Uhhhh yeah, Dark Souls 1 is my absolute favourite game of all time. It might not be the best one, but still remains my all-time favourite: the world design is truly one of the best I've ever seen in a videogame, it's literally god tier and deserves to be in a place where you get to see Metroid Prime and Super Metroid: exploration never got at the same level again. Lordran always gives you "another way" to make you go around the world, you could do Sif or Quelaag as your first boss if you want to; Taurus Demon blocks your way through the church but does it really? Nope, you can just get another way, actually two ways: you can either get down where Havel lies or from New Londo and step yourself into Darkroot Garden which no one talks about, but the whole Darkroot place (Valley of Drakes included) is a pure genius place that connects a shit ton of places in such a quick way you even forget how long it took you to get to it your first time.
Dark Souls 1 is FREEDOM, how you can "sequence break" it just makes my mind blow up every time; and upon everything most of the iconic characters are here: Siegmeyer, Solaire, Artorias, Lautrec, they're all here and their stories are all top notch! I could go hours on how much I love this game for several reasons and how much I do understand people complaining about it for the "4 lords part" being very weak, how broken this game is and so on. But if this is number one it's because there's a personal reason behind it.

This games is my "home". Whenever I go experiencing a lot of new franchises, exploring and living everything they have to offer, every now and then I want to come back to Lordran and I feel a sense of peace which is something way further than the game expects you to get the first time you play it. What I always say about Souls games is that the first time you play them they're an oppressing story that you're writing the conclusion of; from the second time onwards, they become a huge playground. You see that taurus demon ahead that once fucked you up? Now go chop his dick off with that big ass Zweihander you just got.

All Souls games have this and it's why I like them so much, but Lordran is the world I've bonded with the most.

-Artorias of the Abyss is also an incredible DLC that I think it's absoluetly necessary to play along with the base game, it's so radicated into my mind along with the game that I can't think of it as a DLC anymore. One note I might get is how it affects the base game, a thing I'd like to see more on DLCs is this exact feature: when you save Sif in Oolacile the bossfight cutscene changes when you fight him (or her? i don't know there's some theory behind sif but i don't give a shit at this point), and the first time I got it I was like "damn now I don't want to fight doggy anymore".

Elden Ring is just the culmination of years of experience into an absurdly huge package that I never had enough of. It's weird, there's people out there who get halfway through and already say "enough" but here I am, beating the whole game 4 times, getting all the achievements and backupping the save multiple times to fight bosses again, trying out new builds every time with the dumbest kind of magic Fromsoft came out with (you get purple meteors falling from behind you like what the fuck) and still think "is that it?"
Elden Ring has some of the highest peaks ever achieved such as Stormveil and Leyndell and it's also incredibly inconsistent with its quality with the damage output spike that just goes off the charts the moment you step into the mountaintops of the giants and a whole lot of repeated fights here and there.

But that aside, Elden Ring managed to do show me something important about my taste in games, and that being my love for Souls.

If Elden Ring did something way more than any other game it's showing how much I love and care for Souls games, and sealed that love in a letter that comprehends everything I will always enjoy about them, from the setting to the combat, from the art direction to characters, just everything at a point I even feel at home when I see a fucked up lock on, dumb ass hitboxes and the RPG system once again falling off so hard they just can't make one balanced system without making memes for a stat ("just lvl VIG bro" is the new "just lvl ADP bro").

Shadow of the Erdtree is on the works but as soon as I get my hands on it I'll devour it and talk about it here

What Bloodborne tries to do is mix the nexus-archstones system from Demon's Souls with the more interconnected world of Dark Souls, making some hit and misses here and there: what the game manages to do here is to absolutely nail the art direction, the soundtrack and the combat system. It's the game with the least amount of weapons but every weapon has not one but TWO unique movesets that are interchangeable mid combo. With some exceptions aside the bosses are okay-ish and the level design goes from a very high quality Yharnam to a literal corridor that goes from Yahar'gul to Mensis (but the shift from gothic to lovecraftian is so well-made I can't help it I'm sorry). What makes this top 3 is how its world captivates you into a never-ending nightmare with horrific creatures to man-made horrors beyond your comprehension (the 30fps lock on PS5 being the scariest of them all). It's visceral, it's gruesome, it's amazing and it's not on pc i fucking hate sony so much it's unreal.

-If The Ringed City was peak, The Old Hunters is peakest peak, i'm very proud of my argumentation capabilities on this one, please play it

When it came out I was so engaged by this game that, for a long period of time, it was my favourite Souls game (hence my favourite game ever). I literally consumed this shit, beat the bosses over and over, enjoyed the endgame aesthetics over and over, I literally devoured this game in every single aspect. After I went through one of the best honeymoon phases of my videogame career I realized the game has actually very big issues related to level design, world building, build system caps and how a lot of the lore just wants to wrap up and carries up what Dark Souls 1 built in the first place. Mind you, I don't say this very easily because I still think Dark Souls 3 is a masterpiece in its own right, the best boss quality (and the best bosses) are here and the combat is so fun. Even though I felt spells, miracles and pyromancies are "capped" at a standard amount of damage, the build stacks don't let you go crazy anymore and for good dps you just go and make sharp sellsword twinblades+10 with a dex build and you're good to go which is fun but kinda feels lame when you want to go optimal without RTR and bow glitch and this is one of the few that give you results.

