The staggering you do from hits initially, is really, really huge. I don't remember it being that bad in DS1.
You can also heavily stagger enemies, which is nice. The fire longsword has a huge stagger on it's thrust attack. I've been powering through the game with that.
Most of the bosses in this game, I just pulled in a few summoned allies and wiped the floor with them.
A few terrible areas, but nothing felt as terrible as The Depths in DS1.
* Black Gulch sucked for a bit, but was over relatively quickly.
* Shrine of Amana was just cheap, so I had to out-cheap it by spending all my souls on Dex and bow upgrades. Then sniping spell casters in the face from a distance. At least I had some time to level up and build my gear for this one.
* No-Man's Wharf confused me for a bit, until I discovered the short cut added in SotFS
I ended up joining the Rat King Covenant, mostly out of convenience, and then I found out they have an awesome ring you get (Ring of Fog). I could never grind enough rat tails to get it, but the notion I might someday have it was nice.
The torch system was neat, but a little too special case. You could like pyres along the way to various areas, which allowed you to relight your torch at that point. It was mostly used in the game as an "I've been here" reminder, and very little as an actual game mechanic. There was maybe one area where it helped me see things... I don't recall.
The added ability to respec your character, in case you wasted points in attributes that you didn't really want after all. I burned my first respec to change my strength/dex allocations into more stamina and health. Having the fire sword early and upgrading throughout the game meant I didn't need much strength/dex early on. I tried an intelligence build later on, but used another soul vessel to reverse that.
The upgrading of weapons seemed to go much slower than DS1, but it did come much earlier than DS1, so I think it was better overall.
I don't remember being able to destroy the chests in DS1, but in DS2 you absolutely can destroy them. Doing so, replaces their contents with rubbish. This is especially frustrating when an enemy destroys the chest because you were fighting around them at a poor time. This is further made worse by the game auto-saving aggressively, which is terrible when those chests break. As a rule of thumb, I started shield bashing chests to check, because it didn't do enough damage to destroy them. I also save scummed liberally... If you play online, there are usually lots of warning signs around mimics. Only one time did the signs wait to load in until I was already being eaten...
Having to go back to town to level up was a huge pain, compared to levelling up at any bonfire. The warping allowed from the start was nice, but there was a charm to DS1 where your routes would loop back on themselves and you could see the interconnectivity of the game. Warping is still awesomely convenient.
The hollowing process of losing a portion of your maximum health kinda sucked, but it forced you to either use up a ring slot to reduce that reduction per death to cap you at 80% instead of a horrible 50%, or you could use a human effigy to get your humanity and max health back.
I didn't get invaded that often in the game, and had much better positive interactions with summoning other people to help with fights.
Overall the game felt much more accessible than the first.
Finishing the game was good, and it felt nice to complete the story.
Overall I enjoyed the game, and had a great time playing it. My friend Luke did help quite a bit, but I also was able to take on huge chunks without his assistance/direction.
This is how I looked for most of the early to mid game. It's a heavy armor set, and helped me to not die. Still rockin' the fire sword.
This is how I looked for the later parts of the game. Each piece comes with a nice bonus, and it's pretty light weight. Yep, still fire sword.
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