Dark Souls III: The Ringed City

Souls series leaves us with great memories and unique experiences. "The Ringed City" is the ultimate end game content of Dark Souls 3. Thank you Hidetaka Miyazaki for this wonderful trip.

A great content add-on that takes the best of the basic game and the previous games and adds great new features. The Ringed City excels in design, atmosphere, gameplay, boss fights. In fact, almost in everything that it offers.

Whereas most DLC works as a throw-in gameplay experience that complements the main game, Dark Souls 3: The Ringed City places itself in the role of an unforgettable farewell. Whether you enjoy the haunting vistas, the myriad of new combat encounters, the expansion of the weapon, armor and items catalog or the fond memories of the series at large culminating into a fitting conclusion, it’s hard not to argue that Miyazaki’s level of excellence has persisted throughout the series.

Dark Souls 3: The Ringed City is a worthy finale for this game and the series in general. Taking every trick that they’ve learned over the course of the series and seemingly packing them into one final journey, The Ringed City is sure to please if you’re into the masochistic nature of the series.

While Ashes of Ariandel created skepticism where there otherwise wouldn't have been, rest assured that The Ringed City is the genuine article and gives Dark Souls III the send-off it deserves.

Familiar strengths and themes combine with FromSoftware’s apparently endless capacity for creative fantasy design in a finale of suitable grandeur and pathos.

Quotation forthcoming.

The Ringed City is capable of the best and the worst. The last DLC from Dark Souls 3 has one of the most disappointing areas of the game but it has too one of the most awesome parts of the experience. Three new final bosses and lots of weapon and equipment to help you in the PVP.

The second (and final) DLC of Dark Souls III proves to be a far more robust and articulated experience than the first one. The level design is tangled yet magnificent, the content is richer and never ordinary. The perfect conclusion to an unforgettable chapter of the Dark Souls series.

If The Ringed City really is the end of Souls, it manages to hang its head high with the rest of the series. From Demon's to Dark III we have more than enough macabre settings to pore over in the years to come. They aren't all created equal, and some of them aren't even created by Hidetaka Miyazaki, but I'll remember each and every one of them for as long as I live. It's been a wild ride.

Because the only way to access the new DLC is to have finished the main game and/or its first expansion, From Software is obviously counting on players to be high level, committed fans, and ready for a final, "ultimate challenge." The Ringed City is exultantly that but at times -- especially in the longer, gauntlet sections -- the game's unrelenting parade of enemies and ways to die becomes unpleasantly fatiguing and a decidedly chore-like experience. Fans of Dark Souls who have come to love the series will appreciate most everything about The Ringed City and the ways in which it represents both the evolution and end of a very important franchise.

Dark Souls is without a doubt an amazing series that has never ever sunk to mediocrity. The Ringed City DLC serves a finale not only to DS III but also to the entire Souls storyline. From Software has done it again - this truly is a memorable, unique game.

The Ringed City moves and ends a little too quickly--well before it gets all the mileage it can out of its setting and premises--but that's a small knock against what’s otherwise an exceptional send-off. A well of inspired locales and a renewed focus on the series' obsession with cycles, death and rebirth, and the passage of time, plus a few spectacularly designed and animated foes round out a worthy conclusion to a storied franchise.

The Ringed City is possibly the best DLC of the series - Bloodborne's Old Hunters included. It's challenging, intriguing and mysterious, like a good entry in the Souls series should be, but takes all of those factors to the max. A wonderful conclusion to the series, but we can't help but want more.

Dark Souls 3: The Ringed City has found a way to revisit the past without a cheap reliance on nostalgia, wrapping up the story of Dark Souls in a way that will be satisfying for fans who enjoy digging into the rich lore the series has been building for the last few years. But you don’t need an encyclopedic knowledge of the Souls series to appreciate the satisfying twists and turns of this short, but exciting adventure, with its abundance of haunting, secret-filled locales and terrifying boss fights.

At times the difficulty and dreary landscapes are enough, but overall The Ringed City was one hell of a soft note for Dark Souls to go out on. As a surface level thematic experience, the finale is a fitting way to end the series, leaving the faintest glimmer of hope amidst all the ash. I had fun descending through a visual collage of the series’ history—it's much more interesting than Ashes of Ariandel—and I can appreciate the symbolic significance of its ending, but this is Dark Souls design at its most uninspired.

While it’s serviceable enough in a mechanical sense, The Ringed City fails to deliver the closure that is built up to throughout both pieces of Dark Souls 3 DLC. There are numerous lore points during play that are ostensibly A Big Deal, but they all fizzle out by the end. After spending more than 400 hours with the series, it was deeply disappointing to me to see so many promising notes capped with such a meager payoff.

Dark Souls III: The Ringed City brings exactly what the series needed drawing to a close. This installment does feel like "just another Souls game, " but it's a good one that capitalizes on what FromSoftware does best. Pick up this DLC if you already have Dark Souls 3. If you are new to the franchise and are into nail-biting, heart-pounding, blood-rushing, sword-slashing experiences, you won't be disappointed.

Dark Souls III: The Ringed City isn’t the swan song that we hoped it would be, but it’s still an enticing adventure for hardcore fans. The problem lies within city itself, which is a bit of a formulaic mess that fails to capture what made the series great. The first half of the DLC has an excellent setup that will leave players wanting more, especially with callbacks to Dark Souls II, but city portion is structurally boring. It’s still intertwining in on itself, but it feels like the developers had a checklist of all their favorite areas and design tropes that needed to be in this short experience, lessening their importance. No one area feels fleshed out enough to be memorable. Regardless, the bosses are a decent showpiece, especially if you can find the secret one, and the new enemies are a welcome addition. It may be only a few hours long, but The Ringed City still a worthy addition to the Dark Souls universe.

The Ringed City offers a daunting challenge for even the most veteran of Souls-players, and is by far the hardest area in the entire series. It's excellent level design and big, open areas trumps most of the standard game in a heartbeat.