Started with Elden Ring, going back and playing through all the Souls games minus Demon's Souls/Bloodborne because I don't have a Playstation, surely it'll come to PC soon right? My only frame of reference so far for Soulslikes is Elden Ring so if you don't like me comparing the two then stop reading.

I find it rather interesting that a lot of the DNA in Elden Ring can be found here in the original (sans Demon's Souls) in that there are a lot of diverging paths and exploration is on some level free-form. I was expecting a mostly linear experience but found it was actually pretty open-ended which was really neat, and stumbling randomly across new areas when I was just expecting a dead-end with some item was fantastic. The whole "if you're stuck somewhere go some place else" idea is present here as well, although the lack of fast travel until O&S ended up being really annoying for backtracking.

I was expecting to be more annoyed by the massive walks of shame but I got pretty used to them quickly. There are some that are more egregious than others, but the game teaches you to be patient and slow when exploring, so taking time to go back to the boss room wasn't as frustrating (unless I had to go through annoying enemies to get there.) The walks in this game make the run back to Placidusax look like child's play, since while it's pretty long with that fight, you can at least run past a lot of the enemies whereas in this game you often are pretty much forced to fight them unless you want to get stabbed in the back.

PvP is just as bad as Elden Ring, tried it out for a bit, and got teleport backstabbed by a gravekeeper UGS that one-shot me three times in a row before I gave up on trying to guess where he was on his screen due to latency. Speaking of, it's really neat and interesting to me that there are so many different PvP factions that often have unique mechanics. Makes me wonder what it was like in the hayday at peak activity. Kinda rare to get invaded in my playthroughs.

Damage scaling was a nice surprise but it took me one bricked build to realize that vigor is a stat you basically don't have to invest in for half the game. I got stuck on Moonlight on my first playthrough because my ZDPS dex build was failing to 6-round him and it was getting annoying. Read a thread that said you should be 3-rounding him and that re-speccing isn't in the game and got the hint. On my second I basically didn't even level Vigor at all for like half the game.

This game does Dual Bosses right which is a shame since Elden Ring seems to have deeply forgotten this methodology of design. O&S might be one of my favorite bosses now and it's comical to compare it to the foreskin duo in ER. That being said, while boss design in some respects is better, some are just kind of... bad? Capra Demon stands out to me since he's really aggressive and in a tiny room with two dogs that also rush you down, so there's basically nowhere to run and heal. Sure, you can just adapt by playing aggressive and using shield instead of trying to heal off all damage, but I can't help but feel like this fight would be more fun if you had A LITTLE more space between the enemies before they were on you and the arena were maybe... twice as large. with another arena that size placed horizontally? I don't know.

idk how to finish this off, I'll just say Claymore is my baby (love the rolling two-handed R1) and it's insane how they only have one ring slot in the game since one of them is permanently taken up by Ring of Favor and Protection. Moving on to Dark Souls 2 next, surely it can't be that bad right?