Games

obnoxiously long animation, and that animation being set in stone once you trigger it. There is no aborting a sword-swing midway through to dodge or block.

The whole point of the animations being set in stone is to force the player to be mindful of their actions. Don’t commit to an attack unless you’re sure it’s safe to do so. Otherwise you’re going to get caught out.

The slow animations are a deliberate drawback to the more powerful weapons. Being able to swing an UGS around like it’s nothing would make for a fairly unbalanced weapon. If you want a weapon with quicker animations you probably want something more DEX focused. Just look at the Falcion’s animations compared to the Zweihander’s animations in Dark Souls for example. Zweihander puts out bigger damage numbers and thus attacks slower. Pretty basic balancing concept to have thing that does big damage be slower.

The lack of being able to abort moves is simply a way for the game to punish poor decisions. If you get caught out by a slow animation then you probably need to work on picking when to attack. A big part of the game is that it teaches the player through punishing mistakes. That’s why it forces you to commit to actions.

These only come across as clunky if you’re not learning from your mistakes and working around these deliberate limitations. Pick different weapons or pick better moments to attack/use an item so you don’t commit to something at the wrong moment.

The input queue is another thing that lines up with this. I believe the whole point is to, again, push the user into being careful. Dark Souls isn’t a hack and slash like DMC. You don’t want to go into fights button mashing. The game wants you to take your time. The button queue kind of reinforces that by punishing button mashing and being too hasty. I do also find it useful in queuing certain actions like attacking straight out of a roll or following item usage.

All the things you describe as clunky each have a purpose. The game expects you to work with those limitations and when you do you get a better experience. Going against them is when you run into issues. Since youre attempting to doing things the game is trying to discourage. Like button mashing (input queue) and getting too greedy with attacks (Being locked to actions/Longer animations).