Life Gems were a good idea because they enabled you to get to a bossroom with full health and full estus even if you...

Life Gems were a good idea because they enabled you to get to a bossroom with full health and full estus even if you took a hit on your way to the boss, without making you run back all the way to the bonfire and through every enemy again, thus alleviating the issue that taking a single hit wasted an amount of time that came close to dying to the boss and having to approach again, for taking a single hit from some random shitter mob, which is neither difficult nor fun, and thus added nothing to the game.

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Ok but watch out for run on sentences

>die
>lose max health

Fuck DS2

t. never played the game past the first hour

Fuck, you found me out? Does the game get better then?

Life Gems were good because they game the developers flexibility to do levels that weren't of set length. Dark Souls 1 levels are by far the shortest in the series with the short DS2 levels. Undead Burg, Undead Parish, Lower Burg, Depths, Asylum, Anor Londo, Tomb of Giants, Darkroot Garden and Chasm of Abyss are all really short levels. Compare that to DeS, that has really long and really short levels, DS1 just lacks the tension that really long levels bring - aside from Blighttown.

if you ever played it for a reasonable amount of time you'd realize that losing health from dying is an issue, never, because human effigies are so abundant, and the game is still playable at 50% health, even if you somehow couldn't recover it

but that's in every souls game

DS1 might have had small levels, but DS3's profligate use of bonfires makes it way less tense than the first game. I went straight from DS1 to DS3 and was really shocked by the frequency of bonfires. Did they purposefully casual-ise the game?

Lol

>DS3's profligate use of bonfires
The entire Cathedral of the Deep has two bonfires, one of which is unlocked after killing the final boss.

Also let players set their own difficulty as they were cheap to buy and could be spammed with relatively safety in boss fights.

You can't die in DS2 because you struggled in an area, only in one single encounter, because you can't physically run out of survival resources. That isn't a gameplay fault in itself, but it leads development into a terrible habit, the same that plagued being able to teleport from the beggining: lazyness.
Every encounter then has to be as torturous as possible, because if you survive that, fuck it, you are good right up until the boss and that encounter is deemed meaningless in term of inpact it had on the way. Its the only reason one can beat DS2 even while being as shitty as humanly possible. You don't actually need to LEARN anything. Just smash those motherfucking lifegems and fix that life protection ring and you are basically not even dying anymore.

Good game.
The faultiest design overall in the series, carried over all of its larger content overall than all other FROM games

I thought that the Cathedral had three bonfires.

I agree. Sadly the way DS3 tried to solve the issue was even worse, by overpowering Estus to the point where one is worth half your HP bar, trivializing the importance of proper usage of healing.
I feel like if Life Gems would have been so slow and weak that they were unusable _during_ fights but still a viable way to regenerate health _between_ fights the game would have been much better as that would have forced the developers to design proper encounters.

You're right, I forgot Rosaria's Bedroom.
However, the degree to which if affects the way the entire cathedral sequence is played is debatable, since it is literally the last room you will be able to enter while you're there for the first time.

Bloodvials are worse than life gems but nobody seems to give a fuck
> its OK when myazaki does it

Then also fuck Demons Souls and fuck Dark Souls 3

How are they worse? I don't own a PS4 so I never played Bloodborne.

I don't think they're worse since the game limits you to a max of 20 at a time unless you attach a rune to increase the amount.

It heals you for 40% of your max health though. That's like being able to carry 20 estus flasks, with enemies dropping more estus as you go.
It's definetely better than Demon's Souls because you don't have to juggle 20 million different types of healing items but other than that I think that's too much health.