The Souls games by FromSoftware ranked, including 'Elden Ring'

The first sequel has a bad reputation, and it's perhaps the most famously mismanaged of FromSoftware's projects. It started out far too technically ambitious (it famously had to eschew a complicated lighting system because it was too much for the seventh generation of video game consoles), and it's the only game in this list not directly helmed by series creator Hidetaka Miyazaki. It lost one of its directors partway through development, leaving co-director and longtime FromSoftware developer Yui Tanimura to not only direct the game himself, but salvage an incomplete project from whatever assets were built for the initial, graphics-intensive vision. You can feel the strain in "Dark Souls 2" as it literally stretches itself across many regions; it barely makes sense geographically. The game is choked with enemy encounters, pushing the boundaries of acceptable difficulty.