I also platinumed the game and can confidently review every aspect having seen and beaten it all.

Me too. And getting hostile doesn’t make your claims any less questionable if not demonstrably wrong. I understand the game bent you over its knee and pounded your cheeks but you don’t have to make shit up to criticize it. It’s really easy:

A lot of the quests and endings STILL practically require a guide and can break if you progress too fast, and that’s been an issue since Demon’s Souls for crying out loud… The lack of vertical depth on the map often doesn’t do a good enough job of telling the player that there is no path to climb from below to obvious points of interest. And why tf aren’t our waypoints and map markers unlimited? A handful of bosses read your animations and react like a robot, and it not only breaks immersion but feels cheap to fight against. Idk about on console, but PC had some pretty bad optimization issues in certain areas for several months after release, and the DLC now has the same issue. It’s a little frustrating that the FPS is still capped at 60 like their other games. To this day there is still an issue with decorations/foliage over-culling the shading behind them, giving it an ugly glowy effect. The light reflections in things like water are still tied to the camera like in the other games, making it look like you can move light sources with the right stick. It probably should have been more clear that Ria’s hug debuffs your HP. Messages and other interactables being too close to each other disables your ability to switch weapons, which is really annoying when you’re trying to buff yourself before a boss fight and can’t switch to a talisman, and on rare occasions can screw you over in combat. Dismissible notifications like the doors opening in legacy dungeons bizarrely disable your attack buttons, and can screw you over if you happen to be under pursuit or if you forget to dismiss it and walk into a fight. The PVP arena gives you no rewards and there’s no incentive to do it rather than invading. When invading, it’s way too likely that it’ll get canceled by the host walking through a fog wall the moment you load in. They should have fixed that during the DLC pre-patch by removing areas next to a fog wall from the pool, but they didn’t. Summon signs will constantly fail when the demand is too high because they don’t disappear immediately after another host swipes them from you. Players can hide in places only reachable with Torrent and then invite invasions with the taunter’s tongue, which wastes the invader’s time and incentivizes hosts to do this by giving them a constant stream of runes while AFK, making it the easiest farming method in the game.

More subjectively: Malenia’s life-stealing would have been better paired with almost any other boss, because her waterfowl attack is already hard enough to deal with. Maliketh’s burning attacks that lower your HP cap are way too frustrating, and it would’ve been nice to have an item or a physick tear that could help counter it. The mimic tear is a great idea, but it’s wildly unbalanced and makes the other spirits not worth bothering to try. The run-back to the final boss to the grace is unnecessarily long and should have a stake of Marika next to it. Split damage is still somewhat of an issue, so physical damage is still “meta.” Bosses that summon other enemies are annoying and feel almost as cheap as DS2’s horde fights. The caves and legacy dungeons reusing textures, models, and decor might be narratively consistent and understandable from a developer perspective, but it makes them feel too same-y, and the diversity in layout and challenges to tackle don’t do enough to counteract that. They also use the same small pool of enemy types for caves and legacy dungeons, and they could have been improved by expanding that pool. It’s way too easy to hide from invaders and waste their time just to gank them after 10 minutes. They blew the spells of their previous games out of the water but in PVP they make it far too easy for hosts to demand invaders to drain their whole stamina bar while they spam spells, all while their partner is chasing them down.

All that and I didn’t have to misrepresent the game in ways that can be proven wrong the moment you reach Limgrave.