I agree with you. The OG souls experience is one where the boss is the culmination of the hard work you have to put into traversing and exploring each area, after which you’re rewarded with a sick fight. A lot of souls-like games don’t understand this at all.

This has always been the case with other soulslikes. The only lesson many games have learned and are trying to copy is just ‘dark souls is hard’. then they ignore everything else that made it successful.

See: lords of the fallen (2014)

This is all correct but I also gotta beat that multiplayer drum. The notorious difficulty was originally offset by using an item that let you have full health and summon help! Help is good, but now you can be invaded by other players and NPCs. Sometimes you ran out of those items when fighting hard bosses or areas, and now you need to invade to get more helper items. Then you find covenants that let you earn unique equipment through helping and invasions. The whole scenario had risk and rewards that was completely watered down in Elden Ring and totally absent in other souls likes.

They also used to be full of obtuse bullshit that was never explained and you just had to figure out, summon a guide, get lucky, or if all else fails look it up. World tendencies? Curses that dont go away when you die? Unkillable enemies (except with a certain weapon type)? Being able to murder every NPC for special weapons and absolutely fuck your playthrough? Weirdly hidden side quests, areas, and bosses (just jump off this specific cliff)? Demons souls and Dark Souls had all kinds of crazy shit I dont see anymore.

I still enjoy a lot of these other games but I really feel like “souls like” is thrown around pretty loosely on anything that just has a similar combat style, but none of those other hallmark traits.