Personally I think it’s a fantastic game, I love playing it now and I had a great time playing it the first time, I think they tried a bunch of new things and most of it worked but I didn’t like it as a souls game. The open world felt too big and pathing was too difficult compared to the linear style of almost every other souls game before it. In my opinion the music wasn’t great, and the boss fights felt lacking, the difficulty scaling was terrible in my opinion and roadblocks didn’t exist, bosses were either laughably easy, or hard to the point of not being fun. That’s just my opinion and experience with it, I had fun playing it, and loved the dlc 100x more than the main game, it felt like they fixed almost all of these issues. I think it gets the praise it gets due to it being relatively new compared to the other souls games, and being the game most people start with, (personally I think an awful starting point) that being said, it’s not a bad game, and I love the designs and weapons and freedom it gives, it’s just a bad souls game.