Much better than the first game. This game has the luxury of not having to introduce every character in the cast and instead gets to use the cast in more interesting ways. Susado gets to shine a lot more in this one and the side characters feel more fleshed out as we begin to learn their backstories a bit more. All the lingering loose threads from the first one are nicely followed up and concluded. In fact, this game's cases just feel more tightly written in general with less fluff and more brevity that really helps with the pacing. The game has an awesome conclusion that worried me initially as I felt it was going to tread familiar ground with its twist villain. But it did end up managing to do something different which I thoroughly appreciating. Everything that seemed like an obvious twist was lampshade by the game and not so obvious twists were foreshadowed enough to where I was very satisfied with this game's writing. For all the missteps that previous game took with its writing, it was well worth it to get to the sparkling conclusion of this duology.