Last Hero of Nostalgaia is a pretty close recreation of Dark Souls, while also being a meta commentary of Video Games.

The gameplay is very close to DS1 to me, its kind of clunky, and missing a few things Dark Souls has, but it the closest I've seen from a non-souls game. It has the a great interconnected world just like DS1, every place has multiple meaningful shortcuts. It even does some new stuff, like changing how you interact with reading item descriptions. Most weapons/armours need to be remembered, which involves bringing them to specific places so they can, and they will give a little blurb that hints about this. Once this is done, most weapons will unlock a weapon art, some other bonus, and a damage bonus. I find this mechanic neat because it actively leads you to interact with lore.

This is one of those "I get the reference, I clapped!", but goddamn I love it, I did fucking clap. The game has a bunch of fun references like an area just called "Player Housing", and the big bosses are so neat. Most weapons/armours are just references (i.e one weapon is just the Soul Edge, or you can get Master Chief armour). I'm gonna describe one of the bosses here to the end of the paragraph just so I can describe the fun designs to match the original character, if you dont want that spoiler skip. One of the big bosses is the Moogle from FF6, he backstabbed Terra and Locke because he was greedy. When you go to face him, he looks like Smough with a little moogle head. His boss fight his him dancing around, casting blue magic, and using his Dragoon lance. Other bosses also have very fun interpretations of their origin, just very well put together.

Game does have some stuff I don't really like. I think the weapon hitboxes on Big Weapons either don't last long enough, or the hitboxes are too small, also felt wrong when I missed enemies. You won't get any fast travel ability, this isn't really a fault, since there are a bunch of shortcuts, just be aware of backtracking this involves. The main thing I don't like is this game has Dark Soul quests. Time sensitive quest triggers that if you walk too far into another zone, you are fucked over. I missed all but 1 quest (and missed out on the true final boss) because of that crap. I really just hate that they are time sensitive, it really doesn't make much sense why they are besides emulating the dumb ass Quests in Dark Souls. There isn't even a New Game+ (at the time I wrote) so I can speed through the game again to attempt quests again.

Besides these very minor complaints, I love this shit. Its Dark Souls (I love that game!) and it shows huge love to Video Games (I love Video Games!), hugely recommend to anyone who loves these two things.