Hahaha... yeah, but wait 'till you get a bit further. You'll probably find that one again at an even more appropriate place.
But yeah, I'm in agreement with you on that assessment of the game, and that area too. I think basically everything from Anor Londo and beyond was just stellar. The game continues to ramp up all the way until the end, with very cool moments, great level design, beautifully artistic renderings of everything, and this went all the way up until the final boss fight which I was horribly frustrated by because it is hard. Gear yourself up for that. Because it kind of sucks a little bit, and when you lose, there's a pretty annoying run you have to make every single time. That for me was one of the few missteps of the game. I didn't mind the really harsh boss fight, but forcing you to get back to him each time was lame given how many times you have to die just to get some semblance of an idea about to actually beat him. I'm curious how you guys will find that to be when you get there.
Still, even that and the few other negatives one can levy against the game don't knock it more than a trifling amount downward for me. It really is stunning, and I love the fact that it continues to get more crazy and more stunning as it goes. Anor Londo made me feel so very... just... small and out of my depth. I could deal with the stuff there, and got pretty good at dealing with the enemies and such, but it never lost that wow feeling of something big and mighty that was no longer controlled, of a hugely concrete backstory that we only get to see bits and pieces of.
In fact, that's one of the things I loved most about the game. There's really very little straight-up story being told, yet if you read all the item descriptions and find all those tattered little pieces of the world that shape and describe it, you get such a great feeling of being a small part of something substantially bigger than you are, of events you get only the tiniest glimpse of that clearly reshaped what must have been a very different world, and reshaped it down to its roots. This amazed me, and no other game has done it exactly the way this has. At least not that I've played. It's easy to miss if you're the kind of person to just rush around and pay no attention, but if you do take your time to look at the details, the story reward is huge. It really gives every enemy and especially some of the key bosses a real context that they would otherwise lack.
I think that, beyond anything else, is what really cranked this game into true masterpiece territory for me. Great gameplay is essential to any game, but this one is firing on all cylinders, and with a methodology you just don't see much in modern games.
