As time goes on, many people seem to be souring on the game. The reddit for example, is becoming devoid of lore. Every theory is shot down immediately because it has obvious flaws. The lore is for the most part, half-written. There's no backbone to the story.
And speaking of the story, the main plot basically makes next to no sense. The whole cycle thing does kinda diminish DS1 like yahtzee said, but sequels are gonna have shitty reasons to exist, that's what they do. The big problem with the cycle however, is that all it serves to do is make your whole quest seem pointless. If they cycle is going to repeat regardless of my actions, what is the point of them? Why am i following the orders of some random woman i just met instead of looking for the cure that the intro told me i was looking for? Surely given the knowledge that i can't have a lasting impact on the world i'd choose the path of an enjoyable life, not filled with hundreds of painful deaths.
The ending left me quite sour. I mean, the boss was kinda shitty, but more to the point, the ending cutscene bothered the fuck out of me. Essentially being told, "You can now choose to take the throne and be the next monarch, or you can refuse it" is pretty stupid when my character goes ahead and takes the throne regardless. Why am i told i have a choice in the same cutscene that my character chooses their own choice regardless of what i want? Some players have argued that the choice is there, it's just an off-screen thing, leaving the future ambiguous. But this isn't a movie. It's a game. Let me play the choice. The first game left you in a big empty room after killing the closest thing the world ever had to a god. Silence and only your own company, and the question "Is the light worth holding onto? Even if it is only for a little while?". It was a personal question more than anything, as the cutscene you got afterwards showed little. But that silence in that moment was something of beauty. You had finally come to the end of a long and difficult journey. You weren't about to just pick some choice at random because you had worked so hard for it. That tiny section of gameplay, with almost no content mattered massively. The removal of it hurt the ending significantly.
Truly, the cycle is the downfall of the game however. By essentially creating a plot device so that the first game can be remade with a new skin, there will be comparisons. The game won't be taken as a standalone, and dark souls 1 is not a game you want to be compared to at every angle. Demons souls and dark souls existed in harmony, they were different experiences with similar gameplay. They didn't try to be the same. Dark souls changed a lot from Demons souls. Dark souls 2 tries to be Dark souls 1 again, and it simply can't be. The world isn't the interconnected wonder the first game was, the bosses aren't as memorable ornstein and smough or artorias, and the lore is simply afraid to spread its own wings, but hangs to the coattails of the first game, to weak to even expand what it clings to.
I mean, it's a great game. Like has been said before, more dark souls is a good thing, but the sequel stood to close to the original, and became an inferior copy. It's a lot of fun, but i don't think there's really any chance of it having the same longevity of the first. I've played it through a few times, already, and that should speak for its quality, but I don't think it has the same charm that the first one did when replayed. It was so meticulously crafted that there was always a few new things you spotted. The sequel feels more like a generic fantasy game in its design, but still retains a lot of the great mechanics of the first.
