Karmelita is my favorite boss now, the soundtrack mixed with her moves makes it a "dance fight" like Grimm, but better. My only issue is the unnecessary gauntlet before the fight, it just seems mean spirited from the devs, it's not even hard, just a waste of time.
Lost Lace is my second favorite and Lace v2 is third. Lace is a really great fight. She really demands respect, and learning how to manually counter her parries is fucking great fun. As a character she was interesting but not as cool as Hornet was in HK. but if they do Lace as a MC in the next game I wouldn't complain.
Worst boss has to go to Broodmother, she couldn't even have the decency of being on the area on the first time you explore it, you gotta do a quest to fight what is literally dogshit. And Pinstress gets an dishonorable mention, she isn't as shallow, but she is awful to fight and has some broken ass hitboxes.
I really disliked the overuse of gauntlets, it make the world feel more artificial and gamey. Not only that, but almost all gauntlet arenas are the same rectangular box, with nothing else going for them. There was a lot more variety in the gauntlet arenas of HK.
Another thing I really didn't care for were the quests. I understand why they probably thought they were needed. Some of the bosses would be really retarded to find without a quest to point you back to a certain area, specially in act 3. But most quests are just bad, and a lot of them feel unnecessary. Literally none of the fetch quests, or grinding quest were good in any way. And the quest to trigger act 3 was just dumb.
My favorite area remains Greymoor, it's vibes are unmatched. Runner ups are Billewater and Blasted Steps for the oppressive but melancholic atmosphere.
Verdania got close, but I feel like it needed more content. It's a shame that all there is to this area are a bunch of boring orb-collecting, a bad boss fight, and a rematch against the dancers.
I think compared to HK this game lacked some combat-less areas, or more "wild" areas. For the original game, it was probably an issue of budget, but there were many areas that lacked any sort of "smart" enemies, and it felt like you were far away from civilization. Ancient Basin, Howling Cliffs, Kingdom's Edge, Fog Canyon. The only area like that in this game is Mount Fay. With infinite budget and time they probably thought it would be best for all areas to have some cool enemy, but it ended up hurting the atmosphere in a way. Even the areas that are completely "wild" still have some strong/annoying enemies to deal with. This issue also goes with the gauntlet thing. Almost all areas have a gauntlet with their specific enemies.
At first I found the Fleas less interesting than the Grubs and I think as a collectable they still are. I don't understand why Fleas don't make noise to warn you of some nearby, like the Grubs did. They are less rewarding to collect, since they don't give you money until the very end (in fact they ask for money to help you find the rest). But the payoff with the minigames was fucking great, I loved the Festival.
In fact I loved all the minigames and I wish there were more. And I also wish most of them weren't locked to the fucking endgame.
I know that there is a hit-the-target mini game in act 1 & 2 I missed that will show on the Marrow after a while, but I still think there could be more early on.
Last thought, this game is maybe too large? On replays it will probably be a lot shorter, but still, 60h is a bit too much. I was getting burned out by the end of act 3. I'll blame the quests here, they add a lot of mediocre filler time to the game that didn't need to be there.