Trollhoffer said:
To be absolutely fair, Dark Souls 1 only has the barest bones of a directed story -- the vast majority of the narrative meat is in the player's interpretations of what they observe in-game. I suspect a proper judgement can't be made until one is well into the game, far enough to have experienced enough content that lines begin to be drawn. The lore of both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls was a riddle with no true answer, and the story was nonlinear owing to its interpretive nature.
Basically, the best way to answer "is the lore or story good in Dark Souls 2?" is by measuring whether it asks you to interpret your observations or whether it serves literal lore up to you. The former is in character for the series and is where much of the praise comes from. That doesn't make the lore "good" in any of the games, but given the interpretive nature, players will tend to use interpretations that fall in line with their own tastes. But again, that takes time; any player needs both to experience content to contextualise the information provided, and to have to inclination towards interpretive lore in the first place.
In Dark Souls 1, by the same point, I had a relative idea of what to do, allegedly why I was doing it, and a vague direction of where to do it, and why I was an undead anyways. Not a damn clue who half these people were or anything, but the gist of some sort of narrative was established. In DS2, you're cursed, cause it says so. You go to Draegniaa, cause it said so. You must collect 4 mysterious souls, cause some chick of unestablished importance said so, to see the King, cause she told you to. Maybe it'll pick up in tonights session, but there's been no narrative hook, no indication of an objective given (I don't mean quest markers or anything, even a "Hey, you should seek the master of the caves") or established reason for why anything including my character is doing any of this. Also, unlike DS1, it hasn't even bothered to address the existence of the phantoms/other Hollow at all.
