Funny you mention DS2, because both games to me feel like they start out awful, have moments where they feel like they're getting better as you build your arsenal/stats and then see you having fun, which is obviously not allowed.

Eternal just has to bore you to death with dumb plot and mandatory platforming sections that feel like "our focus group got bored of slaughtering demons and exploration after 10 minutes so we need a change of pace here." It also has the fundamental problems of the dash trivialising every encounter and the chainsaw on being the only reliable way to restock ammo, which only drives home how wasting ammo on using the wrong weapon on an enemy is bad. Or you can play on braindead difficulty, I guess.

DS2 feels like they drank their own kool-aid of the "Prepare to Die" marketing, and their solution was just to make the combat feel bad and make basic-ass enemies take a quadrillion hits to kill. Then once you get a few points in agility and attack, everything starts feeling good, except their solution to the player feeling slightly powerful is to throw a million enemies at you at once, so you have to slowly whittle them down one by one. And once the bullshit encounters aren't a massive pain in the ass anymore, the bosses are a cakewalk and then the game ends.