Having just finished this game it's honestly the most torn I've ever felt on a high-profile release and I hate feeling the way I do about it, on one hand aspects like the combat and world as well as all the design innovations that inspired way too many indies for years to come absolutely deserve all the praise they get, they're phenomenal and I can't wait to see how they're expanded upon in later Fromsoft titles. While some areas are more frustrating than others and later portions are every bit as rushed as people claim, for the most part level design with the interconnected world and bosses is well done and encourages getting good and learning each of the game's quirks while rarely feeling impossible.
That being said, the one thing I just couldn't ignore throughout my playthrough was the game's challenge, or rather the illusion of challenge it tries to pretend it has by wasting time at every opportunity. As a whole, while I found the difficulty definitely above average, aside from a couple key areas I rarely got stuck through most of the game. To be fair, this definitely has to do with my friends telling me what stats to prioritize and messages revealing vital secrets and it's unlikely someone going in totally blind would have this experience, but regardless I had a lot of fun learning the mechanics of the game and its bosses, which is why it's a big shame it does everything it can to prevent you from engaging with them.
The infamous boss runs for example are frankly an awful case of design that would be ripped apart were they in any other game. Even as a god gamer you're likely to have a few deaths on each encounter learning patterns, and every time that happens it could take several minutes to run from the closest bonfire to get another attempt, even when using every shortcut available. While I hate it I could see the point in its inclusion if these runs actually held any dangers, but aside from like three cases I can remember (two of which were just because it was early on and I didn't know shit) every run felt trivially easy to get through with little to no damage, serving as nothing more than a waste of time to artifically extend the game. Other mechanics such as curses, the hilariously broken physics causing me to fall to my death time and time again through no fault of my own, and the extremely well-hidden fast travelable bonfires in certain areas you need to later return to drove me absolutely insane, and while I respect the lack of direction it really began to piss me off once I reached my limit with the other issues. Of the 20ish hours my playthrough took, probably a good quarter of that was taken up with either running back to a boss or needlessly backtracking through areas I'd already passed through countless times to get somewhere my fast travels later in the game didn't reach or find some random thing arbitrarily stopping progression.
These issues completely ruined most of the positive feelings I had as time went on, and even disregarding them I don't see how this could really be called a good game when such a large chunk of it is widely considered as bad as it is. After it all I'm honestly left wondering why this game is still held in such high regard given everything that came afterwards.
or i just have a skill issue or something idk man