A melting pot of a game that influenced subsequent action games. Unlike those, this one managed to pick the right dose of every of its parts, and scatter them the right way so that none of them exposed their repetitiveness.

Also, the series seemed to forget the subtleties of this game's combat mechanics, specially regarding the QTEs. They were largely seen as the coward option in this game, not only giving you a breather from adjacent attacks but also depriving you from getting extra red orbs in certain cases.
Some quick time events did offer you more orbs than normal, but they were balanced out by either letting enemies hit you while doing them, or through the brutal death bonus, which obblied you to have a combo superior to 10 or 25 hits to have a slight red orb bonus when doing a QTE.

This, joined to the fact that you have to optimize your red orb count a lot in this game (most runs end up without all weapons getting maximized) was a constant tension of using the easy way out of a battle or risking more.

The sequels dumbed this down through the orb multiplier system in each difficulty and basically rewarding you more for only going for QTEs.