I absoltuely adore the original Dark Souls. I think Dark Souls success is often miscredited to it's biggest flaws, and the focus on making their games "hard" and meanspirited has led FromSoft to make a lot of their games worse on purpose to hold up that reputation as time has gone on.

I don't play Fighting Games much now but played them a lot with my brother when I was young. There are a few (mostly 3D, mostly SoulCalibur) fighting games I love playing even if it's just me against the AI and of those SoulCalibur II is the best and Soul Blade was, for me, the first.

(I still have hundreds of hours in Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 3, and Elden Ring, I'm just a FromSoft lover-hate kismesis with a lot of Opinions™ about the games as they went on that could devolve pretty quickly into controversial discourse).