These are some random thoughts after playing for an two or three hours
I'm pretty sure I spend at least an hour - if not more - on the character creation screen. Holy shit do they give you a lot of options. Yet, it still seems impossible to make a good looking male character. I went with a female.
I decided to start as a Swordsman (or should I say, Swordswoman?) I played through the first Dark Souls with a melee focused character, so I while I didn't necessarily want to go in the complete opposite direction of that, with say, with a magic user, I still wanted a change of pace nonetheless. As so much of my Dark Souls strategy was seemingly predicated on attacking, then blocking with my shield, that I thought that playing as a class that didn't have a shield in their starting inventory would be interesting.
I avoided all the fog gates on the way to Majula, because if I've learned anything from Dark Souls, it that's badness tends to lie beyond fog gates. But actually, they were just tutorial areas this time. Whatever.
I got killed - twice! - by the first proper enemy I encountered. Some kind of poison zombie. Somehow, being killed within my first encounter made me happy. It felt familiar, to say the least.
In Majula, I got attacked by some small creatures - used up two or three lifegems trying to defeat them. I learned that the left trigger tends to attack lower targets, while the right trigger attacks higher targets. Now I know!
In short - I've enjoyed the time I've spent with this game so far. It feels like pretty much everything I wanted or expected from a Dark Souls sequel.