Dark Souls III: Ashes of Ariandel

Goddamn is this DLC good! I felt like the areas of the main game really hit or miss, (as good as Ithryll and Lothric castle are, there are some really aweful areas too, like Ithryll dungeon and Smoldering lake). The beauty and complexity of Ariendel however is just amazing. There are a lot of diverse enemies, really great weapons and great level design. Although the base game was relatively linear, Ariendel has more of that dark souls 1 vibe of looping around in the area, expanding it, and unlocking shortcuts. It also has A few really interesting optional areas with some pretty tough enemies in combat encounters. Definetly take some extra time to look around the area. Although you can blaze to it in like 3-4 hours, and many people criticize it for being short, There are more optional areas that some-what make up for it.

(Spoiler-ish section, I talk about the bosses) Personally, I'm a huge fan of the two bosses they added. There's one optional bus that many people don't like, but I found him to be a cool change of pace and a fun encounter with an interesting arena.

The final boss of this DLC see though, oh my god is it amazing! It has this way of ramping up difficulty while teaching you how to deal with its many faces throughout the fight. The visuals are incredible the challenge is fair yeah extremely high, (harder then anything in the base game, though that's pretty par for the course for dark souls DLC). Personally, The final boss for this DLC is my favorite in the series so far, And almost completely makes up for the lack of other bosses in this DLC. That being said, two bosses is not really that much, and I would've loved to see more, especially considering how good these two bosses were. But, quality over quantity as good, and the next DLC definitely didn't disappoint in the boss department.

Look, this is a good bit of DLC, but I already complained how the base game was starting to feel far too over-familiar to me as someone who has played the first two games, and this expansion consists of one area that is blatantly a parallel to the Painted World from the first game, and if I'm honest, I don't understand why. It's not like the story of this expansion absolutely required the setting to be waving member berries in your face, it really could have teleported you to an entirely new world to do everything it does here.

While we're talking about the story, it's pretty disappointing too. It's more of a prelude to The Ringed City, and other than that one character you meet that serves as the link into that expansion, the story doesn't go much further than "the ruler here is evil, stop her". There is some mystery behind what exactly is happening, but by the time you figure it out, it becomes a very "that's it?" affair.

While the area you explore is a lot like what you'll find in the base game (lacking in concept but still well designed), there really isn't much of it and the only part of it that really stuck out to me is a little village section, while the rest is comprised mostly of snowy paths and fields with the occasional mildly interesting building planted here and there.

The new equipment and spells you can find are pretty cool (I didn't use many of them, going mostly off of the descriptions here), and as for the new bosses, while having only two is a bit of a downer and one of them is painfully average, the other is honest to god top 10 across the whole series material.

So in the end, this feels very similar to how most of what I enjoyed about the main game being summed up with "it's more Dark Souls", but even more so. So, like with the main game itself, if you want more Dark Souls, then go nuts, just don't expect too much of it.