History YMMV / DarkSoulsI

** No changes were made to the game's balance besides weapon matchmaking to combat the infamous {{PvP}} and twinking of the original game, and none of the glitches commonly abused in {{PvP}} such as chain backstabs were patched out either. And even then the weapon matchmaking is entirely based on the highest level of weapon acquired by the player, including pre-upgraded weapons such as the lightning infused Spear in Sen's Fortress, making it easy for players who don't know any better to get locked into higher weapon matchmaking ranges without knowing why, whilst players looking to grief new players in early areas can easily circumvent the system in its entirety.

** The removal of mod/third party tool support by threat of banning anyone who dares to mod the game or use third party tools. Naturally, this means that the massive slew of changes that the DSFix mod for the original game are unavailable without risking being banned, and the anti-cheat tool PVP Watchdog for the original is also unavailable to combat cheaters.

** 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.

** The Demon Ruins and Lost Izaleth are far less tolerable. Both areas are oversized flat planes with barebones level geometry and unrefined lighting and textures. A small selection of enemies, who are incongruent with the area's lore and theme, are scattered around haphazardly. It ends with the fandom-despised Bed of Chaos boss fight, which works against the player's limitations in all the wrong ways.

** The focus on dodging means that for the vast majority of players, lightroll is the only acceptable roll, and even medium roll is far too slow. Lightroll requires remaining under 25% of your maximum equipment load. Thus, Havel's Ring is mandatory for anyone planning on using anything heavier than a straight sword and/or wearing anything heavier than cloth. It's likely for this reason that neither of the sequels even ''have'' a medium roll; you simply roll at full speed until you're heavy enough to start fatrolling (the threshold for which is less strict than it is in this game).

*** 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]].

*** After cranking the bridge tower back to ground level and making it past some Batwing Demons, you have to run up a narrow walkway and go right across a very narrow ledge to get inside the palace. There's two Silver Knights, one on the left, one on the right, both firing Dragonslayer Greatbows at you. Dragonslayer Arrows are essentially javelins, and for anyone without insanely high poise, even blocking a Dragonslayer Arrow will push you off the walkway. Not only do you have to run up there, but you actually have to kill one of the Silver Knights to get past and get to a safe spot, while the other Silver Knight is still shooting at you. Fortunately, the AI isn't very good at pathfinding, and the paths here are only just wide enough for you and the Knights to walk on them; "fighting" the Silver Knights here can only be a matter of getting close enough to one of them that the AI shifts to melee combat, and walking away so it tries to follow you, but ends up falling off the building.

** Petrus of Thorolund is a HateSink for [[spoiler:his heartless potential murder of Reah and her companions]], but he also lacks any likable or admirable traits, boasting an insufferable SmugSnake attitude, never feeling any remorse for his actions, and having an unappealing, slightly {{gonk}}-ish visual design with a horrid bowl haircut. As such, he's become the fandom's favorite punching bag (with many people labeling him an "incel"), and is considered the single most hated NPC in the game.

** Petrus of Thorolund is a HateSink for [[spoiler:his heartless potential murder of Reah and her companions]], but he also lacks any likable or admirable traits, boasting an insufferable SmugSnake attitude, never feeling any remorse for his actions, and having an unappealing, slightly {{gonk}}-ish visual design with a horrid bowl haircut. As such, he's become the fandom's favorite punching bag, and is considered the single most hated NPC in the game.

** The Nintendo Switch port of the remaster isn't as bad as the PC version, but has downgraded graphics and poor audio quality, along with slightly stiffer controls and handling. Its the worst console version of the game due to that.
* 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 Izalith]] 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.

** 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 [[spoiler:though Dark Souls 3 makes it ambiguous if these bosses are illusions]], and Seath gained immortality and crystal breath that he didn't have before).\\