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.