An enjoyable but disappointing mixed bag of a sequel. Combat has some nice improvements with more focus on positioning and team attacks while just generally feeling smoother. Hawaii is nice enough for a new area but it lacks the chill atmosphere of Onomichi or Okinawa and the enemies around every corner combined with strange level scaling across the map make exploring kind of a pain. The dungeons are incredibly dull and I would much rather go through the same dungeon from 7 over and over than go through a bunch of identical square rooms connected by narrow hallways. The pacing is also very bizarre with the first half of the game going very slowly. On top of constantly being assaulted with tutorials it takes forever to unlock the job system and the lack of money means you're going to frequently come across systems and shops that all require a ton of cash that you can never hope to have until much later in the game. Substories are weirdly front-loaded so if you do them as they pop up then you'll really be missing a lot of that charming Yakuza levity in the latter half to make up for the main story's shortcomings. The substories are pretty fun though and I like how they took advantage of the Hawaiian setting with stuff like hijinks at the beach and being befriended by weebs. Dondoko island is also an extremely boring minigame and the fact that they force you to interact with it at all is really annoying.

The story is much less compelling than 7's and also suffers from strange pacing issues. The Kiryu section, while I really like what they did and believe it's what Gaiden should've been, really slows down the story and significantly distracts from the plot in Hawaii. Ebina and Bryce suffer from trying to share the villain role and both come out feeling under-cooked. Akane and Lani do disappointingly little despite being the objective of every group in the game. Eiji's heel-turn from helpful guy we knew for like 2 scenes to cartoon villain mastermind is way too abrupt and comical to take seriously. Yamai being one of the only weird and charismatic new characters and not becoming a party member is a huge missed opportunity. Tomizawa and Chitose are fine inclusions but Tomi does kind of overlap with Namba a bit too much. Everyone at least benefits from the new party bingo board system which allows for a lot of cute little mini conversations that make every party member even more endearing than they are already. I also really hate what they did with Saeko. I don't think she's obligated to like Ichiban or anything and his proposal was terrible but her choice to ghost him for a year just makes her purely unlikable. This was especially unnecessary since they really didn't have much romantic buildup in 7. The theme of redemption is also heavily used in every other JRPG so it wasn't too interesting. I wish someone would give me a dollar every time a JRPG villain was going to die and the hero saved them so they could serve their time instead.

...Well I have a tendency to focus on complaints but it was still a fun time overall.