Alternative Character Interpretation: Dark Souls invites this with pretty much every character, but most notably with the Primordial Serpents, Frampt and Kaathe.
Frampt, who's willing to use deception to allow the Age of Fire to persevere, is either a Well-Intentioned Extremist, or he simply wants he and/or his allies in Gwyn's family to maintain their power.
Likewise, Kaathe could be honest in his intention to give rise to mankind by ushering in the Age of Dark, or he's being just as deceitful as Frampt, and that the Age of Dark will not be good for any mortal.
In the Dark Lord ending, both Frampt and Kaathe pledge to serve you. Does this mean that they were always working together to play both sides?
Gwyndolin gets hit with this pretty hard. Is he the true villain of the game who drove away the other gods so he could rule Anor Londo himself? Is his desire to continue the Age of Fire at the expense of the player make him the ultimate enemy of mankind? Is he a fiend who uses deception to rule and manipulate others merely to benefit himself? Is he a pragmatist who is aware of how disastrous the coming darkness will be for everyone, not just the gods and realizes that some sacrifices must be made? Is his status as the last deity in Anor Londo not something he actually intended? Is his use of the illusory Gwynevere a sign of vulnerability rather than manipulation? Is he secretly Velka, the black haired witch goddes of sin?
Griggs is unambiguously a spy for Vinheim. Is he really the Nice Guy he appears to be?
Abysswalker Artorias: did he become a monster by succumbing to darkness or was he convinced by Kaathe that the Age of Fire needs to end, and that the Age of Darkness, of Humanity must begin? Was his covenant with the Darkwraiths an alliance of convenience with Kaathe, so that he could gain the power to easily hunt the "failure" Darkwraiths? Find out in the PC version! (Or not).
Not to mention that content on the PC version will be available as DLC for consoles.
Broken Base: ...but the announcement that they will be using Games for Windows Live for the online components of the game has unleashed a proverbial internet shitstorm.
Broken again with the announcement that Keyboard + Mouse support will be limited on the PC version and using a controller will be "highly recommended".
Anticlimax Boss: Miyazaki was disappointed with how cheap the final battle against Gwyn turned out. Gwyn was originally supposed to thoroughly challenge/test whatever character build and playing style you had developed throughout the game. Instead, Gwyn can easily be beaten with the right build by parrying and riposte.
The Ceaseless Discharge can end up like this, depending on how you fight it. It's possible to goad it into leaping off the cliff it's on.
Pinwheel. You're (technically) supposed to face him once you obtain the Lordvessel, but he has low health (only about 100 more than the second boss of the game), he only has a handful of attacks that are easy to spot and dodge, and he's cripplingly weak to melee attacks. Nearly every Dark Souls board agrees that he's a total joke.
The Asylum Demon's actually very easy to kill the first time you meet him if you choose the Black Firebombs as a starting gift. You get a (heavy) bonus weapon if you defeat him instead of running away like the game expects you to.
Joining it is another trailer featuring a song by The Silent Comedy, "All Saint's Day". Considering the premise of playing as undying warriors, slowly going mad and losing their humanity, the lyrics eerily match.
Gravelord Nito's theme starts off very dissonant and foreboding, but about 40 seconds in, the song switches into a haunting and striking segment which sounds as if the wind is singing to the song.
And then, after all your struggles, after all the suffering, you reach... Gwyn. Not what you were expecting? Maybe, but it also fits, especially if you know the full backstory, and if you sided with Kaathe, why he's desperate to stop you.
The soundtrack is composed by Motoi Sakuraba. 'Nuff said.
The Basilisks who were immediately notorious after the release of the game. They have a breath attack which emits an extremely deadly attack because it inflicts Curse, the most debilitating status effect in the game. The way status effects work, you have a meter that fills up as you are exposed to something that has a status effect. Players in their first play through will likely have zero resistance against curse, meaning the meter will fill up in about a second, almost instantly if you get caught in the cloud created by two of them. Curse kills the player instantly. When players revive, their health is permanently halved, even if they die again. Getting cursed removed is a quest in and of itself.
The cat beasts in Darkroot Forest definately count. There are three of them, each has hundreds of health, and they attack and move rapidly. Fortunately, however, their AI is easily exploited, with multiple locations that they can't pathfind through, and an easily discovered glitch that will get them stuck on a incline.
There's a small copse of trees in one corner of the area that you fight them in that they can't move into. Standing in it with a spear, occasionally popping out to lure them back over makes the fight with them more tedious than challenging.
