This game is a clash of two ideas: Strange surreal abstract sequences, and over the top anime shenanigans. Usually I like over the top anime shenanigans but in this case, I feel like it brings the story down a good deal. For example, It has a good amount of QTE fight sequences where a few people overpower many, leading to these scenes all feeling samey in both structure and narrative. I think a fight sequence against a singular opponent would have at least spiced things up, especially as our main cast is usually invincible in combat.

Our two main characters are Mizuki, returning from the first game, and Ryuki, new to this game. Mizuki is okay but suffers from a lot of retconning to make her closer to the game's plot. I won't go into it as I choose to keep my reviews spoiler free as much as I can these days, but it feels like it takes a small bit away from her in the first game. A few other returning characters suffer from this too, but theirs is worse since it's done in a "didn't you know? it was ALWAYS like this!" sense. For me, the star of the show is Ryuki, who excels when the story is focused on him and his journey, and his obsession with solving the HB Case, a series of murders where the bodies are split clean in half and found in different places.

Now to talk about the surreal, which I like. I can't go into them, but some Somniums, looks into people's dreams, can do some really freaky things. They're not all perfect as there are a few duds in there, not every sequence is perfect, but when it wants to go out there it goes out there in such a banger way. The puzzles are generally good, but sometimes Uchikoshi gets too in his head with what is considered a comprehensible puzzle, as I had to check a solution once or twice and wondered how the hell I was supposed to come to that conclusion early on. One early instance is a series where you see a bunch of numbers inbetween a series of Xs, and you're supposed to figure out a 9 digit password from that. I tried a lot of variants, but got no where near the real solution. There are late game puzzles that are a bit more egregious, but again these are more the exception than the norm of alright to good puzzles. The dreams having multiple paths to expose different information is also neat.

The journey of solving the HB case is a neat one, but things go in some odd directions. As another review mentioned, it feels like the game was more concerned with dropping big dramatic twists on the player rather than the cast. There's one in particular that gets a whole scene focused on you, and you see the twist, you might have even figured parts of it out yourself, and realize that it changes absolutely nothing as none of the cast are affected by this at all. A lot of the writing is affected in baffling ways by these kinds of twists that it gets kind of ridiculous. Meanwhile, the story itself has anime cliches wrap everything up in a super positive ideal ending just like the last time, to the point where at the big climax I'd encourage you to just turn your brain off and take it in. My biggest grievence is with Blue Silhouette Man. He exists for no reason other than to prevent you and the cast from figuring out the key players too early, even though Wink Psychs and Somniums have no explicable reason to work like that. They just do so the plot doesn't fall apart immediately.

Uchikoshi is great at the out there stuff, and I'm fine with some anime shenanigans it's just when they got too far it was my least favorite aspects of the first game. This game has more of that sadly, but the Somniums and unraveling the mysteries with a real experience that is still alright if you enjoyed the first game and wanted more.

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