Last Heroes is an ultra-generic but enjoyable RPG. In short, Last Heroes 2 is the same, but without the "but enjoyable" part.
Perhaps Warfare Studios thought it was a problem that players could complete Last Heroes in 4 hours. That's the only explanation I can think of for the design choices they made with this game. No longer can you avoid enemy encounters; they're still touch-based, but now most enemies move like jack rabbits, dungeons are loaded with passages that are too narrow to go around enemies, and even the "escape" option in battle has been disabled. So fast is their movement, often times you'll be swarmed by multiple enemy encounters as soon as you enter an area. It would be laughable if it didn't mean wading through far more battles than you need to get your characters up to decent levels.
Compounding the problem is the insane amount of backtracking through dungeons. Now, I'm actually a proponent of backtracking; it can add depth to the challenge of conquering a dungeon, and it's usually more realistic, because honestly, if you make your way to the deepest reaches of a cave that's miles deep, you're going to have to find your way back. But it is possible for backtracking to be excessive and contrived, and in Last Heroes 2 it definitely is. Not only do you have to make your way both in and out of every dungeon (except the last one), going through all the unavoidable enemies both ways due to respawning, but you're commonly asked to re-enter dungeons in order to complete side quests or even progress the main story. That means you have to go through some dungeons [i]four times[/i].
All that repetition and requisite random battling means that Last Heroes 2 takes 6 hours to complete. So the game is 2 hours longer than Last Heroes at the price of having about ten times the tedium.
The story also takes a dive. The plot of Last Heroes was "Fight the evil overlord for the items of power." Generic, but at least it gives you a reason to care. The plot of Last Heroes 2-4 is "Go from place to place asking if anyone knows where Amelia's mother is, occasionally fighting some cultist you met five seconds ago." I sympathize with wanting to find the mother you've never met, but there are no stakes. If you never find her mother, Amelia will still have everything she had before. And while Viper wasn't a hugely interesting villain, at least he had a tangible motive, a strong association with the player characters, and a well-defined threat. The final boss of Last Heroes 2 (and of 4, for that matter) is just some vaguely evil guy with vaguely evil intentions that he might follow through on some day.
Last Heroes 2 is still a completely functional RPG, but one that's a drag to play through and never offers any payoff for the time investment.
