Hmm, I managed to get to where I was in Dark Souls in 2~ hours of playtime after starting over, beating both bosses in the first tower to ring the first bell, and managing to get a ways into the next area, fighting the next boss and kicking its ass.
I've learned how to backstab. It seems my problem was holding up my shield while trying to backstab, which is why I never rendered any result. Once I noticed that I was doing it wrong, I can backstab almost every enemy I come across. It has made the game utterly boring due to the predictable enemy patterns; how they just stand around, not to mention the slow attacks that are easy to parry due to the motion blur cue.
After 20 hours, I've kinda decided I don't like Dark Souls. I still find the same problems I originally did with the game. I like level design, I hate the controls. I like that the player levels up more than the character, but I don't like the repetition. I don't find the difficulty to be high and it's mostly just tedious. I'm not understanding why gamers feel it is difficult nor rewarding. I'm one shotting my way past enemy after enemy, backstabbing and taking advantage of invincible frames, then taking advantage of the bad level layouts like using stairs to slaughter enemies who can't climb up them.
I don't find that challenging, I find it annoying and repetitive. It's like if you played Ninja Gaiden 2, and instead of fighting enemies that constantly have you on your toes and have to make you improve as a player and try out new strategies, you have brain dead enemies that rarely attack you and stand there waiting to be one shotted. Then you get to the boss, die, and start the level all over again.
That's not fun, it's an exercise in redundancy. Dark Souls is gamer masochism at its worst. Samurai Warriors 2 is more engaging and that's a game where you kill 300 mook enemies per map. I think I'm done with the Soul series, I just don't find them engaging despite liking the core principle game design.
