Brilliant. I loved it. I recommend FC and this with every fiber of my being. Some pros and cons:
PROS:
This engine can be so expressive. I love this engine. The cutscenes and animations are soooo goooood. The amount of dialogue in this game is, again, astounding. Compared to the first, there's a lot more character switching and freedom to play with the characters you like. The story is fantastic again and the music is fantastic (except for one track, and you'll know it when you hear it). The new 'tilesets' and 'sprites' and abilities and animations are all awesome.
MIXED:
Mostly the same Liberl map from the first game with a handful of new areas. Some new areas feel empty, some are great. Combat is much harder on normal difficulty—sometimes this is fine and is a welcome challenge, sometimes it's because of annoying enemy behavior, debuffs, abilities, etc. Switching characters freely means missing dialogue for the characters you don't have with you, which feels bad at times, but it's amazing that all of those characters have unique dialogue in case they're in the party.
CONS:
Some of SC feels lower effort than FC. There are infrequent typos in dialogues (still more than the zero I noticed in FC). In FC, every NPC had a name; in SC, new NPCs have names like "citizen" and "passenger." I wouldn't expect any game to name every NPC, but after coming from the awe of that exact thing in FC to SC's generic names, it's a con. The constant switching of characters means the constant manual shuffling of your best gear and quartz, which is a chore. Enemies (even basic, wandering mobs) frequently have annoying abilities/stats (many healing enemies, impedes, dodge rate, etc.) that make some combat a drag.
Very minor spoilers to follow. I wish I had known this before I started, but I'm spoilering it so that you can dodge it if you prefer.
Early in the game, you are offered the choice to pick whether you want to travel with [spoiler]Schera or Agate for the first 1/3 of the game. I picked Schera, thinking Estelle would likely choose to travel with her mentor. While that may be true in my head canon, I feel like this story would've been better served with Agate. Almost everywhere you go during this period, Agate went in FC and Schera hadn't been. Schera's dialogues are all "Oh, I wasn't here." or "I heard about that!" which sucks. I don't know what Agate's dialogues are during this portion, but I feel like he would've been more involved. DO NOT PICK SCHERA for your first playthrough, in my opinion. Thankfully, after this first 1/3 of the game is over, Schera's dialogues are a lot more enjoyable.[/spoiler]
I loved this game (and its prequel) and am going to continue my trek through the series after I digest this one properly.
