An overall massive improvement from the first game, this one has solid gameplay, very fun story and LOTS and LOTS of beautiful artwork, the soundtrack is also great, if you liked the first game this is a must play.

The character development is really neat and getting to learn about Shama's past was very interesting.

Sub-characters and engravings feel so good to use, they quickly become the most powerful part of your toolkit and being able to use 5 engravings at once is really cool and also really broken (but it's fun so it doesn't matter).

One thing I have to say is that the translation isn't perfect, it has lots of little issues and typos, sometimes the automatic text goes by unreasonably fast, making it impossible to read. Another issue that I had is that the nightmare difficulty is pretty much meaningless if you use the guardian owls, they're too plentiful and too powerful, I'd suggest not allowing their use (at least during boss fights, I think that being able to use them on stages is fine) on nightmare difficulty, I finished the game with 50 of them in my bag and I never bought one from a merchant, if I did I'd easily be able to have over 100 of them, another possible solution would be to severely limit the maximum amount the played can hold on nightmare difficulty, like 1 or 2 max would work well I think.

I wish it had a CG collection or an artbook (I can imagine that an artbook would be a lot of work but I think a CG Gallery wouldn't be too hard and it'd be a great addition, all the artwork in this game is superb).

As with the first game, this is a very dialogue-heavy game but this one has a pretty good gameplay/dialogue ratio, the pacing gets slower at certain chapters but it usually doesn't last too long before you get back to playing.

It does end in a cliffhanger so until we get another game the story is not over yet and you might feel a little unsatisfied with the ending, I know I did. Even so this is very much worth playing, it's a very unique experience and it deserves more recognition!