DS2 does some things right and a lot of things weird. The multiplayer covenants are the most creative in the series. Since you’re still on demons souls: covenants determine how you do multiplayer. Some are for pvp, some for coop. There’s straight forward invasion focused pvp, getting summoned to help someone who’s getting invaded and so on.

What DS2 fails is the general gameplay feels clunky and slow and floaty. This is due to various reasons: the biggest is that they put the quality of your dodge roll behind a stat called adaptability which determined how many invincibility frames you get and how far you chug your healing flask. So what happens if that at base level everything kinda sucks and to get a good roll like in past games you have to level an extra stat. Other than that i just feel the animations blend in a weird way that makes it all look off and unresponsive

What it massively failed is the world design and interconnectivity. Think how in demons souls each level is disconnected but the level in itself is consistent. Development of 2 started with a concept like that but then they switched to an interconnected world was too late to get it right and did stuff that would be similar to putting stonefang money on top of the tower of latria. They stitched levels together that had no business being together.

I liked the gear variety iirc.