Dark Souls III Part II (Boss/Story Spoilers)

Great video! I especially liked the haunted house segment. :) Regarding the Castlevania comparison: I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that Dark Souls is just 3D Castlevania, but I have a point of comparison where I disagree with you, and a couple that I feel you missed as a result: Castlevania is absolutely not "all about offence." In fact, it's very focused on avoiding damage through the use of backdashes and jumps, which actually makes Dark Souls even more like it. The main difference is that in most post-SotN Castlevanias, you can't block like you can in Dark Souls, but the game absolutely expects you to focus on avoiding getting hit by enemies. You can brute force it, sure (because the series tends to be easier than Souls games, on the whole), but post-SotN Castlevanias are designed so that being good at them means mastering dodging enemy attacks. This is especially apparent in boss fights, where you're meant to memorise boss attack patterns to avoid getting hit as much as possible, because bosses hit like a truck and your HP pool is finite and relatively small. Which brings me to the other thing: two points of comparison that you didn't mention are the health mechanics and progress resetting on death. In Castlevania, you usually have a very limited stock of HP-replenishing items. Save rooms heal you, but they're few and far between. On top of that, if you die, you lose all the progress you made since the last save room. Enemies respawn when you enter a room you'd previously cleared, which makes running around on low HP even more daunting. You generally don't know where the next save room will be, so you have to focus on taking the least amount of hits possible and efficiently manage your HP, which is the most important of your exploration/progress resources. In a lot of ways, that mirrors the way Dark Souls does things with estus and bonfires; the penalty for running out of HP in Castlevania is just much steeper, since you don't keep ANY progress when you die.

Alex N.