Well I just finished the game, clocked around 40 hours on the character I stuck with and was SL 100 when i beat the last boss, I think the game is largely better than Dark Souls 1 but in some ways worse, I might change my opinion after playing more, I sunk hundreds of hours into the first one after all.

Things I think are better:

- Number of boss battles

- animations and visuals

- less ability to rely on extreme overtanking builds to cheese the game

- replacement for humanity/death mechanics

- World size

- Difficulty, personally I found this game harder than Dark Souls, I know some people think otherwise but trying to play as almost solely dual wielding was challenging.

- Enemy AI, this is leaps and bounds better than the brain dead enemies in Dark Souls

- Multiplayer coop/pvp it seems to work much better and is not a bit more flexible, all round improvement.

- Performance, playing on the Xbox 360 I didn't notice any fps issues like in the original.

Things I think are worse:

- Story (this is subjective and it'll be ages before people piece it together anyway) including the ending.

- World connectivity, what I mean is that the way the world fit together in Dark Souls felt much more natural and well crafted than this game.

- Multiple enemies + bosses in small rooms, the camera wasn't still a piece of shit i'd not have as much complaint here, but some of the encounters while not particularly hard, are frustrating due to the camera.

- Music, the music is in my opinion generally bad, compared to the fantastic Dark Souls soundtrack this was very disappointing.

All in all I think they did a very good job, it's not quite as special as the first one but it isn't a disappointment.

Yeah I finished it in like 40 hours also, which is a great game length. I was SL 150 by the end though haha.

I pretty much agree with everything you pointed out. I really hated those bosses with multiple enemies in the room. That game still doesn't allow for particularly great crowd management, especially as a tank character (which I was). I personally thought the game was easier than DS, but I keep hearing mixed opinions on this matter. I think it's more approachable, and once I got used to the animation differences (fuck that estus flask), I pretty much breezed through the game on like 5 human effigies. Also, I beat most bosses on the first try without summoning. The exceptions were the Duke's Dear Freja and Royal Rat Authority and that's just because of all the enemies in the room. I played on 360, and you're definitely right about the performance. While there were a few tiny frame rate drops, there was certainly no Blighttown.

I definitely agree with you. I like DS more, but it's hard for me to tell if that's just because I played it first. DS2 certainly isn't a disappointment by any means though, and NG+ is no joke. Looking forward to more PVP and replaying the game as a sorcerer.

I do think 40 hours is the ideal game length in general (Vagrant Story/Valkyrie Profile 2, hoooo); but for a new player who hasn't touched another game in the series this game is probably more along the lines of 60 hours and for anyone wanting to do everything in one playthrough it's around 80-120 hours. The opening areas in this game are around 5-6 times harder than the Undead Parish/1-1 as well; if you were a new player it'd just be hell as far as calling the game "approachable."

I didn't have a problem with any of the bosses with adds, aside from that bullshit fight where the adds inflict Toxic on you, you know the one probably, but it's optional so I aint even mad. I took my time with my first playthrough and clocked around 60ish hours. I read all the item descriptions, did all the optional content, tooled around for like 15 hours in the post-game and am on NG+ now, as well as having an alt on NG.

Really love what they've done with NG+, it's not just the same thing but harder, there are actually new surprises, items and enemies.