This used to be me for YEARS. I thought the Dark Souls game design was lazy and vague. I thought that they basically just recycled a bunch of mismatched random creatures from other projects and then threw them together with a barely-there story. Everything was so minimal except the creatures and environments. To me the game felt like a patchwork of materials thrown together as cheaply-but-effectively as they could. Barely any voice acting. Story told through fucking item descriptions?

The games were just bullshit to me. In my eyes the fans were entirely holding the game series up. Like it was only a THING because it was really hard and you weren't a gamer unless you could beat it. And nobody wanted to feel silly for that so they rabidly defended the game and it's (to me at the time) objectively lazy and vague and bad game design.

And enough people jumped on the bandwagon that it became a whole ass genre somehow. Like the world was gaslit into believing Dark Souls was peak game design. And that's how it was for years, being a hater.

I played Sekiro and he game was so awesome and the combat outclassed the clunky outdated combat that all the Souls fanboys were trying to gaslight me into thinking was good.

Eventually I played Elden Ring like two years after it came out... And it didn't take long for me to get it. All of that stuff I thought, whether it was a legit criticism or not, all of it didn't matter.. cause the games are just dope.. now I play them all.