24 hours
I chose to leave a positive review as this game is the most efficient way to torture someone to rope themselves.
I have played numerous games known to make humans mentally insane, but i think dark souls 2 has finally pushed me over the edge. It is absolutely crazy how suffocating yet addictive this game is, while not only giving you countless tumours that chemotherapy won't solve.

This review i have only played 24 hours and i have 27 more bosses to go out of 41, my last 4 bosses were gank fights with the worst run backs. I think so far the boss fights aren't difficult compared to the other FromSoftware titles. Right now its becoming a bit more challenging with the fat ♥♥♥♥ smelter demon. But honestly the title of this game should be Gank Soul 2 and its blurb is " time to get cardio in fatty "

72 hours into the game, my second review after 100%ing the game.
Pros: Early to mid game i would say it was fun and entertaining to slam down bosses, they were easy and majority of the time i first tried most of the bosses. Enjoyable to see another dark souls after dark souls 1. You can use ability to fast travel to multiple bonfires whenever you would like from the get go instead of gaining the ability mid game like ds1, there are some entertaining areas and it looks cool. The style is slightly different.

Cons: I really dislike the style of difficulty ds2 thinks is difficult, the bosses aren't difficult but if your idea of traveling to the boss arena with tons of mobs on the way and learning all the mobs attack pattern and attempting not to get hit and some necessary mobs that you must kill on the way to the boss arena is fun or difficult then sure ( just not my cup of tea ),
i really think ds2 was generally quite sloppy when it came to its overall execution, ds2 decided to loose originality when it came to boss fights as there are a few reskinned bosses and 1/3 of the total boss fights they couldn't of think of any different or difficult attack patterns so they were lazy and decided what is difficult to have a gank fight, at one point in the game there was 3 back to back gank fights that was disgusting, the bosses attacks weren't hard, the whole hard part was to separate and be patient with multiple people which does cost a decent amount of luck to wait for a attack to create space between enemies. I thought it was also really inconvenient needing to go back to shrine everytime to level up and there are barely that many npcs that offer you many things, i like the idea of them all coming back to the shrine but there are some that just stay in their selected areas, i wish there were more story between characters and having a whole civilisation and world within dark souls 2 which there isn't much of.
The level design I thought was also pretty awful, at times where there might be a good view theres just a ton of mobs that you must kill because they just agro to you from a mile away and don't run back needing to deal with them, putting mobs near tight areas where you can get stun locked is difficult just not fun, also putting them where you get knocked off when your trying to dodge attacks are also really not fun to deal with. ds2 predecessor the good nostalgia of interconnected level design is lost in dark souls 2 usually after beating a area it just turns up to be dead end and no way to circle round like dark souls 1.
Mechanics compared to the other souls, ds2 feels a bit janky, you get to realise at the beginning of game this is what things are going to be and you get used to it, usually its not a issue just a walk around, but towards later in the game where you want to be able to dodge consistently, and attacks which you have dodged and then you repeat the same action and then getting hit even not being anywhere close to the attack i think is kinda ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. There are times where my character would just teleport back toward the enemy which attacked even though you weren't there is really confusing. Theres not much content in dark souls 2 other than just 41 bosses and you beating similar to the same bosses before so i don't see the point of doing it again (i did it anyway).

The middle ground: i enjoyed the memories (the memories the task of going into the past), i enjoyed the fight with fume knight, sir alonne, Aava, ancient dragon. I thought they were all unique (3 of the bosses in dlc, 2 in one). The experience was great, the best feeling about this game was the relief of beating it, however i generally hated nearly 60% of the process to get here ( unlike the other souls i have played ), I think universally everyone can agree frigid outskirts was a absolute abomination of this game, and whoever added smelter demon i actually hate and dark souls 2 you almost had a perfect dlc (Crown of the Old Iron King) but you really decided to say ♥♥♥♥ you to everyone, it really wasn't necessary to put him again for the second time, i don't think anyone enjoyed that, the whole purpose of adding him was for the players to hate that fact and then add 2 great bosses after and feel gratitude for that ( i don't, horrible design).