This review will mostly be a comparison to the first game.

While I think this game goes a step forward, clearly having a better budget, allowing for more polish, more + better animated cutscenes, and even having its own insert song, in terms of design and thoughtfulness, it kind of falls flat. To explain what i mean by this, i'm going to have to do the generic reviewer thing of breaking down the game into its parts like this:

Gameplay
The gameplay is somehow a pretty big downgrade from the 1st game. I say 'somehow' because the previous game had good ideas and a good starting point that a sequel could improve upon and to give it credit, it does do that, but it also goes too deep in the roots and changes some of the most rewarding parts of the game. For example, the puzzles become a way smaller part of the game. Instead of encouraging you to become acquainted with the lore or being challenging enough to make you stop and think, the sequel takes a more zelda dungeon approach for most of the game. Find a door with a lock on it, find the key, open the door. When it does throw a traditional puzzle at you, for me, except 2 puzzles, i solved them on accident.

The combat has also become too complicated but also too simple, but above all else, SLOW. Which is funny since the mechanic they got rid of was a mechanic in which you waited to do more damage. They managed to do this by making it so you can only shoot the ghosts seemingly whenever they want you to shoot them, having a cooldown on your attack, generally, you do very little damage in this game, and the ghosts take forever to do anything. The ghosts are almost comical in this game, taking forever to do anything, it looks like they have to remind themselves that they should be attacking you instead of just staring at you or slowly walking up to you. This can be pretty frustrating since you can only do real damage from a zero shot or fatal frame which are basically counter attacks and is nowhere near as satisfying as waiting for your meter to fill up while pulling a well-timed counter in tandom with eachother.

Camera upgrades have taken a weird turn, switching from an item management and a general upgrade system to having two separate currencies to upgrade both your camera and your specials. I imagine the initial idea was to upgrade the camera with points like before and upgrade your specials with spirit orbs but later changed because it was too easy to exploit? It seems like they had a lot of balancing issues during development because it feels like that could be the only explanation for such a strange choice and why i finished the game with over 40 healing items and very little film. It felt like the game was finished before they had finished balancing the difficulty.

Map
The map is about as bloated as this review is getting. I understand why going from one mansion to 3 of them is a tempting idea for a sequel but the quantity should come after quality. None of the individual rooms really stood out compared to some of the locations in the 1st game. You really got to know the himuro mansion like it was its own character and getting used to all the rooms and how they connected really made you felt like you were mastering the game. In this game i felt like i was infinitely exploring new rooms instead of feeling like each new set of rooms is a new stage to flesh out and come back to later, although i can see the appeal in the former if that's more your cup of tea. However this leads to another issue of 'wait. where tf am i?' which isn't helped by the feeling of 'wait. how tf do i get to that room again?' due to how strange the map design can be at times.

Each mansion is built like a maze with many misleading doors and having to go up or down floors to get to a room on the same floor you're already on. Because of this, you'll be spending a big chunk of your playtime bringing up the map menu to figure out where you are and where you're going. You wont believe how envious i felt when i found out the Wii remaster had a much needed mini-map.

Atmosphere
This is kind of a mixed bag and is a very subjective topic. I'm sure your experience will be different. But I found the camera this time around entirely serves the atmosphere, slightly hindering the gameplay somewhat, but some of the shots are just beautiful. The horror aspect is somewhat toned down. being able to go outside anytime and feel an aspect of freedom was a lot less scary than the 1st game where you navigate and try to make sense of this mansion and its claustrophobic corridors and areas that truly felt lived in, with most of the game washed in a deep blue. The 2nd game tries to replicate these feelings but it felt more like i was breaking and entering never used houses at night and the general brown shading just did not look good to me.

The sections with mayu following you around also didn't help the atmosphere. She would often just stand there when ghosts were around, getting in the way when you were exploring rooms, and her voice lines could get kind of annoying. This accompanied with how pathetic some of the ghosts could be, made me forget i was playing a horror game.

Story
Yeah, the story kind of breaks if you don't like mayu. I did not like mayu because i was never given a reason to like her, and in fact only given reasons to dislike her. Without getting into spoilers, she feels like she was written to be annoying. In comparison to my sexyboy hard working goat mafuyu she is NOTHING!!!!!!! miku and mafuyu have goals that make them likable characters. mio and mayu are just kind of there. the whole game is really just a yae and ryozo backstory and i'm here for that ig. The timeline discrepancies are annoying :)

Conclusion
It could have been a lot better and strips away a lot of what made the first game good, but its not a bad game, especially good for a gateway to the series (probably. I haven't played 3-5). Very cinematic and easy to digest so long as you dont mind having a good wander for keys.