Compared to Dark Souls, there are some parts that are clearly worse like the limits on inventory capacity and the entire healing item system, but in the grand scheme of things that's stuff's pretty irrelevant. What makes me prefer DaS1 over DeS is that the interconnected world structure is just much more interesting compared to the more level-based one. I do however vastly prefer the DeS structure over what the poorly connected worlds later Souls games went with, and it's also what makes DeS stand out from the rest. Also while the quality of the bosses was all over the place, most of them were very different from one another which I like a lot. What I didn't like a lot was that the runbacks to attempt bosses again sucked exactly as much as expected. Taking it slow and fighting enemies is interesting when you're first exploring the areas, but having to deal with them in order to get back to a boss repeatedly is just a bad time.

Either way, not as good as Dark Souls but different enough in a good way, and better than the sequels. Also the second half of Tower of Latria is amazing, one of my favorite areas in the series.