The large Mushroom People. After fighting the small ones, who are a joke (they even fall flat on their faces when they try to attack you!), their funny appearence and their laughably slow speed, most people will probably underestimate them and charge right in. The same people will then find out that these things not only have a metric ton of HP, but that their punches hit hard enough to easily kill most characters in one or two hits.
The Skeleton Wheels. They often appear in packs, are extremely fast, and their attacks are devastating to HP and stamina. Weaving while running is a good way to avoid them... in open areas. It's not so easy in tight, confined tunnels...
The Crow Demons of the Painted Realm. Tend to show up in groups of two or three, hit surprisingly hard, and they can jump on you and peck you to death. Worse, if you're trying to obtain Souvenirs of Reprisal without going online, they are the only enemies that drop them, meaning you will have to fight these things repeatedly.
Serpent People. Ridiculous strength, ridiculous damage reduction, and Sen's Fortress has at least one (more commonly a horde) literally around every corner.
Disappointing Last Level: The game's final three areas, the Tomb of the Giants, Lost Izalith and the Crystal Caves have a very apparent dip in quality and are all very gimmicky and compared to some of the game's other zones are very linear.
The Tomb of the Giants is pitch black, filled to the brim with instant kill pitfalls as well as some of the nastiest enemies in the game.
The Crystal Caves is extremely short area with just a few invisible bridges (some of which actually bend). It is very empty, and very gimmicky.
Lost Izalith has the same elite enemy, one that is nasty as hell for melee players, placed 30 times through out the zone. You're likely to spend hours here just chipping away at them from a high area with arrows.
Siegmeier of Catarina is probably the most popular character in the game due to his funny-looking armor, very laid-back attitude and friendly demeanor.
Solaire of Astora qualifies as well. His ceaseless desire to find his personal "sun" as well as his ability to help you in a number of difficult fights up to and including the Final Boss have made him pretty popular. He's even gotten himself the nickname of Brolaire.
Don't forget Priscilla, who despite having only half a dozen lines and is rather difficult to reach in the first place, is very popular with the fanbase.
Even Better Sequel: Dark Souls added Metroidvania style world design, helping give the game a sense of scale and scope that was impossible with Demon's SoulsHub Level and level select design, the more concise and densely packed level design, the huge increase in weapons, spells and armor, enemies and bosses as well as adding covenants which added unique flavor to online gameplay.
Fashion Victim Villain: Xanthous King Jeremiah. Even the game comments on the eye-searingly yellow color of his armor, and his crown looks like a giant light bulb.
Homing Crystal Soulmass, a spell that surrounds your character with orbs that attack anything that gets too close to you. The breaking comes in that the Soulmasses are incredibly powerful if your magic stat is high enough and all five orbs hit. Only one sorcery is more powerful and it only has 4 castings as opposed to Homing Crystal Soulmass's 10. With an Intelligence stat of 50, the spell can wipe the floor with every end-game boss in just a few castings. It and its downgraded version are also the only offensive sorceries that can be accurate without targeting, helping immensely with invading players with the Ring of Fog.
Also, in PVP:
Lightning Weapons, which tend to penetrate most armour.
Wrath Of The Gods, a shockwave miracle that does huge damage.
Tranquil Walk Of Peace, a miracle slowing enemy movement speed to a crawl.
The Mask Of The Child, Grass Crest Shield and Cloranthy Ring offer a boost to stamina regen.
The Dark Wood Grain Ring, offering huge mobility even with heavy armour.
High Poise armor can be this against players using lighter weapons such as daggers.
In true multiplayer tradition, basically everything else counts too, from a certain point of view. Tranquil Walk Of Peace is pretty much universally hated.
The Zaphander Build. Just enough Strength to use the Zweihander sword (24), upgrade it to +5 Lightning (for the aforementioned armor piercing), combine with Havel's Armour (High poise) and the above mentioned stamina-increasing items. You suddenly have a Mighty Glacier that can keep swinging forever, with armour that negates the disadvantages of the sword's slow swing speed. Mix in a couple of rings, you've got a Lightning Bruiser. This can be achieved by level 30 or so. The player can then put the next 50-100 levels purely into Endurance, to boost stamina and equip load, and Vitality to boost health. Again, pretty much universally hated for being generic, bland, stupid-easy to play and frustratingly popular.
Goddamn blowdart snipers, also in Blighttown. Hard to see, even harder to reach, deadly accurate with their blowdarts, and they quickly infest you with toxin.
