trying not to let the last couple bosses and areas spoil the whole thing for me but they really are that bad. think promised consort radahn is probably the worst major encounter they’ve ever done; all of from’s worst tendencies ramped up to 11. it’s like they don’t know how to make bosses harder other than by making the aoe’s bigger, the combos longer, the health pools more enormous etc.. some other systems that i think don’t end up working quite right, either. like the fragments which get to be an enormous chore if you aren’t scouring every corner on your first way through everything. i typically leave myself quite a bit of stuff to do after the final boss - i like knowing there’s still some game for me to play after i beat the game - and the approach to forced exploration through these level up tokens pretty much makes that not an option. you gotta do most everything before your character is at a point where the final encounter is even worth attempting, and it puts up similar walls throughout the game to make sure you’re doing your due diligence with the coin collecting. stinks! i did thoroughly enjoy my first several hours with this and thought it was as good as anything in base game but by the end i was genuinely wondering whether or not miyazaki is washed so 2.5 seems appropriate i suppose. messmer and golden hippo innocent

Taking Miyazaki's dick out of my mouth for this one:
For everything FromSoftware nailed in Shadow of the Erdtree, which was the level design and progression this time around, they dove headfirst into unfun and uncreative enemy design.
Shadow of the Erdtree took over 2 years from the original game's launch, and I think that time made the distaste I have for a lot of the enemies here even stronger. Most enemies were either Bloodborne's Shark levels of unfun, or reused from the base game, or even worse, ideas from previous games. The bosses are also overtuned, and not as satisfying or memorable as the ones in the base game (or their previous works). But most of them I didn't struggle that much with, about 6 Remembrance bosses taking less than 3 attempts and only about 3 (and Bayle) taking any longer. So it wasn't skill level for me, it was personal disinterest for the direction FromSoftware wanted to ramp up the difficulty to be more "glad that's over" compared to "I overcame something incredible".
Also, the PC performance got even worse so that alone took what I was originally going to give a 7 a 6, optimize your games, the amount of freezes and crashes are unacceptable.