I decided to post this after trying Dark Souls for the first time.
The excuses people make for this game are weird, and I don't understand why they do it. It's like everything I read is "it's good once you read these 30 pages of things that any halfway decent game designer would have the game teach you" and "it's good once you replay the same bit often enough (because you will) and finally find some opaque pattern to this one enemy's beavior (that's useless for anything else and only works about half the time)."
Meanwhile, it decides to take everything we've learned about action games and throw it out the window. Predictable enemies? Meh. If you're lucky they'll wind up, but then you don't know if they're doing one attack, two, or six. Oh look, you've fought these guys 8 times before, but here's a new thing that you didn't know they could do, so the beginnings of strategy you'd put together suddenly goes out the window.
Basically, there are a good number of people who have been Stockholm Syndromed into pretending it's not a prototypical example of bad design, and some are apparently willing to sink a few hours of just trial and error in the hopes of getting better. This is apparently what it takes. It's like writing a book, only you did it in your own language that lacks any consistent grammatical rules, and there are people out there who made a story of their own out of it. That's not what I buy books for.
While on the subject of books, I don't understand why anyone likes The Name of the Wind. It's an entire novel devoted to a douchebag jerking himself off about how great he is.