izigame.me

Overall, an enjoyable experience for fans of the genre. I wanna mention two major flaws that I think all new players should be aware of:
- Firstly, you should play the first game before playing this one. This might not seem like a "flaw" because it's meant to be a sequel, but I'm mentioning it because the store page description specifically encourages new players to jump straight into this one, despite the fact that huge chunks of the story and dialogue will make little sense to you. But the first game is short and enjoyable, so just go play that first!
- Secondly, you should enable the fast dialogue option. The pacing of dialogue is almost unbearable otherwise. There's a negative review that has talked more in-depth about this. It's great that they added a fast dialogue option, because frankly I don't think I would have finished the game otherwise. A huge design mistake that could easily have ruined the game.
The writing is good, but it does have issues. It has some genuinely nice, heartfelt moments, and a few memorable characters, but it also has some cliche, eye-roll moments and many of its attempts at humour just fell totally flat for me and felt quite forced. There is one plot point in particular, towards the end of the game, that left quite a bad taste in my mouth (big spoiler: Thief's death being undone in a way that barely impacts the rest of the story). But overall, the plot, settings and themes were mostly handled quite well, and I found myself endeared to a lot of the characters.
The visuals are very well done given the self-imposed constraints. Settings feel unique, characters have personality, and a particular highlight is the enemies in combat which all look awesome. Not much more to be said here.
The music sometimes feels a bit generic and forgettable, but the soundtrack has several awesome tracks that'll get stuck in your head. Again, like the visuals, there are self-imposed constraints due to the aesthetic, but I think the music does quite well despite them. The sound design is very good.
The combat is generally enjoyable and well balanced, and doesn't have too many moments that felt unfair. There is a bit too much reliance on RNG for my liking (for example, Blind can often feel like a completely useless status effect), and towards the end of the game characters feel like they have a few too many abilities, some of which I just never used. There were only a handful of encounters that I didn't beat first time (I did some of the optional content, but not all). Outside of combat, the gameplay is fine, but that's because there's very little going on other than a few extremely rudimentary "puzzles". A couple of the dungeons are a bit too big and start to drag on a bit, with the same 3 or 4 enemies being thrown at you over and over. Character customization is limited to accessories, weapons (which is usually just a choice between more damage vs. more defence, or physical vs. magic damage), and augments (which are basically just another type of accessory slot). The augment system is a bit underwhelming and not very interesting, but they're not a huge downside since they're not at all tedious to obtain or use.