequels and spiritual successors.