The long awaited volume 2 is finally here!
First off the story of this game continues right where it left off from volume 1, so playing volume 1 is a must if you want to get the best experience from the story. This time around the story starts to get a little more dramatic, this volume feels a lot more emotional, as you will begin to learn more about the characters real life selves in this game, also you start to learn more about each of the characters reasons for playing the world and what their true intentions are.
What makes it good is that it adds a lot more depth to the story, as you discover more and more about each of the characters in the World, It intrigues you to keep playing. The bad is that some of these plot twists can feel overly corny, since they tend to mimic every other rpg/anime series out there. While it is well done its not exactly original.
Next up is the gameplay. If you played volume 1 you should know what to expect, but what is really nice this time around is while the core gameplay is still the same they made a number of surprising tweaks that help add to having a more enjoyable playing experience.
while exploring areas they have nice little additions like dots on the map to help you keep track of where you came from since after battles and such you might forget which way you was heading. Also, Your party members will now aid in chim gathering by kicking them which is a godsend since it greatly reduces the time and tedium of running around gathering chims yourself. Finally they added a couple radars to the game which help you find out what animals/players are in the area which is extremely nice when trying to complete the many gathering side quests this game has.
They also tweaked the combat. weapon animations are slightly faster and they re-did the twin blade animation, making the twin blades far more effective then they were in Vol. 1. They also made charge attacks slightly more useful this time around as they felt extremely useless in the vol. 1. Probably the biggest combat addition is of course a new weapon the scythe which has a huge hit range and is useful in fighting multiple enemies at once, and the weapon switch trigger, which lets you equip skills on to your skill trigger for any of the weapons you have and when you use the skill trigger you will switch to the weapon for the skill you used, this allows you to change up your combat tactics faster and easier then using the menus. They also added a new awakening called divine awakening which has you playing a quick simple button pressing minigame that will determine the power of the attack, which is then shown in a over the top cutscene while it is really cool to look at, it will start to get old after a while and it just completely breaks up the momentum of combat, I find myself skipping the cutscene altogether most of the time, or just avoiding the awakening altogether.
While they added a number of improvements, the combat still lacks any real depth, all battles will still just consist of mashing the X button and using skill triggers, which can get quite repetitive after a while, also this game lacks any real difficulty, so winning battles doesn't really feel that rewarding.
Graphics are like a double edged sword in this game, The character models are extremely nice and some of the graphical effects and such are nice to look at and the game is presented in a well done fashion, but on the other hand the level designs are horrid. This game probably has some of the worst level design I have ever seen. all of the areas are flat and boring, you just run room to room until you make it to the end, and they try to add things like trap rooms and locked doors, but the trap rooms are literally a joke you can just run straight through them without any challenge, and most of the time I will just run through them and take the damage without a care, because the penalty for hitting a trap isn't even that bad. It also doesn't help that they only have 6 different area types (aside from unique areas) and only 3 of them are new to volume 2, so the previous ones in volume 1 will still be as boring as ever and the 3 new ones will wear thin by the end of the journey. Probably the best thing in this game is the music and voices. I think the music is extremely well done, I find myself going to places just to listen to a specific soundtrack, and the voice acting is top notch most of the minor characters have pretty poor delivery, but all of the major characters have nice voices that match them perfectly and they all just sound great. The sound effects on the other hand are somewhat cheesy, with fairly simple sounds and the lame bullet ricochet sound effect that seems to be extremely overused in this game.
Their are still other new and improved additions I won't go over, but In the end this game is a great game, I reccomend it to any rpg fan, its not really trying to do anything extremely new, but its a very solid game, everything is presented nicely and its really easy for anyone to pick up to play, with its easy to follow story, and balanced difficulty that allows players of all skill level to play through and enjoy the story without any frustration.