few issues ive had with the souls universe are
demons souls lore has always been more interesting to me than the dark reboot. the old one etc is much more interesting than "muh flame" horse shit. they traded hp lovecraft outer gods for fucking bonfire worship, which progressively is just a shittier version of something "not right" existing with a taken form like an old one or other hp-like, what have you. i get that can be opinion, but maybe i'm just not smart enough to really word the feeling of finding the old one in demons souls, finding frozen bodies in bloodborne with a ringing ost, the mother and baby on the beach, really bloodborne as a whole, in comparison to "zombie lights/does not light bonfire and it's multiple sequels where zombie does or does not light a bonfire and fights people that fucked up lighting a bonfire", with additional vagueness to just be vague and mysterious, which later goes from a mystery plot setup to just "well some autistic (now literal) troons will make it make sense if we just put separate short stories on a 5% and 2.5% drop rate item" it's also been jarring to me to this day to have the most recognizable things from demon souls, fog walls etc, copied, but the logic is handwaved and the attempted lore for them was just forgotten, and they copied it for every single game after where there was less and less reasons for it to exist besides just "well it's a souls game". they didn't make their own functions or logic, they just ripped the assets.
lore and environmental storytelling is also really inconsistent across their titles and even within each one. stuff like the artorias dlc where you have a solid >"wtf is going on here" >"ok i'm noticing patterns" >"wtf is this weird hole" >"k i get wtf is going on here" is great, no items descriptions needed for basic understanding, but they'll have more info which is great. but then they'll just have the most random areas that you will never know wtf they even matter for besides again, troons, or item drops, and said item drops vary from either giving you a basic full story, or 2 paragraphs of a full story, (bonus points if you don't even get fucking that) that's unfinished by design, but devs assume the player will think it's mysterious (and ate that shit up they did/do),
so you just get 30+ troons with millions of views fanficing or reading 2 paragraphs then summarizing 2 paragraphs for 30 minutes because they like their voice so much, and people clap and call it some serious storytelling. they ARE capable of good storytelling, but some combination of souls games getting the reputation for sparse lore and people nutting for it lead to devs either pushing that further, never less, or them using it and just putting minimal effort into environmental storytelling, not saying anything, while someone on youtube will spin shit for them like "this pillar here by the boss has an indent that matches an enemy's frame, therefore we can assume he yeeted his own soldiers into that fuckin shit, but there's also a sticky white substance. there's also a crater nearby which implies he raped tf out of the townsfolk. tune in next time when i talk for 30 minutes about how the cat in majula is literally the cheshire cat from alice in wonderland, by extension the entire game is under the tree, and the main character is a trans allegory shown by the coffin representing their DEAD self"
