I have just discovered A New Thing in Dark Souls II that I can't resist sharing.

Remember good old rolling through and whacking illusory walls in Dark Souls? Well, there are the Pharros' Lockstones walls which can still be rolled through or hit, but in addition there is now ANOTHER KIND OF ILLUSORY WALL.

I just discovered one in The Lost Bastille. Just a completely inconspicuous area of wall and it's illusory. But you can't roll through or whack it. You have to press X! And no, there is no button prompt. And then you go into a dead end hallway where another totally inconspicuous part of wall opens the same way. I got access to a previously inaccessible section of rooftop and a ring that could be useful.

Lesson: if you see a message that says there's an illusory wall but you hit the wall there and nothing happens try walking up to it and pressing X.

From Software: Troll Masters Of The Entire Universe.

EDIT: Botch, have you un-petrified the guy in The Lost Bastille yet? Straid of Olaphis is his name. I just realized he sounds exactly like Frampt. PRIMORDIAL SERPENT IN MAN BODY. OH NOES!

EDIT 2: One thing I like so far: there is a merchant to whom you can sell items (Frampt-style), and another (Straid actually) who you can simply trade a boss soul to get a boss weapon/shield/etc. No more having to do random shit like upgrading a Broken Straight Sword to +3 so you can get some Artorias sword. You have the boss soul, you can "trade" it to Straid to get any items it makes. This is the kind of simplification I appreciate. There was no need for the bizarre boss weapon upgrade guessing game of Dark Souls.

EDIT 3: Side note: I am already a max-level Sunbro. Got 30 Sunlight Medals yesterday and the day before, cashed them in, same reward system as in Dark Souls. Get a shield at 10 Medals, sword at 20 and Sunlight Spear miracle at 30. Now when I try to offer Sunlight Medals to the Sunlight Altar it simply tells me nah, we're good; you're a Sunbro for life, go relax, have an Estus. Your work is done, sir.

Sun. Bro. Champion.

Some crucial information I learned yesterday from experience: rings that break can be repaired. Dks2's equivalent of the Ring of Sacrifice can be repaired for 3,000 souls. I feel like this is a fair compromise.

Same, as far as leveling goes. I've heard there are more bosses than the first game, so it's probably longer if you take all the optional paths. I'm level 85 and feel like I'm in the middle.

Folks: I hate to be the bearer of bad news but Dark Souls II has a Blighttown. It is called, appropriately, The Gutter. You probably won't get there until you've thoroughly scoured the Harvest Valley and Earthen Peak. If you've been playing for a while now and have thought well, there doesn't seem to be any terrible poison places! ...just you wait. The Gutter / Black Gulch is poison fucking hell. I'm dying constantly there. Which I like.

I seem like I've hit that mid-game question mark. Like do I push onward or grind for souls/items/levels? My instinct is to grind to learn the areas, and why not, it's fun!

I have learned a game-changing piece of information on the fextralife wiki forums. Game-changing if you'll be a long-term DKS2 player. Bonfire Ascetics, the items you can burn at bonfires which claim to increase the challenge, do just that. But I've learned the way in which they do it: they propel whatever bonfire's area you burn it at to NG+ essentially. That means all enemies will respawn (and have NG+ attributes), and this time around you won't be picking up new items. Apparently in NG+ you will get different drops from bosses (such as +2 rings, instead of the normal or +1 you can get in your first game) and regular enemies will drop NG+ stuff as well (which is apparently different). Thread here: http://fextralife.com/forums/t26995/best-item-bonfire-ascetic/

Also, you can burn an ascetic multiple times in one bonfire. I'm not sure if there's a limit. The key to creating an unending cycle is to find an area which has a Bonfire Ascetic as a static item pickup and just keep rinsing and repeating if you want to reset that area. I'm not sure how many Ascetics can be obtained in one game (without using any to reset an area) but someone in that thread claims to have about 25 of them. I have just two at this point. One was a pickup (I forget where from) and one I bought from a vendor in the Harvest Valley. For an idea of my progress, I've killed 12 bosses.

I have honestly not been using the wiki except to look at the covenant pages; I've been learning a lot of secrets simply from reading the messages I see. They have legitimately helped me with my chances from finding hidden items to boss fights.

Botch, what model of PS3 do you have? I thought they were all created equally...but perhaps not. I agree that some of the shadows are janky, but I haven't had a single performance issue. The game is not only a solid 30fps everywhere, sometimes it seems to go beyond that into weird giant-TV-high-refresh-rate mode like Infamous 1 did. I have a Slim 120 GB model. No performance nitpicking really.

I'm enjoying the game immensely (obvious, maybe?) but it is ... different from Dark Souls. As in it seems less concerned with shepherding the player through a relatively linear path of despair (Gargoyles > Capra > Depths > Blight > Sen's > Anor Londo) and more with creating an even sort of pacing. No one area has upped the ante from the previous quite like we saw with the Lower Burg to the Depths to Blighttown, or the Parish/Blighttown to Sen's to Anor Londo. They get harder in different ways for certain (the lengths to which Black Gulch goes to keep you poisoned, for example) but it is perhaps not as observable as in DKS1.

I think the biggest complaint I can level against it at this point is that the whole world doesn't seem to be bound together as a convincing, cohesive whole, like Dark Souls was. Obviously we all have more experience with the first game and so can picture every area that much easier but I don't think there was ever a place where you felt like you were just in a video game and had "warped" to the next level. At the top of the Undead Parish you could look down upon Firelink Shrine and even the pit of Blighttown. And from almost anywhere you could look up at the great wall of Anor Londo. Dark Souls II, from what I've seen so far at least, has failed to achieve this scope. When I leave the Huntsman's Copse and climb to the top of the Earthen Peak I can't see any area I've traversed before; just poison, fog and marshes. I can't see that spire in the distance that you can see from Majula, I can't see the sunken remains of Heide's Tower of Flame in the distance ... I just see the Harvest Valley below. Don't get me wrong, it's disappointment of the smallest kind, but it's still worth comparing, since Dark Souls the First was incredible impressive when it came to this.

Have any of you found a Fragrant Branch of Yore yet? When you do post here and I can suggest where you use your first one based on what you're looking for!

EDIT: Steerpike, definitely do Heide's Tower next. It will unlock basically your alternate path through the early game, so it's a good idea. The non-optional boss there also isn't that hard. I soloed him.