4.5/5 ★ – philip_acquaro's review of Dark Souls III.

Started: June 18th 2025 Beaten: July 1st 2025 This was my second FromSoftware game and I absolutely loved it! Going from Bloodborne to Dark Souls 3 both felt so much easier while at the same time taking a lot of getting used to. I understand that a lot of people strongly encourage playing Dark Souls 1 before 3 as there are lots of little references, locations, or characters that’ll only make sense to you in doing so, but one of my friends who’s a Soulsborne fanatic who had played each game on release advised me to play this game first, even before Bloodborne as it’s supposedly the “easiest” of the series and most welcoming to newcomers. I’ve heard other takes where people say otherwise in that Elden Ring is the easiest and most accessible but i’m sort of holding out on that one for when I know I’ll have the most time to play it to experience it fully since that one is the most massive game in the series, so DS3 seemed like the way to go. During the first few hours of this game, it instantly felt much more slower and heavy than the incredibly fast paced and aggressive gameplay style of Bloodborne which gave me a poor first impression since I was really missing what I got so used to. Also not having the rally system anymore (where you heal upon hitting enemies in BB) as well as having to get used to using a shield / parrying took me a bit too since having another layer of defense pushed me to deviate from aggressive combat towards a more defensive style of playing. However, after those first few hours of playing, all those feelings went away as I got more and more used to this gameplay style and I started having a blast with it. I know I haven’t went up against hundreds of the bosses in the FromSoftware series many of which from Elden Ring and its DLC, but if any of them reach the heights that this game’s bosses do, I genuinely cannot wait. From each of the bosses’ aesthetic designs, combat move set, and the beautiful musical scores accompanying them, everything was masterful and was some of the most climactic gameplay i’ve ever witnessed. I had so much fun learning all of their moves to a T and finally taking down every one of them. While I do think that this game’s difficulty felt so much easier than Bloodborne’s, there were a few of them that really gave me a hard time such as Champion Gundyr, Soul of Cinder, and the infamous Nameless King who I died to an astronomical amount of times. But for the most part it didn’t take me nearly as long to beat a lot of these bosses than it did for me in Bloodborne. I also REALLY appreciated the Estus Flasks not being a finite resource that you constantly have to farm when dying to bosses over and over again as this game refills all of your heals after every death or rest automatically. That was the only severe flaw I had with Bloodborne as it wasn’t even a skill issue it was just an annoyance and huge pace breaker. I also loved every environment in this game and their level designs from the medieval castles filled with dragons, swampy forests with towering enemies, a snowy kingdom illuminated by gorgeous blue skies, Underground dungeons, and fire like caverns just to name a few. While I explored mostly all of every area and took down every main game boss in the game, one thing I didn’t do was finish a lot of the NPC side quests nor focus on the lore so i’ll be watching a lot of videos on what i missed there to understand the story better. But this was a phenomenal game that is making me itch to play the rest of the Fromsoftware games very soon!