History YMMV / DarkSoulsI

** A defining element of the game's world is that all of the bosses are [[WorfHadTheFlu severely weakened from their primes]], right? Well, not really. This only explicitly applies to the FinalBoss and Nito. The vast majority of the bosses are as strong as they've always been and are fought in their natural forms (such as all of the demon bosses, Manus, Kalameet, Havel, the Sanctuary Guardians, Priscilla, Gwyndolin, Sif, Moonlight Butterfly, and the Iron Golem). As for the rest? They're explicitly ''powered-up'' from their past selves (Pinwheel has been sapping Nito's power, the Four Kings went from regular people to superpowered abominations, Ornstein or Smough power up by consuming the other during the phase transition, and Seath gained immortality and crystal breath that he didn't have before).\\

** The fact that nearly every NPC in the game ends their dialogue with a hammy laugh, no matter the context, can come across as a bit silly, whether or not it is to show that some of them are beginning to go insane.

* MemeticLoser: Pinwheel gets a lot of these jokes, due to being an uncharacteristically weak boss for its point in the game. A common joke is people claiming to be surprised that Pinwheel's theme lasts longer than the couple of seconds needed for the fight to be over.

** Solaire of Astora. His ceaseless desire to find his personal "sun", as well as his ability to help you in a number of difficult fights up to and including the FinalBoss, have made him the SeriesMascot of the ''Dark Souls'' trilogy, despite only actually appearing in the first game [[spoiler:and being very likely to die before the ending]]. The popularity extended to his co-op covenant, the Warriors of Sunlight, which reappear almost unchanged in the game's two sequels. He's also the first character in the series to get his own Toys/{{amiibo}} with the release of the UsefulNotes/NintendoSwitch version, ''Dark Souls: Remastered''.

** The game's PC port, in spite of its issues, sold over three million copies, nearly as much as it had sold on [=PlayStation=] and Xbox combined. Its release and success [[https://www.pcgamer.com/how-japan-learned-to-love-pc-gaming-again/ was a groundbreaking moment for Japanese games on PC]], showcasing how large the potential audience on the platform was. In the years since, more and more Japanese developers and publishers have been releasing their games on UsefulNotes/{{Steam}} to great success, a complete 180° from before the 2010s where the vast majority of games were skipping the platform.

* MisBlamed: When the remaster was announced, many fans complained that they would have preferred a ''VideoGame/DemonsSouls'' remaster instead, due to it being older and not playable on any modern platform. However, ''Demon's Souls'' and ''Dark Souls'' are handled by two different publishers, Creator/SonyInteractiveEntertainment and Bandai Namco respectively. The latter's choice to remaster ''Dark Souls'' in no way affects the possibility of a ''Demon's Souls'' remaster, nor would they have the ability to do so at all, so fans complaining to them about it are wasting their time. Ultimately, ''Demon's Souls'' got a Sony-managed remake for the UsefulNotes/PlayStation5 from Creator/BluepointGames a few years later rather than a remaster.

* FandomRivalry: It's died down since, but it once had a fairly fierce one with ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim Skyrim]]''. This is despite the vast gulf in differences between them to the point where the only things they have in common are extremely broad fantasy genre conventions. It doesn't help that various video game media sites and magazines kept hyping up the "rivalry" between the two games prior to release, and that there are vocal and annoying haters of the opposing game on both sides of the spectrum. ''Dark Souls'' fans bash ''Skyrim'' for being too "boring and cliché" while ''Skyrim'' fans bash ''Dark Souls'' for being "too difficult and confusing". Fans who liked both games were labelled "traitors" and stuck between a rock and a hard place.

