These games are really easy to begin with, if they made them even easier then the game would be just like any other game like it. Once you play through it once the second playthrough takes like 1/20th of the time. That is what I mean by easy. You can beat the game with no equipment on. (though it would be extremely boring hitting a guy 100 times and they still not die). I do not mean to be like yea that hard game is easy. It truly is easy after the first run. The point being if it was made into a game with different difficulty levels then I believe the game would lose its soul (sorry bad pun).

He speaks the truth ^^
Like someone else in this thread already pointed out, the key to Dark Souls difficulty is the initial lack of knowledge about each area, and the enemies. You never know what to expect. Once you've played through the game it become a cakewalk, because you've been up against everything and have the knowledge required for success. There's not really a whole lot you could do to make the initial run easier without ruining the essence of the game, which is you walking into the treacherous unknown.

For example, if you wanted to really make Dark Souls easy, it would take just one simple little addition. A detailed map you could pull up for each area. Easy mode activated

Having a difficulty setting in this game would be a bad thing. This game is fun because of no difficulty setting.
Everyone who buys and plays this game will have the same experience and because of this a awesome community comes to existence. People gather together talk to each other about what they discovered or how they defeated the boss. The way the story is being telled in the soul series is awesome as well. They don't just spoon feed you the lore you really have to search for it and imagine some of it. This creates such an awesome community where people come together and share.

I don't want this game to become casual, there is literally 100 of games each year coming out with casual setting in it. These kind of games don't get released much. Casual players have enough games to play.

Skyrim players? 

why? the game is really easy the way it is and adding those things you mentioned will just harm it's integrity

I would only get this game if it had some kind of easy mode. i tried to play Demon's Sould and failed hard.

on the other hand i do understand people who don't want to have a easy mode added, even if it is just an option it's not the same as having a game that you have to play this way no matter what.

so, i vote for two completely seperate editions. A hardcore one that goes the way of the original, and a casual one that allows saving and pausing or whatever.

Did the inclusion of Casual mode ruin FE?

Well I guess the combat KINDA suffered but I guess they were aiming for a lot of new players.

I loved Dark Souls but they do need to add some explanation of the mechanics to the game.

I abandoned my first game after 20 hours because I had leveled my character in a corner with the fast early leveling and couldn't progress any further. I wasn't realistic to fix my character since the amount of souls needed increases faster and faster. (reset option would have been nice)
It took another 10 hours to find out you can jump instead of grab something and die. You pretty much need a wiki to find out what stuff does or means, no bigger immersion breaker then having to resort to the internet.
And I never figured out the counter attack.

The new game+ play through went 10 times faster because of all the prior knowledge, but wasn't as much fun since exploring the unknown territory is the fun part. (Not exploring the unknown mechanics)

The difficulty is fine, having to start over or resort to the internet is not. Fix that instead.

I have no problem with them impelementing easy mode but it should be completely seperated from the normal game. Like easy mode = offline only.