Demon's/Dark Souls and Monster Hunter fan here. How much worse is this? In other words, how good is it?
Not a big MonHun fan, from my time with that series I'd easily take Dragon's Dogma.
It's more classic fantasy aesthetic design than Demon's/Dark Souls but I wouldn't say it's worse from a visual standpoint. All your fantasy trope monsters (dragons, chimeras, griffons, etc.) are in their best looking renditions to date here. The world is a touch bland overall but to me it only makes the awesomeness of your leveled up Arisen and the monsters he's fighting stand out and look that much more awesome.
I wouldn't call the combat worse than Souls, but it's far less technical. The Souls games are basically risky choices = death while Dragon's Dogma is the exact opposite. Its what Bioware should have been shooting for when they said "we want you to push a button and have something awesome happen" with Dragon's Age 2. For example, even if you could climb a boss in a Souls game who the hell would knowing they can swat/shake you off then stomp on you and kill your dumb ass? In Dragon's Dogma there is a very real risk that when you try something like that you will die, but at the same time there is a huge reward when you do it right.
Case in point, I fought my first griffon yesterday afternoon. I was just topping off my Magick Archer class and so I quickly found a rock outcrop to mount and rain arrows down on the beast while my pawn (warrior) and an extra hireling (fighter) wailed on it when I knocked it out of the sky. The griffon apparently got wise to my strategy and went to pick off my healer, standing next to the base of my perch. As it took off in a low angled ascent away from my party I broke into a dash across the outcrop and did a double jump that had me just barely grab it's hind leg. Given that I had the dexterity ability already set I quickly climbed up between it's wings and let go with a flurry of blows with my flaming daggers. The beast was stunned and went hurtling into the ground about 20-30 feet below us. Given that I also have a perk to minimize falling damage I wasn't particularly harmed, though my mage was near dead and beat a quick retreat. Meanwhile I remained on top of the downed beast slashing and burning into it's backside while it was still reeling from the crash landing. In no time my other two pawns had joined me and we made quick work of the defenseless griffon.
Not only did I save my mage from death had the griffon gotten much higher before dropping her, my act also directly resulted in serious damage to it when it fell from the sky and it's prone state turned the dangerous 1:1 exchange we had been having into simple butchery.
It's like playing a QT event from God of War or similar only instead of just "press X - awesome happens" it's "awesome happens when you make it happen."
The class system is very solid, all classes feel well balanced and have their own unique skills that change how you approach every fight. The equipment system offers a wide variety of customization as well. Lots of cool LOOT to be had. The world is of a good size and is open in the same way that Kingdoms of Amalur is open. Not as big and broad as a Bethesda game by any means. That's probably a good thing because a large portion of your first play through won't offer any kind of cost effective fast travel to use. So you do a LOT of walking.
Pawn AI is surprisingly solid. So is enemy AI. Storyline so far for me has been ok but mostly forgettable. Not the main draw at all.
For anyone who likes the Souls games based on the concept of involved real time combat in an RPG owes it to themselves to try DD. Between the Souls games, Kingdoms of Amalur, and DD I really hope that Bethesda is taking notes on how to do great combat in RPGs, as their combat in Skyrim is looking quite dated and mundane at this point compared to it's peers.
