Aaand I beat the game. Took me only about 100 hours.
That, in just under 3 weeks. I'm actually really impressed with myself -- usually I think of a 100+ hour game as the kind of thing that would consume months of my life. Then again, I did very little else during these past 3 weeks
but play Dark Souls.
The bit about
time looping was not obvious at all. If Giji had not told me, I wouldn't have guessed that my loopage was actually in-universe at all. To me it looks no different from any typical NG+. There's been no acknowledgement thus far that time has looped, for example.
Also, I got the wrong ending from what I wanted, because I forgot that the game expected me to do something in particular. Wasn't there like a thing you're supposed to light in order to get the "good" ending? I totally forgot about that and for lack of any other obvious thing to do figured the game just wanted me to walk back the way I came.
I'm not sure the game is worth another run-through. Especially not with the same character. I was honestly not expecting when I went in the first time that I'd have to play over again with the exact same character and build with all my stats and levels so that ironically really wrecks the replay value, because I would rather see what it's like to start over from scratch playing a completely different build. Yes, obviously I can do that if I wish, but because the NG+ is there and I also would rather not throw away what it's letting me keep, I'm left in that kind of quandry which makes me wonder if there's any point to another playthrough of either sort anyway and I'm not sure I see it.
Well, not with NG+ at least, I can totally see myself doing it over again as a Dex-based fighter or a mage to see how completely different those would be, because I've no doubt they are.Is there any, like,
real end to the game? Like a secret true ending that truly ends it all and you get a big shiny "you win" screen and then it's over? Or are you expected to just keep NG-plussing over and over again until you get sick of it? Because if all that's ahead of me is an endless treadmill of the same bosses and challenges but this time maybe with larger health bars and damage dealouts, I'm not interested.
EDIT:
I went and checked out what NG+ actually does on a Dark Souls wiki. Turns out the highest difficulty is actually NG+6, not NG+7. It is a common misconception that NG+7 is the highest. After NG+6, further NG+ games do not increase in difficulty. Also, the biggest jump is from NG to NG+; the entire gap between NG+ and NG+6 is only a 25% increase in things like enemy HP.
Also, looking through the wiki, man, I missed a lot of this game because its no-backsies nature made me so fearful to try anything too radical
. And stuff I just didn't want to bother with because I'd already sunk so many hours in and just wanted to get to the end. Maybe after a nice long break I'll come back to this after all and start over with a new build and play differently but this time hopefully going much faster because of my prior experience.
EDIT 2:
Hm, I should really go to bed but I have some more things to say about my experience with the game.
I am not bragging when I say that the game was actually much easier and less harsh than I expected. I think a lot of it has to do with expectations -- the way I'd heard the game described had me imagining a level of harshness that would have been infeasible for a 100+ hour game. In truth, the game was clearly designed around its mechanics for which it is known as harsh, and that actually made it not really all that harsh. For example, no soul loss that I experienced ever represented that big of an actual loss; I have read people saying things like "That feeling when you lose hours and hours of work" but that's just sheer stupidity to spend hours and hours building up souls without doing anything with them. Even when you do lose a large amount of souls, the output from enemies scales up as you go along so whatever amount you lost represents something you can make up for later in the game very quickly. Furthermore, even a large soul loss typically represents very little in terms of actual growth -- even if you lost enough for two level-ups, two extra points on your stats don't mean very much anyway, and mean
less the further along you go (because the increases never change except to
go down) even as they get more expensive. By the end of my game it took me 50,000 souls to increase my Strength by a single point and only every other point caused any increase in damage (I think).
I think maybe I also guessed right/lucked out with my build. Most bosses were shockingly easy because I invested so much into my armor and raw damage-dealing capacity. I had this aesthetic sense that the Dark Souls world would be the kind of brutish world where sheer brute power is more valuable than finesse or skill, so with that mood in mind I focused on upping Strength and judging weapons almost entirely by their power or defense number, and it paid off so well that the only boss which truly tested me was the double-team. I collected a lot of spells but the only one I ever used was the Heal miracle, which I used whenever I wanted to save on Estus and had the time to use the slower miracle instead. Naturally, I felt like I missed out on a lot of the game as a result of collecting so many spells and armors and things and then never using them (admittedly I didn't even figure out how to
use magic till fairly close to the end
), but man did I have fun with what I was using (melee weapons).
Furthermore, he does not revive NPCs, only absolves you of the sin of killing them, which would have de-aggroed the NPC if I hadn't killed her. 
I know how I react to things, and I know I would have gone "Whoa, cooool!" finding that out in the right moment the way the game intended. They call 'em spoilers for a reason. Furthermore it seemed entirely unnecessary for you to spoil that in order to answer my question. In fact, one could cut out the entire first paragraph of what you said without any loss except for the removal of the spoiler.