I thought the game kinda fell off hard after Caleid.
Up until then, the game felt "hard, but fair." It was my first soulsborne and once you get past the initial hump of understanding what the game expects of you, it was amazing. Margit, Godrick and most of the bosses you find in Limgrave and Liurnia.
After Caleid, it feels like a switch flips. The bosses go from challenging, well designed dances to absolute messes. Or really lazy since the answer to fights in some cases late game is either "eh idk here's two pain in the asses instead of one." or reusing the same shit over and over. Shout out to the Tree Sentinel and his 47 siblings
A friend of mine is a soulsborne fiend and he basically explained fromsoft has run out of ways to actually challenge the player (since as it turns out, telling your community to git gud for 15 years lead them to in fact, git gud) so they rely on these spastic bosses that have 40 hit combos where you're lucky to get a single stab in between cooldowns that flip and fly around the arena constantly.
That's not to say the entire back half of the game sucks. There's some standout fights. Godfrey in both projection form and then fighting him/Horah Loux for real. Palciduax, Morgott, Mohg, Melania.
