Dark souls 2 definitely isn't in the same category as any of the other souls games, other than maybe its DLCs, which are wonderful visually and in terms of level design and bosses, but suffer from a lot of the same issues the main game does in terms of enemy placement and mechanics, as well as lore.

Gameplay is debatable. The animations for rolling and movement in general are smoother, but feel slightly slower. Non-dlc bosses were close to the biggest letdown of the game for me, as only five of the 31 are genuinely well designed and only two of which are fun to fight. Most of any of the unique weapons or movesets from the first game are watered down to all hell. Non-dlc weapons are mostly reskins of others and only differ in scaling and elemental damages. Pretty much every area save for lost Bastille, the gutter and forest of the fallen giants(excluding dlc areas) are just a straight walk to the boss with some mobs to weave through, and item placement is counterproductive to building a PvP environment. What I mean by that is that most viable weapons or items for PvP are restricted to later game areas or would simply take an inconveniently long time to access compared to ds1 and DeS(e.g. Flynn's Ring, and most spells are late game). This stifles the "build variety" that people often credit DS2 for. I put build variety in quotes because I'm skeptical to distinguish ds2's build variety from that of ds1's. It didn't really improve anything besides giving dark magic its own class and streamlining the ember mechanics for easier elemental builds.

Covenants are just the bare bones versions of their ds1 counterparts with some pvp arenas and without any unique concepts for them like the Gravelord servants. The rat covenant is an absolutely gutted version of that concept.

The lore was my biggest disappointment with dark souls 2. I realize a majority of the people who play these games just want to kill tough monsters in cool looking areas, but the lore aspect of ds2 completely desregards the design philosophies of the previous games. Item descriptions are absolute garbage(being updated in SotFS) and only ever serve to make the story more vague, environmental narrative is thrown out the window completely. It rehashes dark souls 1's story concepts shamelessly, but without any of the uniquely conveyed or interestingly written NPC or character arcs that helped solidify it in the first place(like artorias, or quelana or laurentius or Gwyn), and justifies all of the events of the second game being rehashed with CYCLES. I get that cycles are a huge part of eastern mythology, but their application in the lore of dark souls is extremely lazy and I wish it was all rewritten or retconned. Even the couple of interesting new concepts they introduce aren't expanded on in any meaningful way. The daughters of Manus, or the fact that chaos is still growing, vendrick. They're all extremely underdeveloped and only leave room for theorycrafting.

Now the good thing about ds2 is it's huge. There's a shit ton of weapons and armor sets and spells and areas and bosses, but the number of any of those that are actually good, let alone on par with ds1 or DeS, is dwarfed by the mediocre or outright bad that there is. DS2 was my favorite game of last year, save maybe Bayonetta 2. So believe me, I don't have a hate boner for it, in fact I PvP'd regularly up until December on two different platforms. It's a good game, a fun game, but it just isn't at the same level of polish and thematic focus as any of the others, Bloodborne especially included.