Dawg... Like 10 hours in, I wasn't expecting this to be much of a great game. It felt very similar to the first entry in terms of structure and story but after the halfway point it just goes completely nuts. Seriously, I wasn't expecting any of the stuff that was happening, especially considering how predictable the first game was in terms of story. I guess there's a very valid reason as to why we needed four 20+ hour games to tell this tale. Even tho I took my time finishing this, I was more than surprised at how excellent just about every aspect was. The dungeon crawling was as addictive as ever, the combat still quite fluid considering this came out in 2006. Also the improvements and qol changes, as minor as they were, had a lot of impact on the game flow as a whole from my perspective. It made the (enjoyable) monotony not as monotonous. Story wise, this is probably a lot stronger than the first game, but considering the first game (and most of this game) was build up, I can look past that. The new cast additions were sensational and I'm not sure when a game made me care about characters I barely knew for 5 hours as much as this one. Frankly Vol. 2 is everything Vol. 1 was but updated and brought to an entirely new level of quality, in terms of just about every aspect. And going by the preview for V. 3, I'm pretty sure that's gonna go even further. I'm insanely excited. Hoping to wrap it up before February but I may spend more time, depending on how good the next one is. "Become strong... Strong enough to destroy me". These words I think just show what sort of adventure I'm in for from here on out.