Dark Souls One and Three Thread

Magic is massively OP if you build it right, especially if you take Manus down as early as possible - you can make a beeline for him immediately after O & S. Pursuers then utterly minces the rest of the game.

Vengeance.

That just means you started into the fortress with already quite some souls saved up. Never do that. Either buy some stuff or level up before heading into a new area.

Ah, yeah, that can happen. You do know where the bonfire is, though, right? Because it's a real bitch if you have to do the whole thing including the Golem in one run.

After a while in DS1 I started to just find it funny whenever I lost a lot of souls. The way the soul economy ramps up it doesn't matter that much in the end, and it's not like you're going to run out of things to kill for more if you really need to level at some point.

At that level. Pretty sure you can get 50k in a few minutes in the later parts of the game. The phalanx in the Painted World give more than 10k for example. O&S is 50k, 25k per kill if you help people with co-op. It hurts in the moment but mostly because you probably forgot to level when you should have, and in the long run you'll be okay as long as you keep progressing.

I just checked, it's only 7000. 500 each and 14 of them. Still pretty good and you can certainly get some good souls per minute by killing them. But they have shields, so you have to be able to dish out some serious damage and also be able to poise through their counterattacks to make it quick.

The crystal clams are also a good source, 1000 each and can kill all 6 in 2-3 minutes. Also you get lots of Twinkling Titanite this way.

But you have to kill Seath first of course.

7k per run without boosters. But it really is very fast.

I’d still play it if you’ve not done so before, there’s a lot of good stuff in there

Just doesn’t feel like a Dark Souls game

DS2 is my least favourite Soulsborne game which makes it 4.5/5 compared to the other games' 5/5 for me. So better then most else out there. As for your individual points:

1) Ice skates? I never felt that
2) Hit boxes. Absolutely not true other than a few very rare circumstances (Smelter Demon's slam attack for example). The wrongly infamous issue is actually the animation queuing that makes it look like the hit box was terrible. This mainly only occurs on grab attacks, in that an enemy does a grab move, you try to dodge, but poorly and are caught, the animation of your dodging completes making it looks as though you scraped by, then you are suddenly warped into the grab after your dodge animation is complete. It makes it look like you were sucked onto the grab but in fact you did originally fuck up, only the game failed to demonstrate how. Play well by not dodging into or close to a grab and you are fine.
3) Enemy placement- mostly decent with only a few notable issues e.g. Iron Keep's knights. DS2 is nowhere near as bad as Demon Ruins' terrible enemy placements.
4) World design - nothing compares to Dark Souls world design. Nothing
DS2 has the occasional glaring issue, but if you are not trying to compare to the first game you can really enjoy the choice of routes.
5) Lightning and atmosphere - the lighting hoo-hah was because the early demos had darkness being much...darker. Early players were very grumpy because they were LIED TO!!! Lightning is fine actually, and who really enjoyed Tomb of the Giants and wanted a whole game like it? Atmosphere is undeniably less good than Dark Souls which in turn was not as good as Demon's Souls. It's still pretty good in quite a few bits though.
6) Meh Bosses - the men bosses tend to die first or second attempt, while the good ones are worth facing. Luckily there is no required boss that is both shit and very difficult.

I recommend it, especially if you go in with an open mind.

I think a bunch of things combined in DS2 made it feel like a worse game to me.

* While it mostly looks a bit better from a technical standpoint it doesn't have the same strong visual design as DS1.

I just measured the time for a Darkwraiths run, and you can kill them all and be back at Firelink in 6 minutes with homeward, so it's 120k souls in an hour without boosters and ample chunks plus a small chance for a slab as well.

Almost done on my third and final run-through of DS3 (three damn endings). NG++ or whatever it is meant to be called was running smoothly until Soul of Cinder who's HP and attack power buff really made the job very hard. Some of his timings seem to deliberately be designed to catch me out more than any other boss in the series. Anyway he finally fell and we are back on track with a victory lap through the dlcs (something I didn't do on my second playthrough).
Midir is such a great boss, I went from being one hit killed within the first thirty seconds thinking that this might not be worth it, to beating him with confidence 30 mins at most later. All his moves are well telegraphed and it is just a case of remembering what to do each time. I had been lucky enough that he hadn't done his ultimate attack - you know, the one where he spazzes fire and laser over everything, and was praying he didn't do it,especially once he was down to the last sliver of health. Another 20 super tense seconds followed as he kept me sweating, but he made the mistake of roaring in my face and got a sword in his nose for his troubles. Such a great dragon battle.
Just Gael to go then that's it. I've given up on getting a Platinum for the first time for the FromSoftware games as the covenant item grinds are too much of a waste of life.