Enormous, unstructured review imminent:
Forewarning - I refuse to review this game in a quantifiable way. I love it. I hate it. It's a 5/5 and a 0/5 at times. It's certainly a masterpiece in its own little fucked up way. I recommend it, but I also recommend uninstalling it if you so choose. Worth a purchase on sale.
This is my first Fromsoft game that I actually gave a chance. I feel very strongly about it in many different directions. For a much-needed change of pace for this game's critique, I want to start with positives.
The combat mechanics are brilliant here. I played a bit of Bloodborne, and in that game you feel like you weigh as much as a feather and have the acceleration of a super-soldier. The attacks are fairly quick and snapping, and your roll is instant, far-reaching, and essentially god mode. The game is a test of reaction - nothing more. You roll everything. There's zero weight. It's a boring nightmare of instinctual, reaction-based combat. I expected the same going into DSII, and was thoroughly surprised when I was consistently punished for poorly planned and timed actions because my character had a real sense of sluggishness and heft to him. My roll was no longer half a second of god-mode (although the ADP stat can make it that way if you so choose), and it wasn't able to be used right after a move. Where Bloodborne was a game for beasts and instict, DSII punishes you for this kind of hyper-reactive, adderall-fueled gameplay. You must position (HYPOTHETICALLY - I WILL GET INTO WHY YOU DON'T ACTUALLY HAVE TO DO THIS LATER) to survive fights instead of rolling everything if you want real damage. This is fantastic, and I can't sing enough praise for the tempo of this game's combat. It's nigh turn-based in how slow and thought out it can be, and the stints of PvP I've done have really been a blast in this system.

Now this is all fine as a system, but does it work in execution? Not really. Save for a boss like Fume Knight (literal perfection), most of the tough enemies you encounter here are so laughably easy or one-dimensional in the way they attack that you can merely just roll-spam once again. Bosses are either like Covetous Demon, a pure pushover, or like Velstadt, where you'd better hope and pray to MAYBE, just MAYBE get a combo extender in his at-the-maximum 3-hit combos. There is never once any real strain on your stamina bar, and the attacks are telegraphed enough (given how slow the combat is) that you can just resort to rolling everything if you're under the age of 60! It's very tragic. The second I got a feel for combat, it became laughably easy with how the bosses are designed.

However, there may yet be a saving grace, for DSII is a fan of the illustrious "gank boss" design. Perhaps this takes more skill and strains your stamina? Yes, it does! But it also sucks total ass in the process. Let's look at Belfry Gargoyles, which is a fight that can throw anything between 2-5 enemies at you within a given moment. These guys SUCK mainly because their main swipes and jabs were not designed with the intention to be a group move. They don't overlap well when used by multiple enemies at once, and for this reason this fight is either a total joke or a nightmare to find openings, solely teetering on the initial positioning of their spawns. There's a slight saving grace in their fire attacks, which a well-versed player can use to force position staggering, but this still doesn't solve the root issue of them having no real way of breaking up attacks or getting openings intrinsic to their consistent boss design.

Another "gank boss" is the Ruin Sentinels. On paper, these bosses should be fantastic, as their attacks have decent-ish overlap (save for their spin attack which is complete bullshit and a travesty of game design) and they have unique positioning built into their AI. However, one little detail kills this fight, and makes it one of the most unfun experiences I've had in a game: the hitboxes. Whether it be their overhead slam, the shield throw, the way their swipes go through walls and floors (if they fall of an edge while attacking), or that goddamn spin attack - it's all fucking ass. A baby coded the hitboxes here, it's actually fucking ridiculous how bad they are. This isn't just an issue in Ruin Sentinels, this is basically for every boss with a slam or stab. Smelter Demon can overhead slam you from half a player model away if you leave your roll around the time his sword comes down, like there's lag or something. Sir Allone can grab you FROM BEHIND HIM (which is actually his right arm's hitbox expanding by about x3 when the stab animation goes through, meaning if you're on his backside and that massive girthy arm hitbox so much as grazes you, you get teleported ONTO his sword). It's all miserable.

