Reached
and then called it a night, the few enemies I encountered seem to hit like a truck. I feel vastly underpowered with a +7 weapon and still no fucking titanite chunks. I really, really dislike how gated-off the upgrade materials are in this. Maybe it will make low level runs have to make some interesting choices - I guess maybe you could get creative with twinkling or other upgrade paths.
It's also linear as hell. I assume I'm very near the end - it's been great but I could've used a few more branching paths especially early on - 20,000 souls for a fucking key to the crows really? I naively thought when I grinded for this first thing it would get me to a mid-game area, akin to going to the Catacombs early or something. I really would've liked to see some more branching paths, even DS2 let you got a few different ways at the start even if each path was linear (which is really no different to Demon's Souls).
The Dancer boss, I remember it getting tons of praise early on, but now it seems kind of boring - I did beat it first try with a few close calls. Again, I am not a fan of these 4,5,6 hit combos that some enemies and bosses do. It seems like you just end up spamming roll and by the end you have no stamina and thus very little chance to retaliate because they recover so fast.
