Expandgreetings. so, I finally watched Joseph Anderson's videos on Dark Souls. I have to admit, a lot of the issues he discussed often get overlooked by fans, and I'm somewhat guilty of that too. I mostly agree with his point of view, with two major exceptions:
1) in my opinion, recycling bosses as regular enemies is NOT fine. it's bullshit when other games do it, and it's bullshit when Dark Souls does it. it doesn't make you feel stronger, it just devalues the weight of the original encounter.
2) I don't think that Dark Souls story is absent, nonsensical, or lacks a solid base. there are gaps, sometimes big gaps in its story and lore, but once you collect enough pieces of the puzzle, putting them together is trivial.
sadly, the things he talked about in the videos don't really explain what happened to Ross when he played this game. in his critique he never touched on anything even remotely related to what Ross had a problem with. or maybe he did, but we don't know for sure because Ross gave up too quickly.
Please excuse me, I might not fully remember all we discussed.
I hope you enjoyed watching the series.
The way I see it, part of the blame for what happened to Ross was because he didn't seem to actually want to play rather than it felt he was being coerced by the viewers, and to boot, a large portion of the stream (not necessarily more than 50%) just wanted to see him getting frustrated (and he probably picked up on that).
Then in the character selection he was pushed to pick a tank, when from all I've seen the best characters are the mages and the game in general is punishing against tankers and relies more heavily on dodging, this exacerbated the feeling of, "eh, these guys are just trying to get a laugh at his expense". (tankers are punished by rolling slowly (with armor on), shield cooldowns, shield/armor piercing damage, and the limit on estes flasks is harder on tankers that are traditionally supposed to soak damage and not avoid it).
Knowing that was his mood, and knowing the game doesn't explain well system mechanics (the best example is the mechanic with the humanity and the kindling increasing the estes flasks, which I myself, after reading the wiki, am still not sure how works) the active viewers (if they really wanted to see him enjoy himself) should have explained system mechanics more in depth and prepare him to the gatcha moments like the bridge dragon and the capra demon.
However the active viewers still came with a mentality of "let him figure it all out by himself" until he dies several times and shows enough frustration to have a laugh and only then explain to him how to proceed, and since he didn't really want to play it in the first place (at least that's what it seemed to me from the video) , it was easy for him to just quit after 2 hours of basically grinding the same path over and over with near 0 plot and stat advancement. Howcome no one suggested, hey you know what? Why don't you take this opportunity to just grind stats a bit more instead of rushing the boss over and over to no avail? At least that would have preserved some sort of feeling of accomplishment and not having to lose all of the collected stuff to random mobs or to the boss time and time again.
On another note, Joseph is actually a supporter of the challenging difficulty in games as opposed to Ross which is why I thought you'd like seeing his videos, however one of the things I did notice that aligned between what Ross and Joseph said was the bad design of the crystal drop after the duke's archives, they basically both say the same thing, the design is boring and confusing (although Anderson says there are just dragonflies in the depths but Ross also encounters golems/elementals , were those added in the remaster?), and Ross just takes it an extra level by save "scumming" (not sure if what he did counts as such, but close enough) in order to avoid the repetition of going through the library to reach the entrance to the drop.
I'm sorry if this seems disjointed, I've been interrupted both mentally and physically, many times, while trying to write this and I'm not particularly good at expressing myself even at normal circumstances.
edit: one more thing, you could see from Ross's struggle with the inventory the merit of what Joseph said regarding having the player start unequipped and then prompted to equip the default armor himslef slightly later after he sees the base ability of the character and being able to understand how armor affects it after being equipped. (although a skip option should be added for newgame+)
Another thing that shows that Ross was not likely to enjoy dark souls was the respawning mechanic, that although I agree with Anderson that it fits very well thematically (and his other praises that I don't remember now), we heard Ross griping in many videos how when he clears a room it should stay cleared and having all enemies respawn whenever he reaches a checkpoint was clearly affecting the way he was playing the game and actively avoiding checkpoints.