World progression is linear and lame with few separations along the way but those are mostly "yeah if you go there than you have to come back here for the other direction" which I think is the aspect that hurt this game the most by its short development time: the world building is so linear, and the level design in the early-mid part of the game goes from mediocre to okay-ish like I really don't like "shit i don't want to do farron keep and road of sacrifices again".
But then again, I still think Dark Souls 3 is awesome and there are a lot of reasons to make it your personal favourite, it just fell off of me after going through it several times.

Now for the DLCs:
-Ashes of Ariandel is easily the worst DLC in Souls games, the only thing worth going through is Sister Friede which is crazy good and hard, the other boss like what the fuck I'm fighting npc+mob to unlock pvp arenas come on if it was a gimmick or something in base game i'd just call it a day but you make me charge more for DLC with only 2 bosses and one of them is a NPC player model?! Fuck that

-The Ringed City, now what do you want to say? It finally has a good duo bossfight again, it experiments with the levels way more than the rest of the vanilla game, it's peak dark souls art direction and it's peak bossfights. What else do you want?

You're this guy who just really likes Berserk, Zelda and Ico. You see this King's Field-like project rotting itself into cancellation because Sony thought it was a good idea to hire From Software to rival with Bethesda back when Oblivion released. You get to work around it, ignore everything your superiors tell you and transform the "open world" thing into the nexus and archstones structure you already know. You get shit from Sony and the rest of Japan after releasing the game but Bandai Namco and Atlus had other ideas, and now you're one of the most appreciated game directors of all time.

Demon's Souls might be the jankiest Souls game but oh god did it have some of the best levels I've ever seen: 3-1 still gives me chills to whenever I think about it, the whole Boletaria section, the lava worms labyrinth in 2-2, and some of the most cruel lore pieces ever surround the 5 world with a heartbreaking fight in the end.

Miyazaki is an absolute chad.

A lot of people argue of this being worse than vanilla DS2 and I see why: Heide is a pain in the ass, Forlorn is a thing, cyclopes and wyverns added for whatever reasons in early game places but it's Dark Souls 2 with the DLCs which are easily the best part of the game:
-Shulva has an amazing level design with levels that make you play with verticality
-Old Iron King has dumb enemy placement but holy shit the bosses are a huge upgrade, Sir Alonne doesn't deserve to be in this game
-Eleum Loyce has the best "vibes", might sound a bit sterile but you get it once you step into the snowy setting and the Ivory King bossfight

"Haha Dark Souls 2 bad game" except not really. Even though it's still the one I enjoyed the least of all the installments in Souls it was the one with the most variety in terms of biomes, possible builds (including fashion souls) and some great ideas that will be reintroduced later (such as respec and power stance) and some of them that are genius but never reintroduced, like the bonfire ascetic, which is a shame! Getting to play NG+ content without actually jumping through NG+ is a great idea, also you get to fight again bossfights you really enjoyed on a harder difficulty and with higher rewards (since you're fighting NG+ bosses and not the NG anymore). Also rewards for "challenge runs" like beating the game without dying or beating the game without bonfires are a cool touch they never brought back, sad thing because it was really cool to see devs thinking of players who really want to challenge themselves on those mad hard feats.

That being said it easily has some of the worst level design, bosses and world building in all of Souls, also if ADP became a huge meme there's a reason why.

Demon's Souls is NOT Dark Souls, and Bluepoint didn't get it. Amazing graphics and 60fps don't make the cut when you fuck up the setting so bad the only thing that you would look like without wanting to punch a wall are the black maiden's feet. And I hate feet, for crying out loud.

The soundtrack doesn't fit Demon's Souls, the artstyle doesn't fit Demon's Souls and now I'm playing a Souls game with a Blizzard fantasy game's art direction upon it.

While it's incredible to finally have this masterpiece available for modern platforms, it's an absolute shame they didn't work on it as much as it deserved: yes they fixed some bugs (and somehow new ones came up), yes it's 60 fps but a bonfire at vamos, controls remapping and new particle effects aren't worth the €40 to buy it again. The new matchmaking system is straight up insane, pyromancies are still free to use and not reworked around the builds, the lava lakes at demon's ruins are still rectangles, for some reason the rendering distance is still the same even though you have a more powerful hardware now and for some reason the gear here looks like plastic. Also very minor gripe to add on but I was kinda disappointed they replaced the bonfire flame art from the OG version with a generic fire particle effect. Trash remastered, Dark Souls deserves much more than this cashgrab.