The tight and fast-paced combat in this game is like a dream come true, with a focus on aggressive play, precise step-dodges and parrying. It fits the way I play the Souls games perfectly, and it kind of makes it hard for me to go back to something like Dark Souls II, with its slow, methodical gameplay.

The visuals in this game are simply stunning, with the gruesome enemy designs, glistening blood splatters, and frankly disgusting guts and fur covering all of the enemies, amidst beautiful gothic-looking environments. It's hard to believe that this came out only a year after Dark Souls II, since the graphics truly make the games seem like they are an entire console generation apart.

I'm not one for lore, as I prefer to let the gameplay and the player's own experience tell the story (something which the first Dark Souls absolutely excelled at), but this game is surprisingly comprehensible even without having to read every item description and look up VaatiVidya videos. The setting seems fresh and unique among video games, and the environments are a joy to explore, with the graphics assisted by the excellent level design rivaling the best of FromSoft's work (still pretty linear, though).

I am not a fan of the Souls games' insistence on having little to no music outside of bossfights, and having large, 'epic' orchestral tracks play during bossfights, but I have to admit that there were actually a few 'epic' tracks which I actually enioyed in this game (most notably the 'final' boss theme), so I think that this game might have the best OST in a FromSoft game since King's Field IV.

With that said, no game is perfect (especially when it comes to FromSoftgames), and I do have some pretty major gripes with the game.

Firstly, the framerate. Not only is the game locked to 30FPS, but it hardly ever reaches that framerate outside of bossfights in small arenas. The horrible framerate on the original PS4 really does the graphics an injustice, and I honestly don't understand how Sony even let FromSoft release such a poorly-performing exclusive.

Secondly, the blood vial system. I don't understand why FromSoft regressed from the Estus system in Dark Souls, to a system where you have to grind for medkits after you use all of them up (be it, grinding for money to buy them with, or grinding for them directly). It's like they looked at Dark Souls II, decided that the lifegems were way better than Estus, and then balanced them by only letting you hold twenty of them at any given time. It's baffling. Fortunately I was able to discover a blood echo dupe on YouTube to alleviate the grinding, and later on, basic fodder in chalice dungeons dropped enough blood echoes to let me buy 800 blood vials and fill out my stash, rendering the effect of their finite nature completely null. Which begs the question, what is the point of making a healing system that only becomes enjoyable when you've completely surpassed its limits?

Speaking of chalice dungeons, they suck. You have to grind randomly-generated dungeons to get good blood gems for your weapons and basically break the game (unless you have PS+, where you can just get all the most overpowered stuff with little to no effort; I do not have PS+), and you have to get through the 'main' chalice dungeons to fight some of the hardest (read: cheap and frustrating) bosses in the game, with a unique boss at the end. Now, I don't want to go on a huge rant here, so let me just say that nothing about the chalice dungeons was genuinely enjoyable for me, and I honestly feel like my experience with the game would have been better if I had not done them. Still, the fact that I had to consciously choose to try and beat all the bosses (as I do in every other Souls game) to complete this otherwise completely optional 'challenge' makes it so that I can't really hold it against the game. I guess I'll just say that it would have been better if there was no achievement for beating the Queen of Yharnam, because then I wouldn't have had to spend hours running through copy-pasted dungeons and fighting bosses with tons of HP and one-hit kill attacks (defiled chalice can suck my Kos parasite).

Speaking of Kos, the DLC was the overall best part of the game, with some nice-looking environments and interesting bosses (albeit easy; everyone except for Laurence took me 1-3 tries, and Laurence took around ten because of he aforementioned huge HP pool and OHKOs). It presented a nice story with a surprisingly happy ending, and was overall a great time.

So, at the end of the day, this game is not perfect, but it probably has fewer problems than every other FromSoft game (maybe except for King's Field IV), and the successful parts of it are overwhelmingly strong, making anything less than 5 stars feel like an injustice to the masterful craftsmanship displayed in most aspects of the game, particularly combat and visual design. This game is a must-play for any FromSoft fan, as well as anyone who likes having a win button, coincidentally bound to L2. Hell, if you like ARPGs where you grind for an hour to get a 1% boost to damage, you'll probably like the chalice dungeons!