So i recently got Dark Souls 3, and to be honest, i'm disappointed. Here's why.
First off, the controls. You're almost required to use a controller, because somehow they managed to make the keyboard and mouse controls worse than the controller controls, which is quite an achievement. Moving the mouse to look around works fine, until you start moving, and then the camera moves in a different direction depending on what direction you're moving, without you moving the mouse. So if you're moving left, and you want to look to your right, the camera will constantly turn left, so you literally have to fight the game for control of the camera. Additionally, none of the controls in the tutorial tell you how to do things with the keyboard and mouse, so even if you don't have a controller, it will tell you to press B to dodge and move the left stick to move. This is something 17-year olds working for free can do and yet a million dollar company has trouble with it.
And the controller isn't much better. As with most 3D games, moving the camera with the controller is difficult at best and nigh impossible at worst. You know a game has problems with the aiming when you literally have to automatically lock on to enemies to be able to hit them.
Now, in Dark Souls, the main method of avoiding attacks is dodging, which consists of a roll in whatever direction you're moving. This makes you invincible for a (VERY)short period of time, and so it can be used to dodge attacks. However, many enemies attack faster than you can dodge, so while you're still in the dodge animation but your invincibility(i-frames) has worn off, you can get hurt. Additionally, it takes stamina to dodge, and it also takes stamina to attack. So with many enemies and bosses, by the time you've dodged all the enemy's attacks and finally have an opening to attack yourself, you have run out of stamina.
An alternative method of avoiding damage is blocking with a shield. This blocks most, sometimes all damage from attacks as long as you're facing the attacker. However, you lose stamina when you block, and your stamina regen is greatly slowed when you have a shield out. Additionally, when you run out of stamina while blocking, you get momentarily stunned.
Speaking of stunning, many, if not all enemies can stun you, so even if you are in the middle of attacking, one frame away from hitting the enemy, clad in full metal armor, and 90 levels above it, a single rat can stun you. This is ridiculous. It's even worse when you get attacked by a group of enemies, as you can get stunlocked until you die, and be unable to avoid it. Your dodging is also unable to push through enemies, so if you're surrounded, you can't dodge out of the way, and you can't attack because you keep getting stunned.
Dark Souls is billed as "Hard, but fair", but in my experience it's more like "Hard, but also hard." A good example of this is how you're supposed to learn enemies' attack patterns to defeat them rather than just spamming the attack button. This is good in theory, but not executed very well. Many enemies have a "wind-up" before their attacks, telling you what attack they're doing. However, this wind-up is often not long enough to give you a chance to dodge, and each one looks similar, meaning it's ridiculously difficult to memorize them.
A game where this was done well is Hollow Knight, which, for the purposes of this article, can be described as Dark Souls 2D. Enemies' wind-ups are very unique and easy to identify, and you often get enough time to dodge the attacks, even without i-frames. Also, when you get hurt, it almost never takes out more than 1/5th of your health, while in Dark Souls, most enemies can kill you in 3 hits or so, with some even being able to onehit you, which completely ruins the balance.
When you die in Dark Souls, you lose all your souls(money). They drop where you died, and if you die before getting them back they vanish permanently. This is a bad idea because the fact that the player died in the first place means they're having difficulty in that area, and the penalty for that is having to go back to that area and retrieve their souls without dying. In places like boss fights, where you can't leave them without dying, killing the boss, or using special items, this can mean that you lose hours of progress through no fault of your own.
Going back to the controls, there's a particularly annoying problem that happens when you hit a button while in the middle of another animation. For example, if you hit the dodge roll button while you're in the middle of healing, you will dodge after you finish healing, even though you hit the button over a second ago. As another example, if you hit the attack button four times in a row, you will attack four times- even though you aren't hitting the buttons anymore. This also applies to the direction you're facing if you hit the dodge button several times and then turn to face a different direction, causing you to dodge in a completely different direction than you wanted to.
There's also the fact that some of the things you need to do in the game are so unintuitive the only way you can figure them out is with more luck than exists in the entire universe, or looking them up online. For example, one of the places you need to go to advance the game is hidden behind a secret wall that looks just like every other wall in the game, and you have to hit it to be able to go through it, and the game doesn't even tell you secret walls exist. And you have to go here to complete the game. The only way i found it was by looking it up and then wandering around hitting literally every wall i came across until i stumbled upon it.
In summary, the difficulty of Dark Souls comes mostly from the ludicrously high damage you take, the difficulty of using the controls, and the unfairly quick and unintuitive enemy attacks. Basically, it's fake difficulty, that's less a test of skill and more a test of memorizing literally every attack of every enemy in the game so you can dodge before they even swing at you, which is sometimes the only way to actually avoid being hit. Overall, i'd rate this game about a 4/10. The idea is great, and the gameplay is fun, but the unfairness and fake difficulty causes far, far more frustration than joy, which is a shame because this game has so much potential.
If you have any feedback, feel free to comment, and have a good day!
