I fought some of those shield blobs after the Phalanx boss' chamber and made my way up to the stone path the top of the wall. The dragons swoop down and breath fire, so you have to time running across the wall so that you won't get killed. My character couldn't survive the fire. I'd clear the first rampart, make my way through the tunnel in the wall, fight the dogs, come up in the next rampart, finish off the remaining enemies and then prepare to avoid the next segment of dragon fire. Avoiding the dragon fire wasn't hard. I'd get to the other side, wipe out the crossbowman and then square off with the shielded knight. The first time I wasn't expecting him and he killed me. So I went back through the whole thing again, fought the knight and just as I delivered the killing blow, and second knight unexpectedly stabbed me in the back.
Ok, so I do the whole thing again, get to that fight and die because of a screw up with the targeting system, which I do not like. I'd prefer to have a button to hold. Still, human error. Once again, I go through the whole thing, only this time I get burnt up by the second dragon. While I was waiting for the dragon to swoop down, I was standing quite a distance back preparing for my run. For some reason the fire killed me anyway, wiping out all of those demon souls I had collected. That was the first death that really bothered me because I lost a lot of souls that I was carrying, and I hadn't even done anything wrong. Do I want to grind and get them all back? Not really. There's no fun in going through areas that are easy just to grind for "money."
Ok, so I put that aside and decide to go through it all again. This time, I die twice at the first dragon. What is going on? Suddenly my guy is getting tired half way to the rampart and the dragon is wiping me out. I figure some of the big stuff I'd picked up recently like shields, halberds etc are killing my endurance. So is there a way to drop that stuff? Not that I could figure out. I can't sell it and get money for it either, so why would i keep it? I went back to nexus, dropped of all my extra stuff with that storage guy, even though I'd rather not fill up my storage with junk, and tried again. Made it back to those two knights, screwed up the targeting again and died and decided to take a break.
My problem was that after repeating an area a few times, it stopped being fun. All of it, leading up to those two knights, was incredibly easy. Then I'd have thirty seconds of fun trying to fight them, and then back to five minutes of boring trying to get back to them.
I have mixed feelings about the design of the game. I appreciate that there are real penalties for death, but treading over the same ground, fighting the same enemies in the same spots etc wasn't that much fun. There is some better balance between save/load and retreading long segments of the game. I guess that segment I was playing wasn't that long, it just wasn't fun after the first few times. It becomes a chore to get back to where you were. I want to see new things, new places, not repeat the same set piece over and over. If every inch was a challenge for me, it would probably be better, because I'd have fun fighting my way through. Maybe my complaint is that it was too easy at times? I don't know.
I think I had to grind a little bit more and be more mindful to go back to nexus and spend my souls instead of carrying a huge sack of them with the potential of losing them all. I'm still considering picking it up, because it's a style of tactical sword fighting that is rare in games, and I enjoy it. The block, parry and attacks really work well. The only thing I don't like is the targeting. I died a number of times trying to back away from an enemy, thinking I had them targeted, only to turn my back on them and get killed.
