To me, great in its level design philosophy of Famicom action-platformers, specifically Castlevania. It's about trial and error, every time you die you make it slightly further the next time.

Like, it's not hard, you've just got learn how to beat it by failing, which is great. Despite only dying to two or three of them, the bosses were all insanely interesting.

I don't mind the online elements, though with the servers shut down it makes it impossible to get the intended experience years later which is shit. Luckily, thanks to fans, I was able to play this online on an emulator with a DS3, so it's still doable, but games should be designed with the future in mind. (Is it playable? Sure, is one of its key features completely gone? Yes)

I've really gotta play Dark Souls at some point.

The critical reception of this game was absolutely criminal and one of the first times I realised how disgustingly immature games "journalism" was.

Apparently, according to people who are seemingly so passionate about games they make their living writing/talking about them, games are simply a product of which value is determined based on consumer cost and length of what they arbitrarily define to be the core experience - even if the entire point of the game is not rushing through it once to see a fucking cutscene and move on with your life like disposable entertainment.

This shit hit Hitman (2016) really bad as well.