Honestly what kind of bullshit is this.
I was saying that the "restart from beginning" isn't that big of a problem, because when you know the game, you can get yourself a pretty good weapon within 10 minutes of playtime and beat almost all the bosses without dying. I did that. There was not much time involved. However the first playthrough takes quite some time, but it trains you to get good at the game. When you change the playstyle (magic to melee for example), the game changes and you will have to learn some bits again to get good. Which means it makes sense to restart from the start.
Sure, you could level up the wrong specs and fuck up your game that way. You could also kill an important NPC in Demon's Souls and fuck it up as well. So? Is that a problem? It's what made those games great. Everything was permanent.
Not everyone has copious amounts of free time.
Oh god, not the "free time" argument.
If you don't have "coupious amounts of free time", then you probably don't have time to learn another playstyle or even learn the game at all. How is it even possible that you played through it 8 times without having plenty of time?
Dark Souls is definitely not the right game for people with not enough time on their hands. Without enough time, you won't be able to learn it and such players would probably also get angry about having to start from a bonfire everytime they die. Which means you could use exactly that argument to defend the implementation of checkpoints in front of boss rooms, having enemies to not respawn anymore, save states, no backtracking, respawning or even invulnerable NPCs, stopping invasions, invulnerability items as microtransactions ("gotta beat that game, got no time anymore to try again and get good") and all sorts of other things. Which means transforming an awesome game into another of the mass-appeal focus-tested it-will-take-20-hours-to-beat-this-game stuff that is out there.
Using your argument one could even defend the implementation of multiple save slots per character, because "I could fuck something up, which means I would have to restart again, got no time for that lol".
At least the required item seems to be rare in Dark Souls 2, but that's exactly how I imagine the franchise to get destroyed at some point.
Shouldn't you even argue that the item should not be rare? Because well, "can only respec once every playthrough, want to be able to respec all the time", right? And what about only having one chance to get back your souls? If you don't manage to get them back on first try, you will probably have to "waste" time to get them back by killing enemies/helping other players to kill bosses and so on - what a waste of time, why not keep them there forever, right?
Dark Souls even let you revive NPCs for a price. Just use your argument "takes too much time to get those souls", so why not make the NPCs invulnerable to save those people time? Or make it a microtransaction?