One of the great joys of exploring the world of Dark Souls is discovering the mountains of loot. Your gear defines your build as much as your stats do, and experimenting with the options available to you is great fun.
There are a lot of different items to be found, a wide range of weapons, many suits of armor, a range of spells, and useful tools to aid your travels.
Loot also ties into New Game Plus play, where you can carry all of your gear forward into a fresh world, with tougher foes.
On top of that, because a great many items are only accessible late in the game, if you want to enjoy a full playthrough with an interesting set of weapons and spells, you need to do so on New Game Plus to fully experience them.
One of the coolest aspects of Dark Souls is that virtually any loadout can be successful. You can take a dagger and a suit of leather armor through the entire game if you want to. It’s going to be a lot harder in some places, but it is doable.
Dark Souls relies on tradeoffs to keep gearing decisions interesting—while there are certainly powerful weapons, strong suits of armor, tough shields, and hard hitting spells, they are often balanced by very high stat requirements, slow casting times, high weight or defensive deficiencies.
The result of this is you can experiment and mix and match almost endlessly with different loadouts, and you can choose your favorite weapons based on their moveset, without worrying that they’ll be completely obsoleted by a later discovery.
Properly upgraded, a simple Broadsword or Battle Axe can take you from the start to the end of the game comfortably.
Experiment and enjoy, there’s a lot to find and play with!