Achievement hunting really turn these games into tedious bouts of micromanagement when you have to make sure that you talk to some NPC's in a specific order before reaching a certain point in the game just so you can pick up a shitty ring that noone would ever use for anything.

the most complete dark souls experience the creators really perfected the series with everything they had learned from their previous games.

Easily the best game I've ever played.

Ohohoho! 60 fps at max settings, just like god intended! My shitty monitor is 4:3 so max resolution isn't quite 1080p, but I'll see how it runs on my 55" television later. A buttery smooth framerate does absolute wonders for the game feel, and gets me super excited for the DS1 remaster.

Woo! $12 USD on Humble Monthly! Shame that the Ringed City isn't included (though I suppose there's a small chance that it is, just not in the early unlock, which is stupid, but oh well). Glad to be able to get the base game since the Steam version has barely fallen in price in the nearly two years since launch.

Okay, so I finally platinumed Scholar of the First Sin and in the end wound up having a much better time with it than I expected, and was looking forward to doing the same with DSIII since I considered it superior to DSII in my initial run.

WTF HAPPENED?

I feel like the jump from 60 fps in SotFS to 30 fps here is a huge contributing factor, as is the fact that I've watched a lot of DSIII footage on youtube in the interim which is almost always from the PC version. The PS4 version looks like absolute ass by comparison. But more importantly, how did I never notice before how terrible and jerky and spastic the animations are? The rolling feels especially weird. If you're holding forward on the analog stick while attacking, the transition from attack swing to running looks really awkward. My character looks like a robot when swigging Estus or queuing spells.

But some of the enemy animations are throwing me for a loop as well. I feel like they've been copy/pasted from Bloodborne with faster attack speeds and little to no recoveries, which worked great in BB but with the more sluggish feel of DS feels mad frustrating. I think the major reason this didn't bother me before was I stuck to sword/shield in my original run, but while playing SotFS I got really good at dodging and two-handing and power stance. Seriously, being able to dodge in any direction in a full 360 degrees while locked on was by far DSII's greatest innovation. But for hordes of enemies it really doesn't feel like a viable tactic here.

I really hope something clicks back into place. I had a lot of fun with DSIII the first time through, and after such a great takeaway from SotFS I felt like I could sincerely say I loved every entry in the series, not something that happens very often for me. This is simply heartbreaking. I kind of want to pop in some of the other games to compare but I'm a little afraid of what I'll find. DSII winding up being my favorite is.... unthinkable.

Sister Friede is my favorite boss I've even seen in a game but not fought. I want to play as her in a game that's not brutally hard and just go nuts.

This expansion's looking like a really great send off for the series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69d-enwfDZ0

Pros:
It's 8th gen Dark Souls. Great bosses, fantastic level and creature design, co-op and pvp blended seamlessly with a single player story and lore and backstory you can piece together from details in the world around you. It's a challenging series but always balanced and all kinds of playstyles are viable. The series still has my favourite swordplay in videogaming and the sheer variety of weapons each with unique movesets makes almost every other RPG look bad (and that's before you get into the variety of shields, armour, rings, consumables, miracles, pyromancies and sorceries).

Cons:
It still falls short of the original in most of the same ways Dark Souls II did. My main gripe is that it doesn't have the intertwining world of branching passages and shortcuts that the first Dark Souls had and being able to warp between bonfires from the very beginning takes away from exploration. They also nonsensically repeated Dark Souls II and Bloodborne's most annoying flaw and made you go through two loading screens every time you want to level up rather than just letting you do it at any bonfire.

I am so bummed they carried over being able to warp to any bonfire like in Dark Souls II. It makes the victory of unlocking shortcuts feel rather hollow, pun intended. Five games in now and Dark Souls 1 is the only title to use its world design to full effect. I remember how intense it was to journey down areas like Blighttown or the Tomb of Giants, knowing how hard it would be to go back if necessary. It was an experience like no other. If DSIII retained this it would have a real shot at being my favorite game in the series.