..and dogshit combat. The NES-Castlevania-like movement needs some getting used to, and even then the weird hurtboxes of enemy attacks and small damage opportunity windows are infuriating.
Made worse by design decisions like resource refills and save benches all being separate, for estus, poison and each ammunition type. (Does poison actually do anything but coloring the enemy's healthbars purple?). The upper limit of 99 for both crafting resources is also really low, and some things costing up to 80. Getting the resources isn't hard, you just can't store them. That brings us to another issue: ITS. NOT. A. SIDE. QUEST. IF. ITS. MANDATORY. FOR. PROGRESSION. At several points in the game you need money to progress, and the only way to get that are the "side quests": Backtrack and kill something, return to quest board, repeat. 3-4 times, per instance of that happening. Which is quite often.
The item system is also..peculiar. There are bars for defense, attack, resists and weight. Since there are no numerical values you can't really tell if for example a higher resist value would be worth a certain loss of defense, and vice versa. There is also a certain one handed hammer you can get from a(n optional?) fight pretty early in the game that just has a maxed out damage bar, making all future drops in that slot worthless?
Didn't complete the game at the time of writing, yet at another set of "side quests", again. To earn gold, again.
