Finally finished this game. 60-something hours, around 250 deaths... Superb game, easily the best I've played this gen.
The good:
- Art style. Environment, characters, bosses, music... Seriously. This is what happens when you let designers with a consistent, overarching vision create a fantastical, engrossing world. The art is mature--there's no appealing to some lowest common denominator. Medieval has been done gazillions of times, of course. But these guys pull it off without cliches, while adding their own twists.
I'd have given up on this game if it hadn't drawn me in again and again with the amazing art.
- Game play. The game play is mechanically sound, given you lots of control over the character. There are canned attack animations, but they don't take away from the sense that you are in charge. The same thing applies to stats, the weapons you pick up, the order in which you play the levels. Whenever I see other players in-game, they've got different weapons from mine, different stats, and probably tackled the levels in a diff. order. That's because it's all up to you.
- No fluff. No bullshit story, no quicktime events, no fetch quests, no puzzles, no unnecessarily long cut scenes, nothing on rails... Just pure game play, where the goal is to overcome obstacles in order to advance through a hostile environment. I hope they keep it that way in Dark Souls. I don't want to have to fetch multiple shards of some rune that will open a door, etc. etc.
The bad:
- Sometimes cheap. I had to put the game aside several times due to the frustration from cheap enemies and bosses. The game actually gets easier as you go along (something I didn't expect), so if you have given up make sure to try again, cuz it gets better.
And it's not just that battles can be difficult. Sometimes NPCs appear in locations in the game where you'd never look. For instance, when I first freed Saint Freke I didn't know he would appear in the Nexus hidden around some corner. Why would I ever look in that place?
In this game, few things are explained to the player. In some cases, it actually adds to the oppressive atmosphere in the game. But sometimes it hampers progress because you have to stumble upon something in an illogical place.
But, all in all, this game has turned me into a From Software fanboi for lyfe.
