After literally, 50 hours of gameplay, I have finally decided to write my overwhelming positive review of Lumines II.
The core gameplay has not changed at all, but the added content and crazy amounts of unlockables, gamers will have weeks upon months of endless eye burningly pretty puzzle cubes. The main changes are 1. Four difficulty levels, 2. Exponentially more skins to unlock, 3. Higher pixel counts on the blocks, 4. the wonderful edit skin mode (allowing you to choose the order of the skins you play, 5. Some licensed music, 6. Finally, there is a skin edit feature. All of these things were change I though would have made the original better.
All of the trippy colors, skins and songs are still intact and the gameplay has been smoothed out just slightly. The biggest improvement is the overall value of the package. With the first game I ended playing the same skins over and over again and it got boring much quicker than this version. This version tends to keep itself fresher for longer. Even if you don't use all of the options that it has, after seeing what it has to offer you at least feel like you have gotten your money's worth.
The battle mode is still kinda shaky but at least its there and some of the licensed music is pretty bad, that's about the only real problems with the game. I meant to write this review in September, but I found myself addicted to beating my high score and unlocking all the skins. So, 4 months later after finally exhausting myself of Lumines, I am sitting down to tell you not to worry about tracking down a copy of the first game (it's going for like $30 bucks on Ebay). Instead pick up a used copy of Lumines II (about 9 bucks) and you don't have to buy another PSP game for about 6 months.