3.5/5 ★ – satchelthegamecritic's review of Dark Souls.

It’s not an overstatement to say that dark souls is the most influential game of the last 10 years. This game pretty much single-handedly spawned of the souls like genre, and changed the way we see difficulty in video games. But it’s not just its influence and the difficulty that makes the game good, it’s it’s expensive world with impeccable level design, enemy encounters, and a thought-provoking story told through concepts and visuals rather than a ham-fisted narrative. Combine this with methodical combat, build variety, and challenging boss encounters and you get a really solid game. This game is definitely not perfect though. The first half of this game IS perfect. I love the way that it restricts the player due to not having fast travel from the start. Not to mention that for the most part the game is front loaded with all of its best level design and mostly balanced boss encounters, (excluding mainly one or two bosses.) Everything up to Ornstien and Smough is fantastic, but everything after that is mostly terrible. The last half of this game is filled with messy and blatantly unfinished levels with janky boss encounters. It’s so bad that it genuinely brings the game down two points for me. The other big negative that brings it down another point is the overall mechanics and feel of combat and movement that might have been serviceable in 2011, but it has NOT aged well at all. Your movement when locked on is so restricted. No omnidirectional rolling, no free sprinting, it just feels bad. Couple this with how slow you drink your flask AND the fact that you can’t move while drinking… it’s easily the worst combat in the series, and I don’t say that lightly. It’s a good thing that the lore, story, final boss area, and the entirety of the DLC, (minus Manus), are so phenomenal because they save this from being a 6/10. And it’s also good that the first half is so masterful, because it’s the only reason I even play the game most of the time. I can’t tell you how many playthroughs I’ve started and then stopped right after beating O&S. The last half is so bad to the point where I just drop the game before getting to that point. If anything I’ll do a glitch to level myself up enough to be ready for DLC, get to the Artorias fight, (which is the only S tier fight in this game imo and honestly the biggest reason to even bother playing the DLC), and then after I beat him, I just quit. For me that’s the ultimate way to enjoy DS1. Do everything I can in the main game before getting the lord vessel, go fight O&S, glitch myself up a couple levels to make sure I’m ready for DLC, only go up to the point where I fight and beat Artorias, and then just quit there and pretend the rest of the game doesn’t exist. Honestly if that was the whole game right there, this game would probably be a 9 or a 10 for me. But it’s not. I know it sounds like I hate this game, but I don’t. I genuinely love every single souls game, even though this is definitely my least favorite and the one that I have the most problems with. Even though this game has an inconsistent flow, the most janky and awful combat in the series, and a second half that is mostly terrible, I still think dark souls one is a solid enough game and I’m happy that it exists. There’s still tons to appreciate about this game like it’s lore, story, and characters and all of the other things I mentioned. I just wish the second half of the game wasn’t so blatantly unfinished and rushed. And I’m not making that up either. Miyazaki even said himself that a lot of the second half of the game was unfinished. I actually think a dark souls one remake would be fantastic one day. But they would have to take some serious liberties with it. Like completely change most of the second half of the game. But anyway I’ve rambled enough. Dark Souls 1 is a really solid game that just hasn’t aged as well and definitely has a lot of obvious flaws. 7/10