While I could say some great positives for this game, I'll just focus on the overbearing negatives that modern Souls-Players are too afraid or ignorant to see:
- First off, the Camera is absolutely atrocious. It is STILL the same thing that it was in Demon's Souls, and there it was great, only that Dark Souls III is so much faster, so absurd in the scale and speed of its bosses, that the camera constantly breaks or merely serves to disorient you. There are even some dynamic camera moments here and there, but From clearly didn't put them where they actually needed to be to make the camera-eating monstrosities of bosses bearable. Who ever asked for R3 to put you back to the center of your character when you're out of range to target an enemy?
- The visuals often give a total mismatch between thematic point and what you're actually seeing. The game is so concerned with being golden/yellow, overbearingly so, that the world unironically looks more alive, and LESS dark, than the original Dark Souls I, even though this is literally supposed to be the end of the world. Even the darkest of places have artificial lighting to ruin the atmosphere. The Dancer being the best-looking boss tells a lot; the constrast between the shadows and the brightness of the swords is amazing. Dark Souls II gets a lot of hatred for scaling the brightness of each area before release way up than it originally was, so that torches are obsolete even in the darkest brightness setting, with everything being artificially lit for no reason, when in truth Dark Souls III, the game about THE END OF LIGHT, suffers just as much from it. I highly recommend playing this game on the lowest brightness possible, as that gives the game at least some sort of flair and lighting contrast.
- Enemy placement is absolutely absurd. This is primarily the case in the DLCs, but even the base game suffers from it. Enemies have multiple hit combos and can two-shot you, but instead of making them interesting encounters by themselves, FromSoft asked themselves: "How can we make this fight difficult?" While dismissing the actual point: How could they make it interesting? The Profaned Capital, for example, has THREE big, massively strong, camera-eating slugs next to each other, that simultaneously have a lot of lore going on, when the entire point and encounter would have been so much more memorable if they just had one of them, or at least seperated them. Ornstein and Smough is STILL the last good encounter of multiple strong enemies targeting you at once; Dark Souls III is not concerned with letting the enemies satisfyingly play off of each other, but rather annoy you with an onslaught of infinite stamina combo attacks that leave open no room to get hits. UNLESS you abuse the bad AI of the enemies to slowly lure out each one of them, where I ask myself if they genuinely thought this makes encounters more interesting rather than unbearably boring, considering how often it happens. The first two Souls games ALSO have a lot of enemies placed next to each other at times, but they compensate for this by giving them either slow movesets or little health; Dark Souls III does neither.
- Level-design is almost constantly a huge step downward from its predecessors, where it constantly reminds you that everything is collapsing in on itself, while giving you a basic, generic linear progression from beginning to end. Even the DREG HEAP, of all places, has nothing but linearity. Nothing is satisfyingly interconnected, and the only things that are connect, are connected by nonsensical elevators or doors that inexplicably open from one side. The point of shortcuts is to give the world a cohesive and non-deprived way of transportation, so when that point is lost, why not just give basic checkpoints?
- Both Solaire and Patches pandering is a joke. When Patches appeared, I already rolled my eyes. But when he unironically re-appears at the end of the world as basically one of the last human being standing, I wanted to end it all. This is a whole topic by itself, how this, on a meta-level, really conveys that the world is ending: Dark Souls III is nothing more than the superficial memes (meant as the actual definition, which you might know if you've played Metal Gear before) that the normie community is defined by. "Oh hey guys it's Solaire hahaha Onion Knight Praise the Sun get it guys, hahaha, Dark Souls is so difficult man wow hahaha!" If they genuinely wanted to make a meta-point by saying, "See, this is what Dark Souls amounts to at the end, nothing is left but the boring superficiality of what used to be an auteur's masterpiece," it STILL doesn't excuse that it's bad. Being bad for a reason still makes it bad.
- Bosses are a huge downgrade. Everything is just a basic doge-and-hit fest, which doesn't even surpass the combat of basic action games. I don't want to repeat what Matthewmatosis has already stated in "The Lost Soul Arts of Demon's Souls," so if you want to know more about how the gameplay/atmosphere got butchered in favour of yet another boss that's basically the same thing as came before, watch that great video.
- Soundtrack is bland. While there are some notable exceptions, most is just a mesh of overbearingly loud nonsense that completely dismisses any of the atmosphere the boss fight might have had.
- The atmosphere of these games has been destroyed. Why? Because modern normie players, ignorant of any thought, just want to mindlessly run to the next boss and have another dodge-and-hit fest. The complete lack of psychological elements in gameplay, when the story is so heavy with it, is utterly baffling. You're no longer forced to think about what you see, what to do, like a real adventurer, but rather the world is designed for your convenience, so that you can have the most linear exploration possible.
- And lastly, this game is STILL just a copy of Demon's Souls for the most part, with nothing that gave the original soul. Because before you go and tell me that things like poison swamps and sorcerer's that make copies of themself is psychological gameplay that forces you to think, these things ALL already existed in Demon's Souls. Which is why, seeing them for the fifth time in a row, is just boring and repetitive. This series has become creatively bankrupt long before Elden Ring even released.

So with all that being said, yeah it's a good game, LOL. I genuinely can't help but love it. Why? Because of the story. The story is so good, aaaaaaa. I love it so much. But this is not something I care to talk about here.

Bizarre kusoge grindathon. Unlike most Mystery Dungeon games, you keep everything when you leave the dungeon—levels, stat boosts, equipment—and bring everything back in, too. Where Torneko 1 and Shiren 1 were about strategy and risk management, Chocobo 1 is about fusing equipment together over and over again until you have high enough stats to proceed.

Also, while movement is still turn-based, attacking uses a real-time ATB system. If your attack charges faster than an enemy's—and it usually does, especially once you start snorting stat-boost seeds—you can walk up to an enemy, attack them, run away until you've left their aggro range, and repeat until you've defeated them. This works on every nonboss enemy in the game.