Lily has categorized and explained her original chart, her categories are still wrong
I don't want to spend too much time breaking down all the ways Lily is wrong, because I think his work really speaks for itself, but his categories, especially for Soulslikes, are just too broad.
By his logic, the original Super Mario Brothers is a soulslike because in order to defeat Bowser, you need to study his patterns and make sure you time your jumps between hammer throws, or that you're running underneath him when he jumps up. The original Megaman games would also count because a lot of those bossfights are playing around the patterns of the boss and then countering with their weakness. A lot of FPS bossfights use similar mechanics, wait until the boss finishes firing their main gun, jump out of cover, hit them, roll to the next cover before they've reloaded or used their super weapon or whatever. Yakuza bossfights tend to use similar movesets throughout the games, where you want to time your attacks/dodges to beat the boss etc.
Pattern play is just a big thing in gaming because that's typically how encounters work. It's everything else that tends to set them apart. Like with Dark Souls, you don't just win the game by knowing the enemy patterns. You also have to understand how your mechanics work, with your playstyle changing depending on the weapon you're using. You need to understand your range, how much stamina you're using, whether you're going to whiff an attack and get punished and all the little variations that go into it. As a genre, it also tends to be much harsher versus something like Yakuza, where bosses can hit you for a massive chunk of damage, but you can drink a soda and get back to full life.
Another big difference is how you build a character, with a game like DMC naturally having more limited options because there's only a handful of weapons versus something like Darksouls where there's a much wider range to choose from. Or something like Megaman, where the route you choose plays a huge role in what special weapons you get in what order. How/whether you level up at all is also vastly different between games.
It's like how just because a game has backtracking, it wouldn't be considered a Metroidvania, that's too surface level of a take because tons of games across a variety of genres include backtracking. But if you unlock new abilities that let you interact with the world in different ways and there's tons of hidden stuff throughout the map, then it leans more in that direction.
Style is also a consideration. Dark Souls games are known for being pretty cutscene light and tell a lot of storytelling through lore more than like, direct character interaction, while Devil May Cry has a very over the top action movie approach to cutscenes (at least the ones I've played, I know little about the modern version of the series) while a series like God of War is (as far as I know with my limited knowledge) more of an epic spectacle style of storytelling. Maybe. I've just heard the new one had really long cutscenes.
