I'm 60 hours in. I'd played 50 hours after about 10 days! Well worth getting imported, let alone waiting for the US release. I've been playing as a knight, as I always tend to do with these sorts of games, and the melee combat is as good as I've played in an RPG. It's a shame so little is done with the story really (and that most of the voiceovers, while all English, are hardly skilled actors), otherwise this'd be a comfortable 10.
The enemies and environments lend to an overbearing, suffocating sense of dread and gravitas. Your character feels mortal, partly because of the quality of the animation (for example, there is a separate, subtly more cumbersome walking animation for when you are heavily equipped), partly because you drop your souls at the point where you died, and partly because your human form is precious. If you die and become a soul you only have half your hit points, and the world in which you died shifts towards a blacker tendency, meaning enemies are harder and more numerous.
Combined with a black phantom (another player looking to kill you so they can be brought back to life from the soul form) being able to invade your game at any time to hunt you down, this is probably scarier than most horrors I've played of late. Thankfully you (the human you) can invite blue phantoms into your world, other players who offer their services to help you up to the point of defeating the next boss. Once this happens, they are rewarded by being brought back to human status and are given some souls based on how you rate their performance.
As it is, I'd heartily recommend it to anyone who thinks they'd have the stomach for working their way past respawned enemies to go and reclaim the souls they dropped at the point where they died - which doesn't really feel like a chore, as refighting the enemies with that extra knowledge you picked up the previous time makes the next battle that much easier and more satisfying. It's very much like working through an 80's montage to come out meaner and tougher at the end. There's nothing tiring about a successful parry and lethal riposte either.
To think, I've barely touched the magic besides a couple of protection / weapon enhancing spells. I'm decent with a bow but I've not really gone down that route so much, and I've started doing up some of the other weapons but I've got rapiers, spears, rods, maces, axes, katana and hand-to-hand weapons which I haven't got accustomed to at all.
There's a lot of game here. Yes it's a tough and cunning bastard but it's always fair, and you'll always want to improve.