This game is still very good, but I definitely think i've fallen out of love with it a bit. I first played Dark Souls 5 years ago back in the fall of 2019 and it helped get me out of my depression. I thought to myself that if I could make it thru Blighttown despite dying a million times there, then there's no reason I couldn't learn Organic Chemistry or cope with the death of my grandmother. And it's true! This game legitimately helped teach me the lesson of perseverance! This is such a beautiful game in so many ways, and will always be near and dear to my heart.

The problem is that it's often un-fun from a mechanical standpoint. Of all Fromsoft's titles, this one is handedly the most dated. The most simplistic movesets, 4D-rolling on lock-on, and the most levels that are only hard because of a inane gimmick (Tomb of the Giants, Catacombs, New Londo, Lost Izalith, etc.). The fact that you can't teleport at the start of the game is neat, but the fact that even after getting the lordvessel, your warp-points are still limited (and that you can't see the area that you're warping to) is much more frustrating than it should be. If you want to go Lost Izalith again, you have to walk all the way there.

The world is magical traverse and it really does feel so contiguous from top to bottom, but co-oping this game with friends made me realize how many elements here are unnecessarily frustrating. Thankfully, Fromsoft also realized and made necessary changes by the time Dark Souls 2 and Bloodborne released.

Half a decade ago, I would've told you that this was a perfect game, but more experience with other souls games and gaming has shown me that it's not.

The God of War gameplay loop is so fun that it's just fun to go through this, but I will say I think this trend of using existing properties to make roguelikes kinda hits its limit here. I think it's more fun to craft a build to get really good with like in the base-game than it is to randomly select weapon upgrades and runes. I think part of the problem here is that there are only a handful of upgrades that can actually visibly alter the way you play the game that you can get during run whereas in Hades, each combination of boons and hammers will give you a different experience each run. As a result, the last few runs, I found myself playing very similarly without much new going on.

That being said, Kratos growth through the base game and now this is still magnificent, and I think this is a much better and more experimental showing for Sony's DLCs then something along the lines of Horizon's Burning Shores