Dark Souls 2.
I like that the combat makes the weapons and armour feel like they have weight to them. You're not moving like some anime crackhouse but when you swing your sword you're committing to it. It may be clunky, but fuck it, I like it. It also has the highest replayabiltiy of all the Souls games just from the sheer number of builds you can do and how easy it is to run a playthrough of. If you hate certain portions of the game you can either entirely ignore them or fast track through them to get to where you want.
Story/lorewise, I think it's actually pretty good. The implication is that you're in a world that takes place hundreds of years or so after DS1 and because the world goes through this constant up-and-down cataclysmic struggle, nobody has time or care to keep much record of history and as such a place or person that seems familiar to the player is barely acknowledged by the game because time has moved on. Think about Ornstein in DS1 vs. DS2. In DS1 he has a name and proper title and everything. In DS2 he's just "The Old Dragonslayer" and is never even called Ornstein directly, but is given a slight nod to being reminiscent of an old legend. I like that nothing in DS1 really mattered or amounted to anything but completing a cycle, and it's the same thing in DS2. You don't link fires or any of that to inspire hope, you sit and wait for the corruption of the land to consume you. This would've been way better conveyed if they could get the lighting engine and necessity of using the torch more prominently to work like they originally hoped. It also doesn't fall into the whole, "hype up some king, eventually have an epic clash with the king." You go through all this trouble to find him, going through his castle, beating his two best sworn knights, and then you get greeted by him completely hollowed out and barely functional. He's not some great force that serves as a final climatic challenge, he's a shambling piece of undead trash that wanders aimlessly in his tomb.
Now if you're into epic and grand stuff, I can see why DS2 would be a big "fuck this game" but the fact it's such an unapologetic subversion of expectations is why it's a breath of fresh air -- especially in retrospect now that DS3 has been released and did barely anything fresh from a narrative standpoint. DS2 has the ugliest areas with some annoying obstacles in your way. You're thrown into a world that through an endless repeating of being torn asunder you're experiencing the absolute nadir of it. You still see flickers of greatness such as Heide's Tower and moments of opulence like Drangleic Castle that suggest that civilization once thrived here, but it's also surrounded by a lot of catastrophes and other devastation which makes the rest of the land look like hell and sells you that it's only a matter of time before everything else crumbles.
There are still flaws with the game and some design philosophies that were stupid but overall it's the one that dares to stand on its own and not repeat the same song like DS3 did.
Also, I'm going to commit heresy that will piss off a lot of people but I found the Looking Glass Knight fight to be way more enjoyable and fucking awesome than Artorias. I love that the area you fight has a thunderstorm going on that he's using as a conduit to empower his attacks and that with how awful the place looks compared to the rest of the castle he's clearly been fucking up guys for a good long while. But I'm more into environmental storytelling than, "This guy has a HUGE dick, you should be scared" that Artorias had associated with him.