Hmmm, now that I'm making my way through Weeping Peninsula and seeing the copy & pasta, I don't know man...
It's like let's take Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Demon Souls formula which was pretty much perfect and let's make it BIGGER by...copy & pasting dozens of tombs, mines, caves that all look the same and let's have you fight the same bosses over and over except with ADDS or two at a time! And when you beat one of these mini-dungeons and kill the bosses you don't even get enough souls to gain a single level because we're going to have so many of them we can't have you character build progress too quickly!
Last part is the same issue I had with Horizon 1->2 where when you more than double the game length, it just means your character strength progression will go at half the speed, so if ER is like 3-4x as long as the other souls games it means you grow in strength 1/3rd or 1/4th as slow. Like I keep gaining levels but can't say I notice much of a difference a couple of levels makes in this, though tbf in the other souls games stat increases seemed about the same? Maybe it's that in the older Souls games weapon levels were 1-10 and apparently in this it's like 1-30 or something?
One thing I like is how elemental versions of weapons are handled where at a campfire you can instantly switch between blood/holy/keen/quality/etc..., the only issue being that until you have war arts in all the elements you're locked out of those. Like if I want to make a lightning or fire sword right now I've got no option. Eventually when I get all the elements that'll be nice and let me mix up the element of my weapon pretty regularly, wheraes in other souls games since you were fairly locked in it was like pick an element you want for your weapon this run and build towards it, so most of the time I need had a weapon that targeted an enemy's weakness.
But yeah, I'm already pretty sick of Catacombs. Just did the implaler one on the cliffside, then the mine in the peninsula woods, and now I'm at another catacombs under the Erd tree there. Also these copy & paste ruins all seems pretty whatever and mostly just jump over some walls with Torrent to find the stairs down and get the treasure and leave.
Just not sure if what I wanted out of my souls games was copy & paste. Makes me miss the tight level designs and unique boss fights of Sekiro.