You're free to disagree, but Demon's Souls and Dark Souls do not touch on the Lovecraftian horror elements nearly as strongly as Bloodborne does, which is the w

You're free to disagree, but Demon's Souls and Dark Souls do not touch on the Lovecraftian horror elements nearly as strongly as Bloodborne does, which is the whole reason I mentioned it here. Bloodborne is the only game in the series which is actually relevant to this thread. As for the class/character system, Bloodborne is actually not a Souls game and is deliberately different. I don't really want to get into a big discussion of the game mechanics here, but it took what worked best from Demon's Souls and invested everything in it. Nobody really played with heavy armor in Demon's Souls anyway except perhaps for a self-imposed handicap. Bloodborne is basically a streamlined Demon's Souls with the cruft that didn't work well thrown out and a more explicitly Lovecraftian story and world. DS2 has a lot more variety but also has a large number of basic mechanical issues, such as imprecise hitboxes. Dark Souls 1 probably hits the sweet spot between variety and solid fundamentals. Hopefully Dark Souls 3 marks a return to this style.