Game is fucking amazing for anybody that's curious. I have no clue how so many reviewers got through it in like 40 hours, other than to just blaze through on a direct path toward the end and missing most of what makes the game special. I'm at 46 hours and probably just hit the halfway mark a couple hours prior. A lot of other people also bitched about linearity and level design not being interconnected, which is staggeringly false, again I suspect because most of them just didn't actually find a lot of the stuff that's in here. I'm not sure if the world is 100% interconnected or if there are a few places one needs to warp around (it's hard to visualize such a huge scope going through it in my head), but it's mostly the case if not completely. And definitely not completely linear. There is some linearity to it, of course, but I've come across one area that let me go, more or less, to 3 different places, then another that branched off into 2 main paths. I completed some content in a completely different order from other people I've talked to. Bit more linear than 1, I guess, but not as restrictive as many have made it out to be (of the reviews I've read, Gamespot's review in particular is disappointingly misinformed on this and several other topics).
People have been saying both that this game is the easiest DS game and the hardest (way to go, Internet), I'd say it's probably the hardest, even though I'm having less trouble with it than some of the prior games. If you're a vet and you know what you're doing, the difficulty curve is maybe less steep in the early goings than some of the past games (maybe?), but it seems to have ramped up the punishment for making mistakes a bit.
Some have complained about bosses being too easy or not creative enough, but certainly not from what I've seen so far. Obviously the series has had like, what ... uh ... okay, by my count, 97 bosses from Demon's Souls on. It's hard at this point, I'm sure, to come up with stuff that's 100% new and amazing. But so far the fights have been cool enough, generally satisfying, fairly unique, and one of them ranks in my top 5 hardest in all these games so far. I had to spend a good couple hours on it, and I watched a streamer friend of mine go at it for like 3 hours. He was practically in tears after he finally made it through. Game gets substantially harder at about the halfway point, that fight seemingly the point of demarcation.
Loving the hell out of this in general, though. It's definitely "just more Dark Souls" in some ways, but none of those pieces feel tacked on, or any lesser for this being the 5th game in this style. Lore is great, characters are interesting, weapons are interesting and have some cool new nuances, spell system seems more robust than ever, there are some faster enemies that demand faster reflexes, PvP seems really solid (though it seems on the high end that the Fume Greatsword needs a nerf), covenant stuff is present and accounted for, they give you more titanite shards early in the game so you can progress some of your earlier weapons a little further along to try out a greater variety of them before ultimately deciding on whatever you want to go all the way with. Game is also just bloody gorgeous. Need a fairly beefy PC to run it well, and I'm still getting some periodic stuttering that I can't identify the source of, but mostly the performance has been good and the art design is brilliant.
Anyway. My two cents thus far.