As stated prior, if the bosses aren't poorly designed or riddled with bad hitboxes, they're one-dimensional. Vendrick, Nashandra, Aldia, and Giant Lord (4 of the game's near-FINAL bosses) have like 4 attacks max. Vendrick has SOME interesting timing to his side sweeps, but the rest of them are absolutely inexcusable in how shallow they are. Dragonrider has two attacks. Demon Of Song has like three. There's nothing to really even say about these bosses other than they're just BORING. They're sloppily made, not fleshed out enough, and it just causes them to be so meandering and lame. Where DSII saves itself in this 1D bosses in their gimmicks. Executioner's Chariot puts a boss run in the boss fight, and it turns out pretty decent. The one lady who's name I can't remember just summons another boss (Velstadt) during the fight (lol) but it fits the tempo so well that the fight honestly becomes very good from this lazy gimmick alone. Ivory King is very cinematic and dramatic. This is all known, but there's one boss I really want to focus on the gimmick of, because of how much of a disastrous fail in the best way possible that it was: Old Iron King. This boss makes me laugh just thinking about it. Fromsoft essentially took some variant of Bowser from Super Mario Bros for the Wii, and ported it straight into DSII, slowed the attack speed down by a million, and then removed the player's ability to jump over his attacks. I cannot stress this analogy enough - it is LITERALLY a Mario boss fight in Dark Souls, and it's so fucking bad that it was the highlight of the game for me in how hilarious it was. Please never change Fromsoft.

So most of the bosses are stinkers, but the DLC one's are good at least. Blue Smelter Demon adds some new timings and HP scaling to an already good fight. Sinh is fantastic in both presentation and mechanics. Sir Allone is meh (but a lot of people really like him!), and Fume Knight is fucking AMAZING. The aforementioned boss has some of the most unique timing sets and combos I've seen in a game ever, and he really rewards thinking about positioning for windows. Awesome fight that never once feels unfair, and offers a decent enough challenge. I cannot sing enough praise for Fume Knight. All this is to say it might be worth slogging through terrible vanilla bosses for some great DLC bosses. Oh yeah there's also Lud and Zallen lmfao.

So on average, the bosses aren't great. What about the world? Well this review is long-winded enough, but it starts out very strong and slowly crumbles over time. What begins as a unified and cohesive set of levels stemming from a hub area soon devolves into a disjointed mess of paths that makes no sense from a world perspective. Even worse, a lot of these areas SUCK. Black Gulch, Earthen Peak, Frigid Outskirts, Iron Keep (on SotFS), Cave of the Dead, Undead Crypt, Iron Passage, and more are just pure DOGSHIT that ought to be removed from the game. I can't even say they look cool or feel like they fit a Metroidvania style world. They're most just super linear, bland caves that are founded on enemy spam or some unfun gimmick. To not make this review too long, I won't go into the main exception to this rule - Brightstone Cove Tseldora - as I think this is the worst area in the game for some unique reasons (let's just leave it at the concept of projectile enemies and an abundance of inaccessible verticality).

I found the narrative compelling at least. I'm not a lore guy but the personal nature of the narrative compared to the grand mythos of DSI and it's OMG THE FATE OF THE WORLD ALL CULMINATES HERE!!11!!!11 was a nice change of pace. There's other stuff to comment on but I feel like I covered the important bullet points. Again, I won't put this game on a number scale, but I do recommend it.

I'm gonna be honest - this game is one of the most shallow political commentaries ever
It doesn't believe in a single ideology. It comments on the state of these, and goes no further. Anyone hailing this game as some Marxist revelation is totally inept.
Speaking of ineptitude, the gameplay and graphics are horrible. Visually, this game is grating, I don't care how intentional. Gameplay-wise, it controls like shit and brings nothing unique to the table. I see zero reason to play this past the novelty of a quirky game that says "erm anyone else think capitalism sucks... haha lol!" and succeeds at nothing else past that.