3/5 ★ – squid0812's review of Dark Souls III: The Ringed City.

In some ways, The Ringed City is a sad example of From Software buying into their own marketing. The level design choices here often seem like they were dictated by what would be most hostile to the player rather than what would be interesting or evocative. So you end up with plenty of outlandish BS that feels like it was produced by a much lesser company - giants that repeatedly spawn hundreds of archers to kill you AND who respawn when you take them out; a staircase with an important NPC encounter that has 5 or 6 damage sponge knights copy-and-pasted all over it; a random boss from the base game bizarrely showing up in a remote corner of (yet another) swamp. There are some very elementary game design principles that are just ignored here, presumably to placate the challenge-hound element of the Souls fandom. And that sucks, to be quite frank. Thankfully, this was still made by From Software, so it’s not without its moments. The first part of the DLC (the Dreg Heap) looks just OK, but once you reach the actual Ringed City, pretty much everything is pure eye candy. And despite some genuinely infuriating enemy layouts, most of the new enemies look great and are fun to fight one-on-one (the little bastards that hide on walls while cursing you from afar are an exception). Some people play these games exclusively for the bosses, and on that front, this DLC is fairly successful (although they all have about 20% too much HP). The Demon Prince is nonsense from a holistic standpoint (we just killed the last of the demons in the base game - why is there another one?), but is also one of the more well-designed dual bosses in the series. Midir is perhaps a bit too punishing considering that he has a lot of moves to learn, but once I mastered dodging him, it was a satisfying fight. Gael is an appropriately monumental final boss for the series - he’s a brilliant mixture of Artorias and the Orphan of Kos. The only real dud for me was the PvP gimmick boss, which lacks the grandeur of the Old Monk, or even the Looking Glass Knight from DSII. The emphasis on relentless hostility rather than thoughtful exploration in the level design makes this one of my least favorite FromSoft expansions, but I won’t deny it has some minor visual and mechanical appeal. It says a lot about From Software’s capabilities that I was still able to enjoy parts of this despite the toxic, ‘git gud’ ethos that pervades a lot of the design choices.