Yeah, I get you. I think some of the disconnect is because it looks like a standard hack and slash action game, but it kind of isn't.

I dunno, it's hard to explain. It's like a lot of the difficulty is just understanding what it wants you to do. And you can hardly go look at how "good players" do it, because they're running past everything in their underpants and parrying which is stupidly hard in DS1. The only place I needed to parry was the very last boss.

I found a good start in DS1 for most enemies was to put your shield up, walk in really close, and try and get behind them to stab. It's kind of cheesy, and there's a few things it won't work for, but it served me pretty well until I got the hang of it more.