Shooting the Hellkite Dragon (the red dragon in the Undead Parish/Burg) in the right spot causes him to jump off his porch and fall down the bridge. Apparently that counts as a Bottomless Pit, so he ends up killing himself and gives you 10000 souls. To think that he would have decided to use his wings... The Ceaseless Discharge (see the example above) could also count, although the pit in the Discharge's area seems to be a legitimate method of killing him.
The Bottomless Box glitch. Which allows you to dupe as many items as you want from an existing character onto a new character. There are some things you can't dupe (Spells, keys), but giving a new character a +5 Lightning Weapon, a fully upgraded armor set, any rings you want and a +5 Ascended Pyromancy Catalyst will make your character a weapon of mass destruction. Fans of the glitch state that it makes alts much easier and more fun since you can start off with the build you want, rather than have to wait until near the end of the game to pick up some item that happens to be in one of the final levels of the game. Those that dislike the glitch state that it allows for lower level griefing and it's cheating.
There is more than one boss that can be induced to fall to its death. Determining which cases were intentional is an exercise for the player.
The blow dart snipers will infect you with toxin, an extremely deadly version of poison, if they hit you. However, using the dung pie from the infested barbarians can be extremely helpful against them. The dung pie also infect you with toxin which will immunize you against theirs while it's active, but the toxin from the dung pie is much weaker than the blowdart toxin.
Hell Is That Noise: The Titanite Demons' Vader Breath, the unsettling laughter of the Mimics, that scream when Nito unleashes his Gravelord Sword miracle on the player...
Internet Backdraft: Disconnecting your game in order to prevent yourself from being invaded is a hot topic in the community. The people that do so are often called cheaters by the invaders for depriving them of there kill. DC's maintain they do it because they aren't interested in PvP and would like to experience the other features of the game without needing to weaken themselves in hollow form. Any type of middle ground on this issue is made with either annoyance or spite from all parties involved, so the only other option you can take on this matter besides agreeing with one side is not caring about it in the first place.
Jerkass Woobie: If the male Undead Merchant warms up to the player, he will tell them of how he used to frequently have stones thrown at him for being Undead.
The Four Kings battle is this for some. You have to battle them in the Abyss, a dimension of pure blackness with nothing but you and the Kings. Its hard to judge distance or if you're even moving at all. For extra fun, try playing this fight right in front of a large TV in a pitch black room so that you can't tell where the edges of the screen are.
Outside of the Abyss, you have the Depths, a disgusting sewer with pus seeping out of the walls and Blighttown, a vile, disease and filth ridden swamp.
The conclusion to the Siegmeyer and Sieglinde sidequest. After everything the player goes through with him, he ends up turning Hollow and having to be killed by his daughter.
If the player has the Old Witch's Ring, every single line of Quelaag's sister is like a laser-guided guilt missile. Even worse is if you kill her for her Fire Keeper's Soul, she thinks her beloved sister just murdered her for no reason. Eingyi calls you a monster, and it's kinda hard to disagree with him.
Porting Disaster: Fans anticipating the PC port are already calling it this because of the use of Games for Windows Live, and the desire to keep the port as close to the original game as possible, including graphically.
From Software themselves have said that the PC port won't be as good as it could be due to their inexperience with making PC games, due to Japan's lack of a PC gaming market.
Scrub: Most players look down on anyone who uses optimum heavy armor like Havel's Set or Giant's set, and the Dark Grain Wood Ring for better backlfipping.
Serial Numbers Filed Off: Let's face it, this game isDemon's Souls 2. Same interface, same leveling system, same gameplay, same voice acting... they just changed the title a bit so they can claim it as an independent IP from the one that Sony holds the rights to.
The Poison Frogs' curse cloud. It kills you instantly, and places a curse on you that permanently removes half of your health with the exception of a few difficult ways you can remove the curse. This effect also stacks. How difficult is curing a curse? There are only two ways, die while wearing a Rare Ring of Sacrifice, or use a Purging Stone. There are only three Rare Rings of Sacrifice in the game, and of the only two merchants who sell Purging Stones, one only sells five per playthrough, and the other charges a ridiculously high price.
The Four Kings' magic homing attack. They'll throw it at you when you're out of their melee range. It's hard hitting, can be spammed by any of the Four Kings (even when you can't see them spam it) and worse of all is extremely hard to dodge and block due to difficulties with depth perception in the horizonless Abyss.
Very nearly every enemy in the game has a potential That One Attack: From getting eaten by ents and getting pecked to death by Crow Demons, to being grabbed and drained several times in a row by The Four Kings, very few creatures in Dark Souls lack means to brutally murder the player as they helplessly watch their hard-earned souls vanish into the air.
