It is a reflection of the crustiest self-indulgence and excess of the FGC before eSports began to sanitize everything. Full of jokes that will make no sense to all but a very small subset of a small niche of gamers. In a sense, its a time I am thankful we are past, because there were a lot of "influencers" within the community who were in fact very harmful people. As a fighting game, this doesn't even pass for something to run on a kusoge night. Its full of corny humor, ugly to look at and it isn't actually fun to play. They were more interested in epic references than trying to make the game at all appealing to anyone outside of their hyper-specific niche. Once again, a reflection of the nature of competitive fighting games during the era of Street Fighter IV.

This game would smell just like those green cans of Axe deodorant.

Playing through this piece of shit on veteran is one of the most joyless experiences I have ever had. There is nothing good here, the gameplay is some of the most bland stuff ever, the visuals are absolutely washed out and ugly, and not only is the narrative 100% uninteresting, the messaging and takeaway is as miserable as the rest of the experience.

Anti-war, but only in the way that the game is so mindnumbing, you would not want anything to do with the desensitized and distasteful garbage displayed.

It's hard to succinctly summarize my thoughts on this game because it's bad but also good. Improvements to movement and things like dual-wielding are a huge improvement over the original but things like deceitful hitboxes and the level design are staggeringly atrocious. Like, go look up early-development DS1 maps and you can see the meticulous care put into designing a cohesive world. Look at the mishmash levels in DS2 and tell me that same level of care was put in. Not to mention how SOTFS took abysmal level design and floored the gas pedal. Such a transparent cashgrab from the publisher that it legitimately turned me off from playing DS3. This is one of those games that its more fun to think about playing than it actually is to do so.