I am firmly in the end game so I’ll be talking about end game bosses, questlines, and such. Therefore, consider everything I’m about to say to be some kind of spoiler and be forewarned.
We need to talk about Miquella’s Haligtree, an area that is the most miserable I’ve been in for any From game. Including DLCs. Blighttown is a cakewalk in comparison. even the Ringed City, which made me cry the first time I traversed it, would be a welcome respite from the hellhole that is Miquella’s Haligtree.
Let’s first talk about the area. It’s hard to get to in the first place. You need two halves of a medallion, and one of those halves include a mini questline in and of itself. Which, fine. I don’t actually have a problem with that because that’s FromSoft. It’s one of their quirks to have optional areas that are really easy to miss and really hard to find. There are some like the Great Hollow of Dark Souls that you find by hitting two illusory walls. When you go down it, you reach Ash Lake–a really serene and surreal area.
Then there are areas like Archdragon Peak in Dark Souls III that you need a gesture found in another completely optional place to be taken to another place where you use the gesture. It then transports you to Archdragon Peak. Did I find that on my own? Hell, no! Ash Lake is more of a set piece to wander through and marvel, whereas Archdragon Peak is an actual level with the hardest boss in the vanilla game.
Miquella’s Haligtree is hard to find. And, it’s hard to get to the first checkpoint because there is a hard-as-nails knight guarding it. Millicent, an NPC is also there, and I was worried that she could die if I tried to kill the knight in her vicinity. Not that it mattered because that knight one-shot me. Have I mentioned how much I love scrub enemies who can one-shot me? I know my vigor was low at that point (I’m at 30, which is laughable), but still.
At one point, there is a room in which there are two soldiers on ballistae, two hard-as-nails knights, some foot soldiers, and a Minor Erdtree. Yes, a field boss. They are just common enemies in this area. Which, fine for the ones you can run past and don’t have to deal with, but this one was in the thick of things. There is simply no way to kill all the enemies, so I ran around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying frantically to find where I was supposed to go. The killer? You don’t actually even need to go into that room.