The second expansion to Dark Souls III and official conclusion to the Dark Souls series—though I feel like we'll somehow get another one eventually—has some downsides for me like the base game but is still a must-play addition for fans of the the series.
I'm mostly just coming to DSIII for the boss fights, and this expansion is a lot meatier on that front than "Ashes of Ariandel" was. The first required fight is another duo boss, which I was oddly able to beat on my first attempt despite struggling with all the surrounding major bosses. I liked its implementation of the duo format, which like Sister Friede’s duo phase seemed to give you a bit of a break by having one more passive boss focus on ranged attacks, but can’t say much else about it. The next boss is just a fight against NPCs (while playing offline as I did, otherwise a real player joins in) which didn’t feel like much of a boss fight. Luckily, there are two big ones afterward that gave me a pretty perfect level of challenge and are what I’ll remember this for.
The first big challenge was the optional dragon Midir, which I have somewhat mixed feelings about. It’s one of those fights that starts out feeling too hard but gradually begins to feel beatable, a pretty satisfying arc as I learned its different animation tells and hitboxes and got comfortable playing without lock-on. But oddly I don’t find this boss super fun to actually fight against, as he must be fought super up close but constantly flies and dashes away, blasts the area near him with big AOE fire to run away from yourself, and jerks around in a way where I would get one or maybe two hits in and then just have to wait my turn forever. It’s far from trivial even if it becomes predictable after a while, just because he has so much health and can kill you so easily, but that war of attrition was not very exciting. I still think it’s kind of cool learning this boss’s unusual behavior and like how its moves are implemented to make you always feel like you’re just barely avoiding big slams and fire blasts.
The beloved Gael fight that closes out the DLC was much more my speed, a fast-paced and complex boss that exemplifies the hard but fair designs you'd want from this game. It offers a particularly great implementation of a multi-phase fight, technically 3 phases that kind of felt like a meaty 2.5 to me. Even the first phase remains fun after many attempts, testing the memorization skills and discipline that you develop throughout the game, punishing if you overextend on stamina or healing animations, some tricky stuff to dodge but very doable as he was predictably staggered and leaves solid openings. Once a bit of a transformation happens, the moveset completely changes and throws some real surprises at you. The animations and design of this second half of the fight are very cool, really feeling like this all-out final duel while not being overwhelmingly difficult or drawn-out.
I wish I liked the levels leading up to these bosses more. The first area is just kinda meh to me, a bit awkward as they design it around these big drops that you intuitively know you are not supposed to survive, so they put a bunch of messages on the ground saying basically "Hey, you can drop down here!". Once you're through that part you deal with a bunch of ranged attacks in a pretty decent larger section, a bit annoying but some nice verticality. The second area is the titular Ringed City, which feels like the most troll area in the game, very willing to lead you to your doom with unnecessary item pickups, block your way, blast you with more kinds of crazy ranged spam, and so on. I was pretty impressed with how this area develops and opens up, and it definitely can look cool and feel reasonably-paced in terms of shortcuts and checkpoints, but I wouldn't say it was extremely fun due to its various annoyances.
Glad I finally truly closed the book on this game, and its DLCs and optional content were definitely worth the return visit. I think this DLC is a better value than the prior one, but both should be played together almost as one very big expansion for the best experience. This one slots in very nicely after completing the base game and is a generally memorable chunk of content even if it has some ups and downs.