A specific example is Artorias. It's commonly claimed that you fight him at his weakest because he's been corrupted by the Abyss and has had one of his arms broken, preventing him from using a shield along with his sword. The latter point is true, but the former is pretty clearly debunked by the game itself; his second phase is marked by him charging up a BattleAura of Abyss energy, after which his speed, damage, and aggression all increase. It's straightforwardly making him ''physically stronger'', just like it does to everything else it corrupts, from the Four Kings to the regular citizens of Oolacile. He also gains AOE and ranged attacks that he, of course, wouldn't have without being corrupted.

** A full chorus being used in a boss's theme is more likely to do a number on the fight's drama than not. Typically, the singing consists of pure tones – some accented, some not--that come across as being rather vague, somehow even less compelling than CanisLatinicus.

* EvilIsSexy: Quelaag is a sinister (though largely AntiVillain) demon whose legs have been replaced by a lava spider, but she still has a lot of fans.

** The Bounding Demons in Lost Izalith are hilariously [[JustForPun half-assed]] enemies. Even if you don't know or notice that they are repurposed from the bottom half of the Zombie Dragon, they just look ridiculous, being mostly legs with a vague mass for a head-like thing. Their haphazard and excessively numerous placement in their lake doesn't help, as it only contributes to them being a part of the level's decline in quality relative to earlier areas of the game. Similarly, clearing Ceaseless Discharge drains the lake of lava beside him, revealing ten Taurus Demons standing stock still along the lakebed. It looks just as ridiculous.

** [[BlackoutBasement Tomb of the Giants]]. it is dark enough that even with a light source you can only see a short distance ahead. There is no HollywoodDarkness that is present in other dark places, such as the first section of the Catacombs that preceed this level. If you are exploring the area without a guide or prior knowledge you are likely to walk off the map at least once. Even when using a map, it is very difficult to orient yourself or tell exactly how far you have moved from a spot that is relatively easy to identify, and in a level in which the edges of the ground are the easiest to have appear within your light, some parts of the level require you to find low-lying pathways in centers of the path. Navigation is not helped by how there are few distinctive places in the level, and any landmarks that could serve as guiding points to a certain extent[[note]]You may see the second bonfire of the area, but between you and it is a bottomless pit, so it only provides the most general of directions to eventually reach.[[/note]] are liable to disappear as you descend levels work through the level's twists and turns. Hidden in the darkness are powerful enemies, including highly aggressive and hard-hitting quadrupedal [[DemonicSpiders skeletal beasts]], and woe is you if you if you accidentally aggro multiple by accident.

** Forging weapons from boss souls requires you to upgrade a weapon of the same type you want to make (sword, shield, etc.) to the max. This is because many weapons can only be upgraded to the max by different blacksmiths then the one who makes the box souls, which adds to the running around that you'll need to do in addition to gathering the necessary materials.

* TheScrappy: The Bed of Chaos, widely considered the ''worst'' boss in not just the game, but the entire franchise. This is primarily because of it being an UnexpectedGameplayChange that focuses on the games unpolished and imprecise platforming mechanics, worsened by the FakeDifficulty of the Bed's attacks usually knocking players into pits while they have no means of responding, clashing massively with the otherwise tough but fair boss design which is a series trademark. The fight is also viewed as being disappointing from a narrative standpoint, cheating players out of a proper fight with [[spoiler:the Witch of Izilith]] in favour of another generic monster, and lacking the satisfaction element which comes with the other major bosses in the game. Even [[https://www.giantbomb.com/forums/dark-souls-6255/dark-souls-design-works-translation-npcs-and-monst-576001/ Miyazaki himself]] admitted to seeing the boss as an OldShame.

** It's possible to dupe any item that has a Yes/No prompt by exploiting how the game queues inputs. Attempt to use the item you want to dupe from your hotbar while in the middle of another animation (such as a roll or parry), then quickly open the menu before the animation finishes and use a different item directly from your inventory. If you did it correctly, you will get the Yes/No prompt from the item in your hotbar. Selecting "Yes" will give you the effect of the item, but use up the other item you selected from your inventory (so this is best done with the easily replenishable Estus Flask or the infinite-use Darksign). This can be used with boss souls to dupe infinite souls, or Fire Keeper Souls to dupe infinite Humanity. Theis glitch was fixed in ''Remastered'', though... until a ''new'' glitch was eventually discovered for ''Remastered'' that allowed you to dupe any consumable as much as you want, as well as getting the effect of using up to 999 of it at once, while consuming only one, making soul and humanity duping even ''more'' efficient than before.

