Dark Souls 2

[Lemonray]

Hm, okay. Since last night I've spent about four hours messing around with DSII and everything seems pretty okay so far.
The first thing I noticed gameplay-wise was that combat, and movement in general, doesn't have as much weight to it as DS1 did. In comparison it feels somewhat floaty and uh, N64 like. On a few occasions I've even gotten hit without my character reacting whatsoever (this only seems to happen when I've been hit while trying to roll), which feels jarring. Maybe I just need more time to get used to it but so far, the game feels inferior in this aspect.

Otherwise, everything else has been fun. After a little exploring I discovered an area guarded by some stone knights- Which, by themselves were fairly harmless except when I was fighting 2-3 at once. Taking the most obvious path I encountered my first boss: The Dragonrider. He's about as difficult as the Asylum Demon from the first game, although he did manage to kill me once by shoving me off the side of the arena. Using the asylum demon strategy (circle, attack rear, repeat) I killed him then went on to discover a new location, which was easy enough until I ran into some... Things, that caused bleed damage, which killed me.
Exploring the stone knight zone some more, I ran into Ornstein, or rather, the Old Dragonslayer as he's called in this game. Without Smough, he was easier while still being harder if that even makes sense and dropped both the Leo ring and 20,000 souls upon death. Good times.

Oh, and brief thoughts on the animations. Most are okay. Some, however, look like they'd be more suited to C-3PO than an undead warrior.

Edit: More brief thoughts after several more hours playing the game.

Most visuals are good, in terms of design and technical quality.
The game sounds great in most aspects.
The weapons and armours are pretty cool.
Overall there should be more enemy variation.
Difficulty-wise, it feels easier than the previous game despite combat issues, greater numbers of enemies attacking at once, weapon durability, limited estus etc.

The changed combat has become less of an issue for me after getting more used to it, but, I still find it inferior to DS1 combat. I honestly don't know why they felt the need to mess with it. Besides the aforementioned floatiness, there have been a few other negative changes. Parrying is now more bothersome- I'm not sure why exactly, but it's just more finicky here than in the previous game. I'll have to look into this more.
Lock on tracking seems to have been gimped, this is most evident when trying to use thrusting attacks, or anything with a narrow hitbox, really.
And then there's the fact that half of everything can be killed by just strafing around it in circles.