Yeah, sad to say but there were a couple of issues I had with Dark Souls II myself. The level design was definitely one of them, along with the "stop respawning" thing. I get that it was to stop people from farming, but they had already added the Soul Memory mechanic for PvP, so I don't understand what would've been so terrible about letting people farm.
But on the whole level design issue, I feel like the fact that everything was spread out more felt like you had more of a journey that you actually went through. I feel as though that took away from the Dark Souls setting though, how everything was close together but felt so far away because of the trials you had to go through. Also, because they put everything so ridiculously far away from each other, fast travel was basically used constantly, which was something you had to gain in Dark Souls 1.
Another gripe is that every weapon only has 10 attacks. There were a couple of weapons in DkS1 that had more animations than others, and I wish that that had transferred over. As is, you can expect every weapon to have two regular swings, two strong attacks, and then two/two for two-handing it, and then two more attacks if you do a running attack, depending on how many hands you're using (I suppose there's more if you include rolling attacks, but those always seem such a waste). I feel like it sort of made combat more limited than it used to be.
I think the ending lacked a little; it just didn't feel as strong as DkS1.
Good things about the game include having ridiculously fast PvP times, no more of this "well you might be getting invaded, you might not," thing. Combat's still fun even though it feels more limited. Miracles and casting are much more valid options than they used to be, they used to be limited to buffing or high level casting (or WotG). Still a fun first playthrough. There are PvE covenants for once, and every rank of everything actually has a reward (Poor Gravelords). Boss designs were pretty fun, albeit much easier than the first.
All in all, I think they nailed Covenants and PvP (although hexes need to be nerfed somethin' awful), could've spent more time into world/boss design, and could've probably toned down the overworld being so hard while making them always respawn. Also maybe add a little bit to the weapons so I had more things to play with.