I'm a tad confused by younger gamers now...

I honestly don't understand how a simple game like Dark Souls took off like it did.

Dark Souls is not a difficult game. It's all about pattern recognition and waiting. It's an easy game masked with cheap tricks and bad coding. Like having basic enemies able to bomb you through solid walls, and massive damage to compensate for an actual challenge. And waiting for an opening to strike is not difficulty, it's time wasting.

Before anyone accuses me of being a try-hard here, when I played I had well over 200 actual deaths before I finished my run. But at no time did I feel challenged, and at no time did I feel good about any achievement simply because I knew I would get punked easily the next time I turned a corner.

Also, at what point is this game about exploration? Because any time you leave the beaten path, you get killed. That's not exploration, that it;s teaching you, psychological conditioning, you touch the banana, you get zapped, you touch the carrot, it's OK, you go that way. The exact opposite wandering around, getting lost and finding something cool.

One more thing, I'm a little confused so to its main teaching tool: Death. This is supposedly how the game let's you learn its systems, where you can and cannot go, and recognize/learn the attack/defense patterns. I mean, that's the whole poin of the original tagline of 'Prepare to Die', right? So why does the game punish you for dying to an ambush or bad luck? It feels awfully cheap and unfair.

This is difficulty now? This is fun? I found the entire experience to be dull and tedious. And you know what's the saddest part of all this? I wanted to love the series. I like moody, atmospheric fantasy games, but the execution was painfully bad and full of fake difficulty that it killed me.

And that's not even touching on the lackluster lore that is a massed jumble.

Dragon's Dogma was a much better Souls game in the end for me, I actually enjoy it when I die then.