found it tedious for some reason but enjoyed the soul system in detail: like SotN but watered down with reduced audio/visual specs (gba), smaller, same filler content (useless items/drops/souls etc) and grind, chaos realm end game area meh, some difficulty boss spikes (death, end bosses) but maybe I just suck and less memorable bosses, kinda ehhh on soma as protagonist. On the flip side, more balanced than SotN, soul system overall is good, easier to navigate, story is alright, some good/memorable bosses (Balore), not egregiously bad in any way, just a lesser SotN experience for me.

moving from HoD to this gave me whiplash: difficulty is now brutal instead of easy/boring, potions suck/are nonexistant instead of being able to buy them, controls are now slow and clunky (double tap to dash sucks), long winding back/forth corridors from HoD now replaced by lots of verticality. One of my main annoying gripes: beating the (very tough) bosses does not give full heals, meaning you have to crawl on the verge of death to the nearest save point and hope you dont get smoked by an enemy en route (jk lol save states fuck that). Without save states I'd just get filtered or have to grind... BUT good: aesthetic and music, excellent sprite art, some of the fucking coolest memorable boss fights (Dragon zombies, Camilla), even ones that are very mechanically repetitive/slightly annoying have cool designs (Adramelech), once you get over the hump the challenge of these feels rewarding, tougher enemies appear in previously visited areas after progression to shake up backtracking tentative 3.5 but the clunky movement (esp the running) and puzzling lack of QoL mechanics (no life orbs from bosses, low skill card drop rates and no monster encyclopedia, most evil clocktower style platforming verticality with projectiles, petrification & moving platforms, could use more teleportation rooms to mitigate backtracking) would rater higher if not for annoying dash, clunky movement, low drop rates and lack of some QoL updates

fairly simplistic level design (lots of corridors, winding ->^-<^->^ rooms), long tedious pointless backtracking, repetition (2 of the same castle with exactly the same layout w/ slightly diff bg's so you can clear the same shit twice!), difficulty becomes a joke adding to the boredom, graphics okay for its platform (some cool looking areas) but palette sometimes a bit garish, repeating enemies (palette swaps or slightly stronger), unintuitive objectives adding to the padding w more backtracking across 2 same castles, controls ok but kinda floaty, boss fights ok but too straightforward/sometimes dull (just spam attack ftw, not enough variation/movesets), overall not bad or good just mid, kinda ok waste of time but probably rather be doing smth else