Far and away my least favorite FromSoft Soulsborinko.
Spoilers below first paragraph.
"Jolly cooperation" for farmers I guess, I never felt like summoning was such a total win button in the other games (save for specific NPC summons in DS1 like the dude who can solo the iron golem), finding out it only increases boss health by 10-20% is such a letdown. Which is a shame, because a good number of the bosses here love cheap-shotting you and are absolutely relentless at least if you're a pure dex non-weeaboo like I was. The online came back mid-playthrough for me, which was nice, but again a letdown because it felt like I was just pressing the "win" button whenever I summoned for a boss. I only failed 2 or 3 summoning raids in total of the maybe 10-15 I used (all in the mid-late game)
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FromSoft is usually good about making their bosses at least feel a little organic, even in the rudimentary Demon's Souls; but they feel far from that here most of the time, feeling weirdly easy for the first third of the game, getting a difficulty spike, mostly normal for a bit forward and then taking a nosedive in how organic they feel starting immediately after Pontiff Sulyvahn. Bosses have always all had patterns and react to the player in different ways, and yes almost all of them even in DS1 "input read" to some degree but they're cleverly disguised around for the most part and dressed up to be interesting. Dark Souls 3 decides to just say screw it, frame one mid-combo interruptions and perfect punishes beyond reason,; the most egregious example of this in my mind is Champion Gundyr who will interrupt his otherwise repeating patterns mid-combo literally the first frame you register R1/R2 or Action, not to mention the dogshit design that is his shoulder bash which he can whip out seemingly randomly with 0 windup or tell that will decimate your stamina bar if you had the audacity to try and block it (unless you took the tank build approach with Greatshields, then you just win the game I guess! ridiculous how good they are)
Shoutouts to the DLC having one of the most blatant oversights in playtesting, making it a series first where the player can be attacked unannounced while conversing with an NPC because enemies a mile away patrol all the way up to the door she's at.
This is also the most linear in the series by a mile, making even Demon's Souls blush; once in a while the game tries to harken back to DS1 and DS2 by showing off the obligatory "contraption does not move" or iron door "that does not open from this side", but these feel weirdly shoehorned half of the time for the handful they are present. Despite this, NPC questlines are somehow at a series low in how obtuse and vague they are, with lots of backtracking down the gigantic hallway known as Dark Souls 3, while the NPCs themselves have I think the least dialogue in the Dark trilogy even still.
Despite being linear hell the game is a stuttery, frame dropping mess, and has been since launch. I've tried all of the suggested community fixes and eventually they undo themselves anyways, so whatever. It's mind boggling to me that DeS, DS1/DS1R, DS2/DS2:SOTFS don't have any of this even a tenth as bad, even Elden Ring nowadays runs MUCH better than this and that's a sprawling, constantly loading massive open world game dense with shit to do. What went wrong here? Not to mention the extremely aggressive LOD constantly making model pop-in painfully obvious. Watching my 3080 or 3700x actively choke because I ran around a ladder one time was mildly amusing, until I realized that's how the rest of the game was going to be. What even happened here?
Whatever. I might revisit it someday, I don't know. A lot of the bosses are cool on paper but were actively either boring or infuriating to fight with a payoff that only amounted to me saying "finally it's over" just like I think Miyazaki said when he put the final period in the fourth "Souls" game's 2nd DLC's script.
Oh also the game has like SIX swamps. WTF!!!
Spoilers below first paragraph.
"Jolly cooperation" for farmers I guess, I never felt like summoning was such a total win button in the other games (save for specific NPC summons in DS1 like the dude who can solo the iron golem), finding out it only increases boss health by 10-20% is such a letdown. Which is a shame, because a good number of the bosses here love cheap-shotting you and are absolutely relentless at least if you're a pure dex non-weeaboo like I was. The online came back mid-playthrough for me, which was nice, but again a letdown because it felt like I was just pressing the "win" button whenever I summoned for a boss. I only failed 2 or 3 summoning raids in total of the maybe 10-15 I used (all in the mid-late game)
=================
FromSoft is usually good about making their bosses at least feel a little organic, even in the rudimentary Demon's Souls; but they feel far from that here most of the time, feeling weirdly easy for the first third of the game, getting a difficulty spike, mostly normal for a bit forward and then taking a nosedive in how organic they feel starting immediately after Pontiff Sulyvahn. Bosses have always all had patterns and react to the player in different ways, and yes almost all of them even in DS1 "input read" to some degree but they're cleverly disguised around for the most part and dressed up to be interesting. Dark Souls 3 decides to just say screw it, frame one mid-combo interruptions and perfect punishes beyond reason,; the most egregious example of this in my mind is Champion Gundyr who will interrupt his otherwise repeating patterns mid-combo literally the first frame you register R1/R2 or Action, not to mention the dogshit design that is his shoulder bash which he can whip out seemingly randomly with 0 windup or tell that will decimate your stamina bar if you had the audacity to try and block it (unless you took the tank build approach with Greatshields, then you just win the game I guess! ridiculous how good they are)
Shoutouts to the DLC having one of the most blatant oversights in playtesting, making it a series first where the player can be attacked unannounced while conversing with an NPC because enemies a mile away patrol all the way up to the door she's at.
This is also the most linear in the series by a mile, making even Demon's Souls blush; once in a while the game tries to harken back to DS1 and DS2 by showing off the obligatory "contraption does not move" or iron door "that does not open from this side", but these feel weirdly shoehorned half of the time for the handful they are present. Despite this, NPC questlines are somehow at a series low in how obtuse and vague they are, with lots of backtracking down the gigantic hallway known as Dark Souls 3, while the NPCs themselves have I think the least dialogue in the Dark trilogy even still.
Despite being linear hell the game is a stuttery, frame dropping mess, and has been since launch. I've tried all of the suggested community fixes and eventually they undo themselves anyways, so whatever. It's mind boggling to me that DeS, DS1/DS1R, DS2/DS2:SOTFS don't have any of this even a tenth as bad, even Elden Ring nowadays runs MUCH better than this and that's a sprawling, constantly loading massive open world game dense with shit to do. What went wrong here? Not to mention the extremely aggressive LOD constantly making model pop-in painfully obvious. Watching my 3080 or 3700x actively choke because I ran around a ladder one time was mildly amusing, until I realized that's how the rest of the game was going to be. What even happened here?
Whatever. I might revisit it someday, I don't know. A lot of the bosses are cool on paper but were actively either boring or infuriating to fight with a payoff that only amounted to me saying "finally it's over" just like I think Miyazaki said when he put the final period in the fourth "Souls" game's 2nd DLC's script.
Oh also the game has like SIX swamps. WTF!!!