I like the first Dark Souls more than the second game but I still think II is just fine. I feel like some areas needed more time in the oven, as they look kind of bad or incomplete. The foggy woods area and the area just past that is one example. I'm playing on 360 and the game looks like an N64 game in terms of the geometry on screen when in the foggy trees. There are almost no effects turned out and everything looks flat.

You are right about leveling, in Dark Souls II you level up like mofo. Seems like every time I beat even a minor boss I was leveling up several times over. Not so in Dark Souls. Another thing that I felt was unnecessary was the effigy stuff. Yeah, it's a pain to see your level bar go down to half but I found this to be more of an annoyance than a real threat to your survival. If you play it smart you can save up enough effigies to get past the rough spots on the game. I have a thought for From Software: how about making the enemies tougher and not make me pop effigies all the time? We cool with that? Alright then.

All in all, I was super super hyped for Dark Souls II given the first game is my personal "game of the generation", but was overall not quite as pleased with it as I was hoping for. But hey, that's just fine, we got more Dark Souls, that's a good thing to me. Bloodborne is right around the corner but I'm still going to be super excited when they announce Dark Souls 3. I'll take another Souls please.

that dlc though... I started having flashbacks to DS1 (which I played through once). I am quite enjoying that dlc.

I feel with Dark Souls 2 like i did with Demon's Souls, amazing game first playthrough, but falls flat the second time around. Where as i'm still playing Dark Souls, and just played it through my first time on PC last weekend with the DSfix installed, and had an awesome time.

I mean I agree with the general sentiment, and this is two weeks late for posting. But did you really think the movement was unresponsive? Just making the framerate stable 60 covered any potential mishaps on that front for me, DS2 is buttery smooth. And the character creator is equally shit in both games, but 2 looks better in general so I say it has more potential. Maybe.

But yeah the first game knocks its sequel out of the park. Hard to see the original ever get topped at this point. "Though Bloodborne looks so goddamn sexy I might gladly eat my words"