Horrible, boring, meaningless difficulty.
Making a god awful game with seriously pathetic controls doesn't make a good game. How this gets a 9.5 rating is beyond me. First of all it would need really good graphics to make it to 9.5 and it doesn't even come close to having graphics worthy of this generation, or last generation, this is basically a PS1 game at best. It has fps lag which makes no sense. So not only did they make poor graphics, they couldn't code it well either. Also your path is not clear, often you will find yourself lost and running circles around a place because round a corner is a very small stariway you couldn't see due to the awful graphics and color.
Next a game has to have a story to get a 9.5 rating. This game has no story, at the begininng you scratch your head... and then throughout the entire game you have no direction. Nobody says anything important to you, they give you stuff and laugh. The game relies on the player to do all the work in he game so it can do nothing but make you frustrated and angry. If you work really hard in the game trying to beat overly annoying creatures and collect souls to level up, the game will find a way to be extremely lame and kill you in a very cheap and unfair way. For example, even the first boss is very cheap by knocking you over and smashing you with it's hammer while your character spends way too long getting to their feet. This game wants you to explore and make your own stories, but then negates that by making it possible to lose everything you worked for. So really you'll find yourself running away or avoiding areas so you can keep your souls to level up. Everything costs way too much as well, so be prepared to work really hard and lose it all. Souls are the only thing in the game that will get you any further, and even the weakest enemies will be able to kill you if you're not ready, and you will not be ready unless you've played the game several times. Even then, you probably won't be able to get your character to operate correctly, and there are always the very cheap, unfair attacks the creatures randomly pull out of the terrible game.
Next to get a 9.5 rating the game has to have good sound, this has okay sound, but definitely not good or amazing as gamespot would lead you to believe. Your attacks do not feel like they've made an impact, really it makes this whooshing sound most of the time, one that sounds like an electronic device mimicing your grandfathers hacking up phlegm noises. If it isn't that horrible sound, it's the clank of your sword, supposedly that sound is supposed to work in every situation. It sounds more like you banged a wine glass against the bottle you're drinking from. It's like that when you hit stone, dirt, anything. Ambient noises sound like a flies are buzzing around in your ears and you can't get them out. The voices are extremely low in the game by default while the ambient noises drain everything else out. So go into options turn voices to 10 and music and sound to 1 and then crank your TV volume to 70% of max volume, but even then you might have a hard time understanding with all the awful vocal FX they mixed it with. It's okay though, cause it's better to not care since none of it makes any sense anyway. All anyone really wants to do is give you an item, overcharge you for souls, or say something worthless and vague that really just means "Go explore and figure it out on your own!"
Next to get a 9.5 rating you have to have good gameplay. While this may be the best part of Dark Souls, it isn't good gameplay. Your character takes forever to do anything, while creatures move faster have better combos and can execute them flawlessy every single time. Your character can't do this, because for some reason they made every action your charcter does take way too long. It was probably because they wanted to make thegame even more annoyingly difficult than it already is. They even added in things you won't ever use, like kicking and jump attacks. Might as well not bother because kicking won't work half the time, and a jump attack is probably going to miss. Are you going to risk 5000 souls for a jump attack? I don't think so.
The only action you're going to be doing is holding up your shield and attacking when you feel like the creature is in a dormant state. But really they all move way too fast, and by the time your moronic, horribly developed character can raise it's shild you'll be hit for 25% of your health or more, and even result in death with the right combo. What's more frustrating is that , even if you are doing what you're supposed to the game doesn't register that. Because they've coded it so poorly, sometimes just turnin around your character will swing it's sword randomly. Why? Who knows... maybe they weren't sure if they made the game too frustrating. So they decided to add in quirky mechanics to their gameplay. Sadly the potential for the gameplay is endless, they could have made blocking and dodging a little more quickly, and it would have been tolerable. But you can't dodge and then block seemlessly. The animation for the dodge has to end, then you raise your shield, the enemies are TOO FAST for this. I don't know about you, but this type of gameplay seems very poorly executed on the developers part.
So I'm searching through this game trying to figure out how anyone could rate this 9.5 and all I can think of is that they suffered through it and want other people to suffer paying for it and then throwing it in a dark corner becase it's stupid and pointless, and it's difficulty lies in the fact that they made your character pathetic and slow and enemies powerful and fast. There is no story, there is no reward, no special ending, no good graphics, sounds horrible and plays like grandma even if your reflexes are cat like. This game barely passes the 3 mark for me, and it got that by not being an NES side scroller platform game.
One of the worst games to ever come out, and get an outrageous, nauseating 9.5 rating somehow.