>finally have your setup and gear nearing completion, higher chance you will be using some cool unique gear or trick, or a bigger variety of cool spells
>much more cool armors
>starting to feel like youve gotten good at the world and pressing buttons
>revisiting early areas during your first playthrough and finding stuff you missed before with much more ease
>firelink shrine has probably grown a lot into you
>a bunch of cool more 'action-ey' or 'deadly enemy' bosses like four kings
>painted world
>new londo ruins
>catacombs
>the DLC
>the comfort of knowing you just finished the archives area and will never have to unwillingly enter there again
>the area has issues and BoC sucks, but demon ruins/lost izalith is the most over-hated shit ever
>npc quest conclusions
>the pauses in firelink shrine become less about thinking of the future and more about all the shit youve been through, and then the final moment there right after you get the last lord soul
>kiln of the first flame
The second half of DS1 is kino, that claim always came across as someone who gets their opinions from parroting internet bandwagonning, rather than playing the game blindly and having their own unique experience with it
Its like getting stuck on half-truths like "It drops the interconnection and world design" (which has some degree of truth, but not only it literally starts at anor londo, it also does not apply for a huge chunk of the first half which is the very beginning of the game if you dont have the master key) and being too dull to see everything else, quite possibly because they completely robbed themselves out of playing the experience, be it by knowing everything that was about to come up, or just not coming to the game with an unbiased POV and just actively trying to see whatever they were told to see on the internet~