Thank you, Noema ! Yes -- I feel like as much praise as the Soulsborne games get, there are still aspects of it that people keep missing; particularly, developers often seem to think that it is the combat or the "fair difficulty" of these games that make them stand out; but there are so many more sides to these games, prime amongst which is their coherency. This kind of metatextual coherency is probably my favourite quality in any type of work; I really hope that more developers will be inspired by it.
Yeah that's the diegetic. Nier Automata does it even more better than the souls series, imo. You should look at it. And I agree it's one of the greatest strength of the series.