So far I've only played the original demon's souls and dark souls remastered and both games instantly clicked with me. I think that liking the games really depends on if you are an "instant reward" or a "reward through hardships" kind of guy. So yeah if you don't like it there is nothing wrong with that.

I think the difficulty selection screen from the REmake perfectly describes this:

I find Dark Souls the second best franchise only behind Zelda.

The series is a bit counter intuitive at first play, but once you figure out the nuisances the games are quite enjoyable.

Try playing 2 or 3. Dark Souls 2, imo, is the best and definitive Souls experience, I know many, many people disagree with that. The Souls lore though, is why I love the series so much, so mysterious and well written. The sense of no direction and feeling lost is a very important role in it's notorious difficulty, makes it much harder, especially on a first playthrough. One of the greatest series, Dark Souls 2 is one of my favorite games of all time.

Ni-Oh is probably more your speed.

You should try Dark Souls 3. The combat is more fast paced so it may be more to your liking. The storytelling is still pretty vague though. I haven't played Dark Souls 1 so i can't really say much about it. But i enjoyed Dark Souls 3

I went with medium equipment all the way. Sometimes I picked up light armor, though. 

I would never play Bloodborne, Dark Souls feels pretty unnerving with its gritty and apocalyptic world, but I managed to tolerate it. The PS4 exclusive not even looks like that, it also looks downright spooky, and gotta give it credit there because it sometimes does it with cliché horror elements, like giant spiders, werewolves and the like. I can't deal with that. It's precisely the other From game that looks so good, though, I especially like how interestingly includes features of the Lovecraftian mythos. 

I'm gonna confess something: everytime I played Bloodborne at night, I had trouble sleeping that night. While playing, I wasn't too scared save for some specific moments. But my heartbeat was over the clouds at all times. It was a combination of the game's atmosphere and the fact that everything and everyone could kill you if you were not careful. And of course, when I tried to sleep after playing... I struggled. My brain was too excited to sleep.

Never a game made me so tense in my life. And yet... I fucking loved it. I came back for more day after day. Despite the tension. Despite the bad sleep. And it was worth it. Imagine how good it was to me xD

Anyway, my point was that I understand what you say. I've been there. And if you really think you're gonna have a bad time by all means: don't play it. But from my experience, this game is worth getting your pulse rate to 100. It's just that good xD

Armor is a good example of where the game is counter intuitive. Armor doesn't really help that much, unless you have crazy stats and can have wear Havel's armor set. Point being, light armor all the way. Stamina matters way more than defense.

And the one aspect that a lot of people miss, holding your shield up greatly reduces stamina recovery. Put the shield down or better yet get rid of it.

I enjoyed dark souls a lot but I also agree with you, movement was very clunky and the story is mostly what you make of it in your own mind. There are a lot of questionable bottlenecks in the game and tbh, I didn't enjoy the boss battles at all, none of them. The only stand out in my memory in order of how annoying they were. Multiplayer was a complete fail and even the messages broke immersion more than be helpful. The 'ghosts' were the only good part of the online functionality.

That said, the atmosphere of Dark Souls is still unrivaled and exploring the intricate 3D vertical world kept me going. Dark souls has one of if not the greatest gaming world map there is, all interconnected. DS2 was a let down compared to that.

I leaned on light armor to keep movement a bit less clunky and heavily relied on magic to get through the game. Which made me mostly useless against bosses but at least exploration was fun and very do-able. One on one combat reminds me most of Zelda. Learn the pattern, wait for cues, don't improvise, just do the same dance over and over and over. More like developing a programmed response (in you) than actually engaging in a tactical fight. Closer to a rhythm game than fighting AI.

From Software games have great atmosphere, yet after DS and DS2 I was done with the game play that comes with it. I still have Bloodborne unplayed if I ever feel the itch again. Haven't bought any since.

I played one of them (2 I think) for a little bit, and felt like the game was really making no effort to get me into it. Felt like the game really didn't want me to play it, so I didn't.