The questionable honor of the most hated boss however goes to one of the first bosses of the game, the Capra Demon. The two Poison Dogs that accompany it make the fight all but impossible until they're disposed of, and the brutal speed at which the boss charges at you with powerful attacks as soon as the battle begins combined with the very small area you have to maneuver in mean many players will stare at the "You Died" screen mere seconds after starting the fight. To clarify: the Capra Demon and his dogs will often kill you so quickly that you find your dropped souls and humanity outside the room you fight him in. Whether you make it to the stairway on the left side of the room or not is essentially down to luck.
Ornstein and Smough. They are essentially designed to be a co-op boss, and either one of them can kill a player in about two hits. Its nearly impossible for non-ranged players playing solo, as neither one will ever shift their attention, giving no windows to attack. To add insult to injury, they are also a sequential boss, in that if you kill one, the other gains his power and full health.
Fighting Giant Ornstein is more challenging than fighting Lightning Smough since Giant Ornstein has a different attack pattern from his original self while Lightning Smough is just a somewhat stronger version of his previous self.
The Four Kings. The battle is essentially a problem of finding a way to kill each King as quickly as possible before the others spawn while surviving/avoiding their highly damaging magic-based attacks. It gets worse in New Game+ since the Kings get a considerable health boost making it that much harder to kill them quickly.
That One Level: While the game's levels are certainly not a walk in the park, levels like Tomb of the Giants and Lost Izalith have gotten backlash from players due to being too dark or too bright respectively.
Sen's Fortress. A hellhole filled with deadly traps and packed to the brim with Demonic Spiders.
Despite his willowy appearance, androgynous voice and distinctly female name, Dark Sun Gwyndolin is confirmed in the flavor text of several items to be male.
Pharis. The description Pharis' Hat refers to Pharis as male, yet closer examination of the archer (easily done if the player is a member of the Forest Hunter Covenant) reveals the character model to be female. I believe that's because the archer in the Forest isn't Pharis, but someone using Pharis' equipment.
Priscilla the Crossbreed. Her whole existence is misery upon misery, and all because she was born different.
The Daughter of Chaos. You need the Old Witch's Ring, but if you don't feel absolutely horrible listening to Daughter of Chaos, who is so overburdened with eggs that she can't move and is in constant pain, talking about how her children died (you can see the bloody eggs all around her) and how much it hurts with that fragile and pained voice, chances are you're already hollow inside. They really drill it in with her repeatedly saying how she'll be fine because at least she has her dear sister...
You also can't forget Rhea of Thorolund, an inexperienced cleric who is tasked with a mission to venture into the hellish Tomb of the Giants. The player can later find her there cowering in a corner, filled with forlorn despair as her knights have Hollowed and she has failed with her mission. She can make it out of the Tomb and set up shop in a church, but she will either be killed by a knight who abandoned the mission or be abducted by Channelers and brought to the Duke's Archives to be turned into a Lovecraftian monster called a Pisaca. In the latter situation, she will go Hollow and when you find her you'll be forced to kill her yourself.
Anastacia of Astora, the mute and cripped Firekeeper of Firelink Shrine. Her tongue was cut out so she could not complain about her fate and her feet were cut off so she could not try to escape. She will be killed by Lautrec of Carim for her valuable soul but you can retrieve it and return her to her cell to restore the Bonfire at Firelink Shrine. She will be upset that her tongue was restored and insist that she does not want to talk.
Great Grey Wolf Sif. When he's near death, he begins to limp, his attacks slow, and he stumbles in great pain.
Gwyn. Breaks his soul into 5 pieces (one for Seath and each of the Kings) and sacrifices himself to keep the First Flame burning. He then spends at least a 1000 years burning in the Kiln, to the point where, when you reach him, he is utterly insane and attacks you, even though the only reason you are there in the first place is a fail safe he set up if his power is no longer enough to sustain the flame. Oh, and the kingdom he sacrificed everything the save has fallen apart due to the Darksign and his children's apathy/incompetence.
The Ceaseless Discharge. He was the only known son of the Witch of Izalith, and was afflicted with lava-oozing sores. The only way to ease his pain was to wear a specially-made ring his sisters made... but then he lost the ring. Since then, he has existed in a state of constant pain, all the while losing his sisters one by one. According to Word of God, the only thing that gives him any peace of mind is watching over the tomb of one of them. Until, of course, some little bastard came along and desecrated it.
World of Woobie: A considerable amount of the characters in Lordran could do with a hug.
