I'm doing a blind playthrough on my Youtube channel. It'll show that I'm live streaming when I'm on. It'll eventually get added to the playlist above.
First, non-spoilery impressions. It's a pretty good sequel to Dark Souls 1. You can tell that it's a lot more of a direct sequel than Dark Souls 2 was, which was headed by a different team in From. Which is both good and bad. There's a strong sense of "you liked this thing in Dark Souls/Demon's Souls, so here it is again". Which is an oversimplification, since it's also amazing with the new stuff that it adds. The monster designs are still top notch and interesting.
The boss fights are also a mixed bag of both amazing and stupidly hard. Which leads to my other point of this post. I'm starting to see a terrible trend of From Software perceiving itself as a company that makes hard games. The reason people like Dark Souls 1 is because it's a very well designed game, but fair. And with Bloodborne and now Dark Souls 3, it's starting to seem like they're feeding into the small percentage of masochists in the crowd. With Dark Souls 2, most of these ridiculously unfair fights were relegated to optional areas. But first Dark Souls 3, the first boss you fight is actually pretty darn challenging and non-optional. No tricks. Just git good.
It's borderline unfair. One of the enemies in (maybe) an optional area is the worst thing I've seen in a From Software game. He
Spoiler
hides in corners, and will grab you, then he'll sit on you clawing your eyes out. Then he'll try to grab you again to repeat. If he doesn't, he jumps in the air and lands on you. It's fucking annoying.
Like Bloodborne had real problematic enemies. Like the exploding brain ladies and the Rom fight are terrible. Or Ebrietas with her one hit kill dash. And almost all the bosses in the DLC aren't fun to fight against (for me). I just worry that From is iterating in the wrong direction.
Some random complaints before I get to my final thoughts. I might have missed something, but the NPC storylines seem on par with Dark Souls 2, pretty weak and not fleshed out. The areas are a lot better designed than Dark Souls 2, but suffer from too much junk and noisy design of Bloodborne. But it still feels pretty linear, despite some areas meeting back upon themselves. It just doesn't feel like a whole world the way Dark Souls 1 does.
I'm not done with Dark Souls 3. I'm stuck on a boss, which shouldn't be surprising considering the tone of this post. I hate to be negative, since some of the callbacks are amazing. I'm loving some of the new mechanics in the game (although I'm not really using the new weapons technique system). Like, I play these game for the moment to moment surprising experiences. And there's definitely a lot of that. One of the monsters
Spoiler
looks like a designer went "what if Sadako from The Ring was mixed with a spider", it's nightmare fuel