This is not actually a yes/no on recommendation I feel like I'm lingering on 5/10 just like the first one.
This game has some obvious improvements on battles, day/night system and they finally made the characters talk to each other at the end of the game but several issues dragged the score down:
1. Story: like the first, this has been another disappointment ... it's like they didn't bother finding better writers. Only Osvald and Throne has some interesting storylines, even if questionable (it's not that amazing either). While most of the other characters feels like it's written for idealistic children, the others some have very mature storylines.
2. Partitio: man what a cringe fest. If Alfyn and the apothecaries were questionable enough with their totally free healthcare it kind of takes away the realism of the world... how do they feed themselves or make a living? Now we have this numbnut over here claiming to be a merchant while spending too much to even earn a profit, and then gives away stuff for free. He's a socialist/communist. This unsustainable idiocy will bother anyone with common sense. I know this is a 'fantasy' game but c'mon.
3. Music: The bgms are actually good, my only complaint is that there's not a lot of good hits as the first. It's as if all the braincells of the great composer Yasunori Nishiki went to the first one and was just dragged into making another one for Squaresoft's profit. The problem with great artists is that most of them are spent already on their first masterpiece, I would argue that this is the case with movies as well and why there isn't a lot of good part 2's or even a trilogy (with some rare exceptions)
Everything else is fine... not great, just, most of them are skippable actually. Near the end of the storylines for all them I decided to skip over the rest since they are pretty much the same old lame story telling (power of friendship, etc). The secret jobs aren't as interesting, it looks like they were experimenting on this one.
I'd only recommend this game on a massive sale and probably just to pickup some of the bgm's.
