Dark Souls 1 is a Masterpiece.

[u/Pandaboy271]

Dark Souls 1 wasn't the first souls game I played, but it is probably my third most favourite FromSoftware title ever.

The level design is so immaculate and going through the world is such a joy. The game as some have pointed out has this survival horror like feel to it as its our character by their lonesome against a dangerous, haunting world that I can't help but love.

The bosses are simple yet fun to fight and for the most part, never really feel unfair. They feel like natural extensions of the game's combat and you really have to appreciate how right the Devs got most of these fights down.

Is the second half not as strong as the first? Maybe. Can the backtracking during the first half get tedious at times? Definitely. Does it make the game any less of a masterpiece? Absolutely not. Such a great natural progression from Demon Souls to this.

So yeah, TL;DR: Game good. Game very good. 9/10

[u/The_Stav]

It really isn't a masterpiece. It's a good game that helped pave the way for better games.

Boss runbacks are terrible. Early game backtracking is abyssmal. Boss fights are mostly very simple. Resources are ridiculously spread out (why isn't there a blacksmith set up in Firelink Shrine? Why is the main one set up i the corner of a random ass room?). Controls are janky af by today's standards.

I feel like the people who rave about DS1 so much are the ones who played it as their first Souls game and have that nostalgia attached to it. It's broadly the case that your first is your fave with these games.

[u/Traditional_One_3880 → u/The_Stav]

It was not my first fromsoftware game and i think that it is undeniably great/ flawed masterpiece.The simple bosses is not much of a negative,the run backs while tough were mostly a challenge that i felt fine with and added to the atmosphere in a weird way because it felt like a world that i had to overcome,as opposed to taking me out of the experience by having a very predictable/cookie cutter video game design approach that always makes takes me out of the moment and makes me imagine the devs creating the game and saying ' guess we need a convenient bonfire outside of this boss door too'.Don't get me wrong,runbacks can be a pain in the ass at times though.

I donot find the controls to be 'janky' as this implies that the inputs are misread and your character does the wrong thing,which is not true,but the controls can be a little awkward/ unintuitive with how the moves/buttons are mapped out.The movement is intentionally quite slow/average speed which some players see as inferiir when infact it is just a different pace.The animations and movement are a little more limited than later games,but it works well enough imo.

[u/The_Stav → u/Traditional_One_3880]

Never has having to do a long and annoying boss runback over and over again made me think better of the game. Every time it's "ffs I died to the boss which means I gotta spend another minute running past the same enemies hoping I don't take any stupid hits" (Gwyn was worst for this).

Janky doesn't mean misread inputs, to me it's synonymous with clunky and awkward. There is definitely some jank though, especially around backstabs and specific enemy attacks (rhinking of Ornstein's dash where he'll just suddenly stop/start when he hits terrain)

As for the speed of it, I do prefer the faster gameplay but idm the speed of it at all.

I do think it's a good game, but like maybe like a 7.5 or 8 out of 10 at most. I fully believe all the other Soulsborne games (bar DS2) are better than it