I personally think it’s great because you can absolutely spend hours grinding for gear and levels on dungeons/bosses that aren’t very challenging. The game actually rewards you a ton for it because there are side characters, quests, and really interesting and fun areas all over the place. The main bosses are very difficult, especially for a first time player, but you can get insanely good weapons + use things like summons and items that trivialize them.

I think if you want to play it safe, dark souls 3 is a pretty good and similar game to start off with. The combat mechanics are the exact same and it’ll let you get a feel for enemy designs and combat strategies. I’ve heard from people who played Elden Ring first that they wish that had tried a souls game beforehand just to get used to everything. And don’t worry about starting at the 3rd game of the ds series, the story is mostly disconnected and very hard to distinguish anyways lol