I played Dark souls 1 and Dark souls 3 before Ds2:SotFS, and even with that ds2 is my favorite. Its challenging but never really gets really frustrating like the others, the game performs beautifully, and I love the freedom offered by things like the soul vessels.
I also like how you get some choices on where to go first at some points, mainly in the beginning and at the memory sequence part.
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The PvE mechanics are so bad. You get ganked constantly in a game where fighting more than a single enemy is awkward. The vast majority of the bosses are easy once you invest enough points in ADP, the real challenge of the game is fighting hordes of enemies to get to them. There's too many bonfires, yet most of the bonfires are placed a good distance away from the boss rooms. It requires you to either run past a ton of enemies that can knock you out of the "entering fog gate" animation since it's so slow, or fight them over and over again. I think it's the most unsatisfying game out of the 4 souls' games I've played. Respecs and weapon upgrade materials being infinite is nice and all, but a lot of the weapons I've used in the game are impractical in PvE.