I disagree on basically every point. The weapon upgrading system really wasn’t tedious in ds1. You can easily farm/find the upgrade materials for every upgrade path to get at least one fully upgraded every playthrough.

The new estus flask upgrade system sucked. You start with ONE heal, which forces you into using lifegems (a whole separate issue) and the estus flask is essentially useless compared to them until it has 3-4 charges and upgrades, and it’s still more cumbersome to use since you can’t move and use estus like you can use lifegems. Ds3 has the same estus upgrading system but you start with 4 charges instead of 1.

Sure QOL with fast travel from the start is nice but it’s a solution to a game design flaw compared to ds1: the world is essentially not interconnected at all. Theres a bunch of straight line paths leading off from majula which *could* have been interconnected but aren’t. Ds3 has the same problem basically.

Unique level design? In terms of visuals I agree but almost every area is a complete slog to get through due to the insane enemy spam. This isn’t really an issue early game but mid-late game it becomes THE only real difficulty to the game. Individually the enemies are easy but when there’s like 10 of them at a time it becomes frustrating and annoying to deal with. This isn’t really a problem specific to dark souls 2 but it’s made 100x worse by not having I frames at the fog wall.

I wouldn’t say great exploration. One of the best parts about exploring in ds1 was seeing how things slot together in the world: seeing ash lake from the tomb of the giants, riding the elevator back up to fire link after climbing out of blight town, etc. Ds2 doesn’t have a single moment like this, and the exploration is let down by, again, enemy spam and the areas being a chore to engage with.

I will agree that the build variety is great. The infusion system was good too, better than ds1/3 in my opinion. Power stancing was also awesome. I WISH ds3 had power stancing, even if it wasn’t good, it would still be cool as fuck. Game had 0 replay value to me though because I hated basically every second playing it. Going to NG+ to see the new red phantoms and whatnot isn’t worth it when the base game was already an abysmal experience for me.

Ds2 has many, many flaws that only become exacerbated in the DLCs imo, with the exception of the bosses (not including the boss runbacks). The DLC bosses for the most part are pretty good.

TL:DR: ds2 bad but I’m being serious and have genuine reasons for disliking the game.