I beat Dark Souls 2! And by “beat” I mean the base game idk if I want to put myself through the DLC. My verdict on DS2 is that has a lot of new ideas for the series that vary heavily in quality. Some changes you can see bloodborne lack that ended up coming through in DS3 and ER and some that are very weird which I’m glad did not return. However the main reason why I don’t think I’ll come back to this entry much if ever is a lack of cohesion and a lack of scale. Regardless of why that came to be, compared to the other entries in the series, ds2 felt less like uncovering secrets of a dead world, and more like following one story scene to scene.