[WastingMyTime89]

It’s a fairly common opinion even amongst fans of the Soul games. Basically everything after Anor Londo was rushed through as the budget dwindled and the game had to be released.

The catacombs are just a smudgy mess with a couple of uninteresting ennemies and a mid-boss without any worthwhile patterns. The depth is just reskinned old ennemies you have to plod through one after the other before what’s probably the worst boss in the soul games. Even the better areas like Duke’s Archive, Crystal Cave or New Londo are inferiorly designed retread of previous ideas. The true genius of the game - the looping-on-itself level design - is over and you spend your time in this very bland linear areas wishing it was over already.

Honestly if the game stopped after fighting Orstein and Smough, it would be a better game overall.

The DLC is good again however. You can tell FromSoft got additional budget for it.

[iamacyborg]

If you want to see what rushed looks like, compare Revenant[1] before and after the major underground section.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenant_(video_game)

[tmtvl]

Yeah, East Ahkuilon is pretty decent, the caves kinda outstay their welcome, West Ahkuilon tries to hang in there, but after you defeat Teleporty McFireball things really take a nosedive.

[iamacyborg]

It’s a shame, it seemed to me at the time that the game had a lot of potential and the core systems were quite fun.