** The Basilisk's curse cloud. Your curse meter is smaller than the poison or bleed meters, and the cloud fills it fast if you don't have any resistance. Being cursed kills you instantly, and permanently removes half of your health with the exception of a few difficult ways you can remove the curse. This effect used to stack until a patch was released, and it seemed less like a bug fix and more like an address to player complaints. There are only three ways to cure curse: wear a Rare Ring of Sacrifice when you are cursed, visit Ingward in New Londo Ruins, or use a Purging Stone. There's only four Rare Rings of Sacrifice in the game, planting them firmly in the TooAwesomeToUse category. Ingward's location in New Londo Ruins is rather out of the way, and is lousy with horrendous GoddamnedBats that you really don't want to fight with only half health, and if you can make it to Ingward, he charges one humanity for curse removal. Purging Stones are sold by two merchants, Oswald of Carim (who only sells five per playthrough) and the Female Undead Merchant (who charges 6,000 souls apiece). The easiest option, for those who have persevered and discovered either of the two areas where they appear, is to farm them from man-eating clams.

** Compared to the later games, the Kindle mechanic becomes this in hindsight. Useful, as you can kindle any bonfire you encounter up to three times, gaining +5 uses of your Estus Flask per level of kindling, but this comes with two downsides. For one, it requires that you spend Humanity for each kindling, which though abundant, the player LIKELY will want their excess humanity to be used for the several covenants that require large contributions of it in order to rank up, leaving them with less available than you think, and the player may wish to kindle more than one bonfire in a particularly difficult area to have more uses of Estus than the pitiful 5 a bonfire normally gives. Second, you cannot be hollowed when you kindle a bonfire, requiring ''yet another Humanity to be used to return to normal in addition to the 3 necessary to max out a bonfire's strength, upping your total to 4 necessary to kindle a bonfire if you tend to play as hollowed to avoid PvP''. To make matters worse, if you reverse hollowing and are invaded before you can finish kindling, you'll be forced out of the bonfire menu immediately, and getting killed by the invader will require you to spend YET ANOTHER humanity to unhollow and try again. Needless to say, it's a good thing that upgrading your Estus Flask's charges became a completely separate mechanic in the later games that was permanent across all bonfires rather than requiring you to spend resources on a single bonfire each time.

** NPC summons tilt any battle in the game in your favor (even Smough and Ornstein), but the Iron Golem in particular gets destroyed by Black Iron Tarkus, who is hidden very close to its fog gate. Even without Tarkus' help, the Iron Golem is much less of a hassle than the brutality of Sen's Fortress beforehand.

** The Bottomless Box glitch, which allowed you to dupe as many items as you want from an existing character onto a new character. There are some things you can't put in the box, and thus cannot dupe (spells, keys), but giving a new character a +5 Lightning Weapon, a fully upgraded armor set, any rings you want and a +5 Ascended Pyromancy Flame will make your character a weapon of mass destruction. Fans of the glitch state that it makes alts much easier and more fun since you can start off with the build you want, rather than have to wait until near the end of the game to pick up some item that happens to be in one of the final levels. Those that dislike the glitch state that it allows for much easier low-level [[{{Grifer}} griefing]] and it's cheating. It was patched as of Update 1.06, so it's a moot point either way.

** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HNQ7ysT4MA "The Political Agenda Of Dark Souls"]], a video by Creator/JimSterling, lays out their political interpretation of the story of the game, in which a normal person is pushed to sacrifice and fight for the sake of upholding a malfunctioning, inadequate status quo (the Age of Fire), which benefits nobody but the elite (and even then, the elite isn't really benefiting much from it aside from the fact that they are the elite), all out of fear; the fear of a new age. Jim underlines that this is similar to real world politics, where the elite can appeal to the fact that certain things are how they've always been done to avoid a change that might benefit others, including on subjects like global warming. The video is at least partly satirical and intended to debunk the idea that "video games should be apolitical" by demonstrating that political interpretations are inevitable and natural, but it's still a thoroughly sound and reasonable interpretation of the evidence, as they themselves note.

** Getting some of the dragon tail weapons can be an absolute pain.
*** Cutting Seath's tail creates the Moonlight Greatsword. Seath has an infuriating habit of turning extremely fast, and if you get to his tail, you need to watch out for his tail slam attack, which he will perform just to spite you. On top of that, while almost every other boss tail has a clear area where it can be cut off, [[HitboxDissonance only the tip of Seath's tail will register the damage properly]]. Additionally, Seath tends to spend half the fight with his middle tail completely clipped through the wall, making it impossible to hit the necessary area at all until he deigns to reposition. It's possible to take off his entire health bar by just attacking what you thought was his tail, and still not obtain it. This is doubly hard for caster builds, since Seath is both resistant to magic and infuriatingly mobile; thus, your most damaging attacks will simultaneously do reduced damage to him and have a high chance of missing his tail altogether. It's generally agreed that Seath is a complete pushover until you decide to try and obtain the Moonlight Greatsword.
*** Priscilla's Dagger is gotten from Crossbreed Priscilla. She has relatively low health, and at the start of the battle, she will go invisible, and needs to be staggered before she can be visible again. This can result in you lowering her health too low to actually get the dagger before killing her.
*** [[BonusBoss Kalameet]]'s tail turning into the Obsidian Greatsword. You'll quickly discover that there are almost no openings to strike his tail, and the only two that are require you to prolong the fight for a painfully long time waiting for him to attack you in three very specific ways, two of which require you to get right next to him as he's doing extremely high-damaging attacks. You can't shoot at it with a bow because Kalameet is facing you nine times out of ten, and any magic you throw at it is nearly guaranteed to miss. The only solution is to summon phantoms, that way somebody is able to unload on the tail while the boss is paying attention to someone else. If you want to use the Obsidian Greatsword, you probably already know that it has no stat scaling, so you haven't put any points into Str/Dex beyond the requirements, meaning that on the rare occasion you actually score a hit on the tail, it won't do much damage. It's a small mercy that this is all DLC content, so you don't need the Obsidian Greatsword for the [[ThatOneAchievement Knight's Honor achievement]].

** Some of the enemies, such as the Skeleton Babies, can qualify.

** Vagrants are enemies that can be generated in most areas by online player actions and drop loot when killed. The chance they can spawn is horribly tiny, with evil Vagrants appearing if players lose a lot of "soft" Humanity and don't retrieve their bloodstain before dying again (players are unlikely to ever store more than one soft Humanity unless they're grinding for items or if they gathered some by killing enemies/phantoms in a new area) and good Vagrants spawning from drifting item bags made by leaving certain items on the ground (the lack of inventory weight means that there's no reasons to drop items outside of this mechanic). Most players will see a Vagrant maybe once or twice across several online playthroughs, and the loot they drop is rarely worth much.

** Lost Izalith is covered in lava, which is impossible to traverse without the Orange Charred Ring, and even then forces a lot of healing. The main enemies for its first half are the Bounding Demons, which are lazily made (they're hind legs that the rotted Undead Dragon in the Painted World leaves behind after it tears its front half away from it to reach you, repurposed into an enemy), very common, and dangerous for melee characters and tedious for ranged characters, though they don't respawn. The second portion is more interesting, containing the climxes of Solaire's and Siegmeyer's questlines plus a final duel with Kirk, but the boss, the Bed of Chaos, is almost universally considered [[ThatOneBoss the worst boss in the entire series]].

