One of the chiefly misunderstood qualities of the Souls series is failing to realize its nature as an exclusively AAA genre. I think people intuitively understand the idea that some games could only be made in an AAA space because they're bottlenecked by voice over, art production, set piece vfx, etc (like an uncharted, or a call of duty) but there's some disconnect that prevents otherwise capable critics from identifying when a game cannot be made without a level of testing, iteration, animation, re-animation, prototype animation, and experimentation that is completely unacheivable without a skilled, 200 person team (and an external mocap studio on tap).

The Deck 13 "souls likes" represent a nearly big enough studio that had enough sense to notice it was impossible to duplicate souls-like combat (animation driven everything and very little "spreadsheet design" is hopeless with a ~50 person core team) but not enough sense to realize that attempting to cobble souls game encounters out of limited animation
moveset, rubber band movement, and big box and sphere hit tests was completely moronic.

Awful game.

The type of game where it feels really good to grind for hours. For me it started to become a mob grinder simulator. When I entered a new room my brain started to map out the easiest way to exit/re-enter and grind all the enemies. Fun when you have to mess with ur loadout to efficiently clear a room quickly over and over. Playing this way is not at all a requirement btw.

The amount and variety of spells crippled the game's difficulty a bit. I used the NIGHTMARE cheatcode to unlock hard mode, it was pretty brutal at the start but after the first few hours it became trivially easy, especially when it came to bosses, which I could basically permanently stunlock with several spells. I don't think I'd necessarily call the game poorly balanced though. I remember hearing that they designed every boss to be possible to kill with minimal equipment and I think that's a good design basis. Outside of bossfights, spells aren't particularly broken, and I felt like I actually had to experiment a lot to find good spell loadouts for different situations (hitting enemies through walls, hitting many flying enemies, etc.) The sheer volume of spells in the game is cool but I found many of them to be not very good.

For some reason I wanted to try 100%ing the game and gave up at 97% or something. There are so many weapons, many extremely rare drops, also lots of secret enemies I never would have found w/o a guide. But I guess that's in the spirit of Castlevania so I can't complain much. Highly recommend against even trying to 100% the game as it'd involve you just crafting weapons and following guides for hours.