Dark Souls was a balanced game. Yes, you could still get yourself in a corner by wasting materials on a bad weapon, but the game on the whole was infinitely better balanced than the sequels. The shields actually worked. The collisions were as
perfect as they could be. Cheap traps were very few. Gang attacks were rare and you mostly had to work to trigger one, and since shields were actually worth a damn and good collisions meant the shield would effectively block attacks, you could still survive for more than a few seconds. Enemy attacks weren’t literal machine guns, even the hardest bosses had some cooldown moments and they didn’t read your inputs when you tried to heal 9 times out of 10 like ER blatantly does. The game only had one duo boss, and enemies that made the camera go bananas were rightly notorious because of it.
The game design in ER clearly revels in cheap situations, surprise assaults, deliberately awful camera, and relentless enemies. The magicians in the Academy will keep casting spells without a second’s pause for literal minutes, like they’re having a magic seizure or something. When you’re on horseback, most enemies can pull a quickfire combo out of their ass that will one-shot your horse without giving you time to react. There’s dual-wielding knights that I swear can (and will) pull off a 8 or 9-hit combo that can one-shot you like it’s nothing.
Yeah, there’s ways to cheese the game, but only because cheesing is the name of the game, unless you’re an absolute pro who can parry every blow without a mistake. It’s a contest of who can out-cheese the other - the game, or you. Dark Souls felt like it rewarded actual skill - you didn’t need to cheese the game, just choose a build, stick with it, and yes, git gud at it.