- Jerky movement - Bad, forgettable bosses. - Bosses are too easy, getting to them is the challenge. - Too many bosses. Most of which aren't good. - Adaptability - A lot of the environmental traps are surprises. They will kill you the first time you encounter them - Hollowing punishes you for dying in a game where dying is routine by lowering your overall health. - Poison rapidly kills you. Moss is hard to come by when you need it the most. - Frustrating level design. - Shitty NPC quests that require you to summon them for bosses when that information isn't conveyed as well as it should be. - Too many enemies everywhere. Getting ganked by enemies is a regularity. - Bows are borderline useless throughout the whole game. - Enemies de-spawn after killing them a number of times if you're not in a specific covenant that makes the game much harder. Farming materials for weapon/armor upgrades is a chore. - Soul Memory - Ugly visuals

Hell of alot better game than [i]Bloodborne 2: Working as Intended™[/i].

Best Dark Souls game imo. I'd like to see a sequel to Dark Souls 2 made by the same team.

Is it a good game? Yes Is it a good dark souls game? No

No. Not even. It's a decent game when compared to other games. But it's the weakest title imo of the souls series. It focused way more on pvp then pve. You can clearly see this because of mechanics like soul memory, the inclusion of arenas, overall simplistic level design and boring/repeated bosses I.E a different flavored knight at the end of a hallway. Dark souls 2 brought a decent amount of improvements like more fluid animations, more useful movesets, being able to see host/phantom health constantly, lighting bonfires was checkpointing instead of having to rest at it, left hand actually being useful etc. But it had a bunch of core issues at launch that were not addressed for a long time. and even past that some still exist. Soul memory ruins any point of making a build with limitations not to mention it ruins dedicated low level coop builds for people who actually need it. You could "some what" combat this with the agape ring. But that requires you to basically min max the hell out of your souls. Which isn't enjoyable for an average player let alone a dedicated fan like myself. It's virtually impossible to rank up brotherhood of blood by only invading. No unlimited invasion item exists. A stat controlled your I frames. Being able to cancel out of any animation basically ruined the point of having longer animations and made punishing players for stupid mistakes that much harder. I could rant all day about this. If you enjoy DS2 then enjoy it. I'm personally running through again to get some weapons that I miss and will occasionally pvp on there. But overall I enjoy DS3 much more. To me there are only a few things holding DS3 back. those would be: ~heavy armor not having any worth for the investment ~tracking for every weapon is insane ~rolls being dirt cheap The sentinels/darkmoons could use a re work. Invasions could stand to feel more satisfying somehow. Though in my opinion no souls title has gotten invasions done well. Demon souls had the ability to send invaders back at a whim with spells. Dark souls boss kills/being hollow removed your ability to be invaded, DS2 didn't have an unlimited invasion item, more hollow means less of a chance of being invaded, and killing a boss while it doesn't perma make you un invadable an automatic 30 minute cool down for that area does. You can of course remove this yourself at the bonfire. But it hurts random invasions. seed of the giants, host being able to clear an area of add spawns entirely. And DS3 we've got the hollow/boss kill problem again. Not to mention we've also continued to have seed of the giants which has a much higher drop rate then DS2's. A host can summon up to 3 phantoms easily. And invasions (seemingly) are turned off entirely after you've been invaded once unless you do one of several triggers to re-enable them. Bloodborne I won't even mention how shit invasions were.

i could get parried and go to the bathroom and come back And the animation will still be going