I thoroughly enjoyed the DLC, except for the story. I consider that part of it a travesty considering this is the last bit of DS content. Honestly, the story we have been treated to as a whole bears the classic hallmarks of either

A. Lazy writing, B. Raising far more questions than you could ever hope to answer, or C. Some combination of the above

I’ve always enjoyed the open-ended speculation provided by DS’s story/lore. However, it seems that after DS1’s story the lore has progressively gotten shallower and more disconnected with the gaps growing ever wider. There are unanswered questions in DS1, sure. But in my opinion most of those unanswered questions weren’t large-scale game changers for the story.

Likewise, even though DS2’s lore was a lot more disconnected, it started to really shape up with SotFS. At the very least we were able to make sense of most of it all with the update and a lot of the new questions raised by the DLC were sort of answered compactly in the same DLC while answering some questions from the base game.

DS3 on the other hand has essentially confounded the whole thing, throwing characters (new and old) and concepts around with hardly any connection and expecting us to find or, more likely, invent the connections. At this point it’s almost like questions are being raised just to raise questions and keep people’s minds busy trying to write the whole story themselves, which is kind of a mixed bag. Granted, for many dark souls was never really about the story, but for me at least that was a driving force for playing the game. I would much rather be able to form my own idea of the story and find out I was wrong in part or entirely than to do so and to never find out whether I was right or not.

I don’t relish the idea of calling any of it lazy writing since there are some well-written tidbits of lore as well as amazing moments in the story (meeting and fighting Artorias was honestly incredible for me, as well as being able to fight an everlasting dragon). I also understand that the Souls series is working with large timespans, convoluted timelines, shifting lands, and possibly “telephone game” legend stories which seep out of characters and item descriptions. So to some degree it makes sense that bits and pieces of the lore seem contradictory in much the same way that historical sources in real life may contradict other sources. But when you expect the audience to do 80% of the story’s heavy-lifting using what feels like only 20% of the information that could have been given to them, you’re literally just expecting them to concoct the entire story on their own and hoping they can walk away from it all with something meaningful.

All told, the ending of the DLC isn’t bad and there were some cool moments. However, I would have much rather had many questions answered than more new ones added to the mix. YMMV, but the above is my opinion on the matter. Ultimately still a great game though and I look forward to—some years from now—playing through all the games once more.