I've still got a couple to clear off my backlog.
I've finished Bloodborne and Sekiro multiple times, have finished Demon's Souls once, and we're on our second playthrough of Elden Ring. I have not really played any of the Dark Souls, however.
DS1 was actually the first one I've ever played after watching PewDiePie play the game (holy shit, this was ages ago). I didn't really get the game and I didn't know what a soulslike is yet, so I dropped the game quite quickly after killing the Taurus Demon.
Fast forward to a couple years ago, I bought the DS collection for PS4 and started a playthrough of DS1 and DS3 which I've both played a couple hours of but then dropped again because I preferred the other FS games.
I would really like to play DS2 sometime soon, however. I want to know if the game is really as bad as people make it out to be or if it's just hyperbole.
Dark Souls 2 was made by a different team than the other souls games, so it's kind of like somebody else's take on the formula, in a way.
It introduced a bunch of stuff that wasn't (and in some cases still aren't) in the others.
I played it when it first came out and loved it. Played the DLCs, loved them, and then again when the Scholar of the First Sin edition came out.
The latter is definitely what you should play if you liked the others.
It's really not the same thing as the original release, oddly. It also includes the three absolutely phenomenal DLCs as well.