Dark Souls III Review

Dark Souls III arrives with Bloodborne in its bloodstream. Attacks come out faster, rolls cost less stamina, and enemies press you in a way the first two games never did, which pulls the series away from patient spacing and toward reading a fight in real time. Weapon arts give every armament a second identity, and for the first time in this line the strange options are worth committing to rather than admiring from a distance. Lothric is denser and more linear than Lordran, and you can fairly argue that trading the original's tangled geography for a strong critical path is a loss, but the bosses are the best set the studio had assembled to that point: Abyss Watchers, Pontiff Sulyvahn, the Nameless King, Soul of Cinder, each a lesson rather than a wall.

The final act leans hard on the series' own history, and whether that reads as elegiac or as fan service depends on how much of the first game you carry into it. The craft is not arguable. This is FromSoftware closing a book it had been writing for six years, and the ending lands.