I have a feeling this game has seen significant changes to balance over the years, because the experience I had playing through Dark Souls for the first time was a far cry from the reputation it had gained in the early days of its release.

Sure, some things are a little obtuse and you can find yourself stuck or making things a lot more difficult for yourself if you don't pay attention to everything, but I would honestly call Dark Souls a fairly reasonable game difficulty wise.

My shattered expectations aside, Dark Souls is a well crafted game and it's easy to see why it spawned possibly one of the most iconic sub-genres since the "Doom-like".

The story and lore is intriguing, wrapped in mystery. So much is left up to the player to investigate that there are entire elements of the game locked behind finding and helping certain individuals that you can easily miss. When I went to face the final boss, I did so knowing I had seen only a fraction of what the world had to offer. Future playthroughs will probably be done with a guide to find the games many secrets.

The areas I didn't enjoy so much were the lack of good fast travel in the early game (shortcuts don't cut it when I'm still having to run for 5-10 minutes) that made backtracking a chore. I also think the games difficulty curve was a bit out of whack, with the end game being incredibly easy compared to earlier parts. This was probably due to some overpowered gear, but almost all of the final bosses consisted of me just running up and bonking them with my big club until they died. Very little strategy or learning attack patterns like in the early stages of the game. It wasn't until the final boss that I even had to change my load out so I could parry attacks, at which point the fight was trivial.

Overall, happy to finally play through one of the most important games of the 360/PS3 generation.