>>713254029 (OP) Absolutely godawful design and balancing of anything that is not an r1, deflect and mikiri. Terrible balance of prosthetics, even worse design of combat arts, all made even worse by the fact Spirit Emblems exist. All issues are even worse if you're doing charmless + bell demon, it exposes just how little thought went into balancing of everything and most prosthetics lose any combat supplement role beyond being glorified hard counters for 2-3 enemies.
Very linear level design. Not even grappling hook saves it, most levels are excessively straightforward and grappling hook points are very controlled everywhere except for late game Ashina Castle.
Terrible rewards for exploration. No, i don't need another 10 ceramic shards for finding a well-hidden nook. This feeds another issue - a bad design of consumables in general, with tons of blatantly useless shit with only a few exceptions.
Broken, easily abusable stealth. Thanks to stealth sugar you can go around on a massive genocide spree and enemy AI is too retarded to notice anything.