i have to disagree with some of your points...Initially I was into the idea of a leaner, less RPG-bent type of Souls experience but the further I press on the more bored I'm becoming with it. I always played solo so I don't miss any of the co-op stuff but I do feel the game lacks a bit in the atmosphere department - especially after Bloodborne. It all feels a bit by the book visually speaking. Love the verticality but the stealth honestly feels tacked on and regular enemies do a pretty poor job of training you for bosses and and mini-bosses - of which there just seem to be far too many or at least not enough of them have memorable identities in the way I think of characters like Father Gascoigne, Flamelurker or Ornstein and Smough. Then there's this engine still chugging along struggling to keep pace with 30 fps after Nioh's rock solid 60 fps and a camera that somehow feels like it's the worst of all the Soulsborne games. Those patches where a jumping enemy will simply go out of view and you'll lose lock-on altogether.. dear FromSoft, if you're going to encourage near 'perfection' in parrying, dodging and posture control maybe you aught to actually try give us the same and sort these aspects of the game out before you put it out for release. All these reviewers who continue to kiss these guy's asses for fear of the GitGud mob coming after them are doing the developers a disservice by pretending their games aren't worthy of more scrutiny and developing a new engine that would offer more fluidity like say Ninja Gaiden - would make this game amazing. Right now I just don't buy the hype unless things get better in the latter half but typically the more time you put in the easier it gets but being easier or harder alone doesn't directly translate to better.
i have to disagree with some of your points...
the atmosphere is as good as always... headless fight(s), sword saint or the whole ashina castle including its multiple invasions spring to mind instantly...
the enemies do a poor job of training you for bosses thats true, but that has always been the case with souls games kinda... and again isshin the sword saint, owl, genichiro, guardian ape, demon of hatred are great bosses and super memorable....
camera is your worst enemy at times, thats true...
but the fighting system is a) better and more complex than souls and b) *super* fluid and satisfying once youve truly figured it out...
Headless sucks.. worst fight in the game imo.. and you can fight 3 or 4 of them and they're all the same aside from the one underwater which is even easier. I like some of the bosses but I don't think they're very memorable to me personally.. the game is just endless roadblocks with how many bosses you can fight.. I feel like they run out of ideas with this combat system too quick.
And I don't think the combat system is very deep at all.. because unlike Souls/Bloodborne experimentation and alternate styles of fighting are generally frowned upon. The punishment is too strict and too many of the combat arts seem near useless, so there's no room for creativity and it's the same in how you're forced to tackle bosses. Every player has to do it in the exact same way because there's really one single strategy to every boss (generally speaking) since you only have one single fighting style. Again I wouldn't even mind if more of the tools seems useful but it's like.. why even bother using almost any other combat art when the first one available is literally the best in the game.. okay shadowrush is good but whirlwind slash still seems to be better in almost every case I can think of. Try to do something fancy and you're probably going to be punished for it by losing almost your entire health bar.. it's incredibly restrictive and boring to me. Half your prosthetic tools seem useless as well.
Seems like they're taking themselves way too seriously or they're just trolling at this point. Aspects like nerfing dodge (doesn't have to be bloodborne good but should still be more useful than it is) and making you feel forced later down the line into grinding souls because you know chances are you're going to lose a bunch repeating a boss until you learn it.. to me it's just bad design and wastes the player's time.
Haven't actually finished the whole thing yet but yeah.. I'm already over it.