'It feels like you are moving underwater.." is exactly how I feel about Dark Souls 2. It feels like the world is in slow motion, its quite sluggish. Some might refer to this as 'methodical souls style game play'..no that is Dark Souls 1. In Dark Souls 2 devs either deliberately misunderstood this concept or decided to slow it down to an ungodly pace, and threw in animation cancelling.
I don't like comparing 1 and 2 any more though. The truth is, and it pains me to say this - they are completely different games, despite being in the same franchise. Perhaps that has something to do with it being made by different people, or furthermore..different people without much of a clue (not saying this is a fact.) 1 is not slow, nor has it aged badly, it is not slow because it is dated either. It's an incredibly fast game(Yes Bloodborne is faster), with a spectrum of play styles that reflect a certain pace and preference. Often times temporary players will base their impressions on extremely narrow and limited experiences with their choices.
2 does some things well, which is impressive in itself, but it really did nothing better. It did some things worse, and did a lot differently. Not differently like Bloodborne - where its clearly a game made from the same assets, with a twist on traditional souls game play.
Dark Souls 2 was a new different game. All I wanted was the same devs to update Dark Souls 1, make some tweaks, give us a new game. That didn't happen. New dev's came in, possibly without guidance and made a completely different game "if so they did an incredible job." People will love or hate it. It has great build variety and the multi-player in sotfs is pretty wild with the higher player count. I still host fight clubs occasionally. However things like soul memory contradict the value of build variety and I honestly felt that combat did not meet the standard of the prior game. Outside of back stabs, and arguably poise.
DLC is much better than the base game, thankfully. By the looks of Dark Souls 3,it looks like 2 will end up sticking out like a sore thumb. Not because of its quality but because its nothing like the other games, except on the surface to a degree.