** Anor Londo is called "Anal Rondo" or "Anal Rodeo" by some, in reference to its difficulty (especially the bridge part with Silver Knights firing javelins at you).

** Aside from Sen's Fortress, most of the pre-Lordvessel areas are based around dangerous enemies and not so much level hazards. Once you place the Lordvessel and reach the areas it unlocked, the challenge of simply navigating the map intensifies. You have the [[LethalLavaLand lava field]] in Lost Izalith, invisible floors in the Duke's Archives, the [[CheckpointStarvation lack of Bonfires]] in New Londo Ruins, and worst of all, the near pitch-darkness of the Tomb of the Giants. In comparison, the final area, save for a few {{Elite Mook}}s, is very straightforward.

** The Master Key is the only starting gift worth taking, because it allows for SequenceBreaking at the very beginning of the game by opening the New Londo - Valley of Drakes shortcut door from the "wrong" side or cutting into Darkroot Basin via Havel's tower in the Undead Burg. Getting to these areas lets you rush towards lots of useful items earlier than expected (Astora's Straight Sword for easy Catacombs, Havel's Ring if you can kill Havel early, the Red Tearstone Ring for speedruns, and the Grass Crest Shield and a possible Black Knight Halberd drop right next to Darkroot Basin's bonfire). These paths also let you skip most of the Undead Burg and Undead Parish to reach Andre, or avoid the long path down to Blighttown's swamp (which skips the Large Ember, but there are other ascension paths to take). The only reason to ever pick anything else was back when people [[TrollingCreator still thought the Pendant did something]], or you picked Thief as your starting class who always starts with the Master Key in addition to the gift you pick (in which case the only gift worth taking is Black Firebombs so you can kill the Asylum Demon early and get the Demon's Great Hammer). Otherwise, the Master Key is only obtainable after Domhnall moves to Firelink Shrine, by which point it's just there to be carried into NewGamePlus. That said, there are some players who insist that the Master Key shouldn't be taken on a blind first playthrough so that the player experiences the intended route through the game without skipping anything.

** Alvina of Darkroot Wood. Is she an old, vengeful cat spirit selfishly guarding Artorias's grave from "defilers"? Or is she, in claiming that traversing the Abyss is a fairy tale (which is a lie), trying to prevent anyone else from suffering Artorias's fate, to which she was witness? Is she speaking out of concern for the Chosen Undead [[spoiler:who helped rescue Sif and defeat Manus in her past]]? Or, knowing what the Undead is here for, is she instead trying to protect Sif [[spoiler:from the one who saved them]], knowing the wolf would die before letting anyone touch its master's grave?

** Alvina of Darkroot Wood. Is she an old, vengeful cat spirit selfishly guarding Artorias's grave from "defilers"? Or is she, in claiming that traversing the Abyss is a fairy tale (which is a lie), trying to prevent anyone else from suffering Artorias's fate, which she was witness to? Is she speaking out of concern for the Chosen Undead [[spoiler:who helped rescue Sif and defeat Manus in her past]]? Or, knowing what the Undead is here for, is she instead trying to protect Sif [[spoiler:from the one who saved them]], knowing the wolf would die before letting anyone touch its master's grave?

** Lost Izalith is covered in lava, which is impossible to traverse without the Orange Charred Ring, and even then forces a lot of healing. The main enemies for its first half are the Bounding Demons, which are lazily made (they're hind legs that the rotted Undead Dragon in the Painted World leaves behind after it tears its front half away from it to reach you, repurposed into an enemy), very common, and dangerous for melee characters and tedious for ranged characters, though they don't respawn. The second portion is more interesting, containing the climxes of Solaire's and Siegmeyer's questlines plus a final duel with Kirk, but the boss, the Bed of Chaos, is almost universally considered the worst boss in the entire series.