Let's start with the movement. The exactness you need in navigating the world is just not there.
The movement worked just fine for me. In fact, I felt the movement worked well for weaving in and out of multiple enemies and looking for the perfect time to strike back.
Enemy placement is not thought out well. Whoever thought it was a good idea to have the only way to survive is to have barrels explode should be fired. Sure, maybe one part, would be fine but it's like this around every damn corner.
I mostly played SotFS, so I'll be speaking from my experience with that version, but I found the enemy placement to be mostly fine. The hordes that will sometimes rush you down are meant to test how good you are at crowd control. You are meant to draw enemies to fight them one-on-one, or take the fight to an area that is more advantageous to you and fight them without lock-on, or just weave in and out of them, looking for a good moment to strike, also without lock-on. At least, that's what I try to do. Many of the combat arenas seem to be more open, and this is good, since it gives you more room to maneuver around enemies and your weapons won't bounce off of walls as much. The exploding enemies in the Lost Bastille were a problem though and it was dumb to have some enemies so close to certain bonfires.
The pursuer. He's not a hard boss but you have to fight him like 3 times in the
He's called the Pursuer, that's kinda what he does. I don't know, I kinda liked having a recurring mini-boss that showed up in unexpected places. It reminded me a little of the SA-X from Metroid Fusion. I just really like the Pursuer. I think he has a cool design and is really fun to fight.
Diminishing health. When you die your health bar shrinks. When you die a lot, the game just punishes you more. I get it, Dark Souls is suppose to be hard, but it's not difficult just to be difficult. Dark Souls 2 just wants to troll you without teaching you the best way forward.
I wasn't a huge fan of this, but I always had plenty of Human Effigies so it wasn't really a big deal.
No grinding allowed. In most Souls games you get stuck, you grind a bit, level up and you get through it. Not in DS2. Kill the enemy enough times and they just disappear.
I could be wrong on this, but I believe you can use an item to make enemies respawn.
Life gems. So you have like Zero estus and the healing animation is brutally slow. On top of this you have these shitty life gems that are supposed to help. But they heal you so slow you are dead before you get the advantage.
Man, I loved the Life Gems lol. Saved my ass more times than I can remember. If you just spam a few of them, they heal you at a really fast rate. Plus, the gems can make the runs to the boss fights easier, since you have this technically infinite supply of healing items separate from your Estus if you need to heal without losing some Estus charges. Life Gems are neat. If anything, they make the game too easy.
I don't know man, I really enjoyed DS2. I think it is a great game that, at times, surpasses the original. Like, there is nothing as bad as Lost Izalith in DS2 (maybe Frigid Outskirts, but that is a shorter, optional level) and the DLC areas in 2 surpass even the best areas from 1 for me. But, it is also a very different game (the game seems to be built around fighting multiple enemies, for instance, and you are expected to adapt to this change to be successful). I think that DS1 is held up on this pedestal, and when the sequel deviated from the original and tried to be its own thing, some fans were really disappointed. I'm not saying that DS2 is perfect, I just don't think the gulf in quality between the two games is not as large as some people make it out to be.
One more thing, I think one of the best ways that DS2 could be improved is teaching the player that lock-on is a tool that shouldn't be used for every fight. It's pretty understandable that so many players don't realize that using lock-on sometimes puts you at a disadvantage, when the game really does nothing to teach you this.