After playing DS1 and Bloodborne and with all the horrible shit I've heard about this...

The Good
>DaS2 has probably the most meaningful build diversity in the series
>You're free to take multiple different paths to progress early on
>Plentiful upgrade materials, meaning you can experiment with a lot of weapons easily
>Good magic gameplay
>Many armors use very similar materials and color schemes, so it's easy to create an outfit that looks cohesive from parts of different sets

The Bad
>Agility determines the number of iframes in your dodging animations, and low agility exposes the fact your character leaves a lingering hitbox at the origin point of the dodge, meaning you can see your character physically evade an attack but get hit by it anyway
>Grab hitboxes are just plain awful
>Attacks from some enemies generate a bullet that deals the damage rather than the damage being tied to a hitbox on the NPC's model, such as some large NPC stomps or slams, and it's possible for NPCs to sometimes generate these bullets disjointedly from their animation, causing awkward phantom hits
>NPC invaders can heal with Estus, cancel any animation with an instant dodge, and read inputs (The most extreme example of this is that you can actually trick an NPC invader that has parried or backstabbed you into cancelling out of the animation by spamming R1 as quickly as you can)
>Soul Memory punishes you for accumulating more souls than are absolutely necessary for your build

The Ugly
>The game went through a tortured development where a significant number of assets were already created before the first director was booted from the project, and a lot of those assets had to be reused in sometimes nonsensical ways
>Several transitions between different areas don't make any sense at all
>The original lighting system for the game proved too taxing for consoles at the time, so it was heavily downgraded
>Many areas have low quality or repeating textures that were meant to be hidden by the original lighting
>Animations for the player and some NPCs can be pretty low impact and floaty

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>Roll backwards, the sensible way to dodge a grab
>Get nabbed 100% of the time
>Roll sideways, a seemingly bad way to dodge a grab
>Evade 100% of the time
DS2's hitboxes are something else.

It's just jank made by some literally who's. Miyazaki had NOTHING to do with this game and it shows.

I wish they just kept everything as it were in DS1 and added new enemies and areas. Why the hell did they feel the need to fuck with the basic formula so much.

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It feels like someone tried to create a bastard child between dragons dogma and dark souls

>Why the hell did they feel the need to fuck with the basic formula so much.
I feel like they might have been trying to capture lightning in a bottle again. Sony commissioned From Software to create a fantasy RPG game following the success of Oblivion. After several months, the development was floundering with no clear direction. Miyazaki, a junior director at the time, approached the executives and asked for control of the project, pitching his vision for what would eventually become Demon's Souls. Despite his lack of experience, he was given the director position and planted the seeds of the series as we know it now.

In all the early interviews featuring Shibuya, he's very direct about expressing his ambitions for Dark Souls 2, even though they don't really align with the framework that Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 setup. The main feature he stressed wanting to implement was even greater freedom of choice, making the game world more open, though still far from what you'd consider a traditionally open world game. The chief example of this is probably a concept he outlined wherein it would be possible to skip to the second half of the game without having to visit any other areas by way of crossing this particular extremely challenging bridge. In the leftover map data, it's possible to spot a giant bridge cutting through various different areas, which is believed to be what he was referring to. When Dark Souls 2 began development, Miyazaki was busy directing Bloodborne, so the executives needed someone else to head the new project. Shibuya, who had not directed even one game prior, was given the job. Based on how he conducted himself, Shibuya was probably styled as a visionary in the same vein as Miyazaki and they were hoping his attempts at taking the series in a new direction could prove fruitful. In the end, Bamco became dissatisfied with Shibuya and he was ousted in favor of Tanimura, who was left cobbling a game together from Shibuya's pieces.

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Not as bad as you hear on Yea Forums.
The lightning engine is disabled so the game look like shit compared to other Soulborne.
And rolling pretty much does nothing until you level up your agility stats.
Otherwise it's more of the same, with up and downs.

>a significant number of assets were already created before the first director was booted from the project, and a lot of those assets had to be reused in sometimes nonsensical ways
kek, do you by any chance have any direct examples of this shit at the top of your mind

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People tend to belittle DS2 for petty things like graphics or the elevator in Earthern Peak. Apart from the fact that the game looks better than DS1, it's just less polished and detailed when it comes to certain areas/enemies, it's still one of the most enjoyable experiences in the series.

There's no pointless backtracking between areas that involves running up a hill for five minutes, the levels aren't a slog to go through like DS3 and you actually have to plan and use tactics in combat instead of just waiting for a spastic enemy to finish its combo and then attack it.

The game might feel slow and clunky at first, but it doesn't take much to get used to it. It's mostly very deliberate. Some enemies have janky hitboxes or animations, but that's literally the case with EVERY fromsoft games, but the community only picks on 2 because it's slower so it's easier to notice.

Try it out without comparing too much to the original, it's more of its own thing.

One of the most jarring moments is probably the transition from Earthen Peak to Iron Keep, with an elevator at the top of a tower suddenly letting out at a volcanic caldera that was nowhere to be seen from outside the tower. The map files have since shown that originally, Earthen Peak was instead meant to have a large spiral staircase descending into the ground that would eventually lead to the Undead Crypt, which also handily explains why the tower is populated by grave wardens. As for Iron Keep, the salamander cave in Forest of Fallen Giants was going to tunnel through the mountain, leading up to the keep, which also similarly explains how the turtle knights got from Iron Keep to FoFG.

Several characters got repurposed as well, like the Bell Keeper, who was originally meant to be Lucatiel's traveling companion. Lucatiel would've been a somewhat delusional knight in the vein of Don Quixote, with the Bell Keeper being her voice of reason equivalent to Sancho Panza. Even more surprising though is that Nashandra was not created to be the final boss, having been intended to be a secret optional boss, which probably goes a long ways towards explaining how ill-fitting she is for the job.

There was an entire time-travel framework for the game that got dropped almost wholesale. An example that was shown early on was how the different eras affected the bridge leading to the dragon shrine. In one era, the sky was filled with dragons, who would swoop down and snap the bridge with you on it if you attempted to cross, effectively making the area inaccessible. When you returned in the other era, the dragons would have died out, allowing you to cross the bridge unimpeded. In the final game, the dragons will still snap the bridge, but only if you've been going around smashing the eggs in the area. Another remnant of the time travel plot that managed to make its way into the final version is, of course, the giant memories.

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>Some enemies have janky hitboxes or animations, but that's literally the case with EVERY fromsoft games, but the community only picks on 2 because it's slower so it's easier to notice.
Also because 2 had Agility, which makes the shit hitboxes even worse.

>It's just jank made by some literally who's. Miyazaki had NOTHING to do with this game and it shows.
It really shows, fuck miyazaki, hack recycler