This is a weird sequel, it's better in some ways than the original Ori and worse in others. The combat and movement have been overhauled and feel great, you get all the abilities from the first game back quickly and are getting new stuff early on which is nice. I like the way swapping abilities/weapons works in particular. However, the combat never really gets challenging and I felt like I breezed through everything, and even if you didn't want to learn enemy patterns the heal is so powerful and you can use it so often you can just mash through combat. The platforming and exploration is fun, and I do think this game makes backtracking less tedious than in the first one, but despite that I didn't really feel the need to 100% this, which is something I do with most metroidvanias. The purchasable upgrades felt really unnecessary because you're so powerful already, and it didn't do a very good job getting me to care for the myriad of side characters it quickly introduces then doesn't bring up again. The side quest system also is pretty vague about where to go or how to actually complete quests, so I just didn't bother with a lot of it. I also got lost just trying to follow main story objectives a weird amount in this game, there's a point where it opens up and gives you multiple main directions you can go, but some of them are walled off until later and don't tell you that until you've already gone there, and some of them seemed like dead ends but turned out I was just missing a new ability in an awkward spot. The overall story has some interesting ideas, but it does feel heavy-handed at times, and feels like it's trying too hard to live up to the emotional impact people liked in the first game. I did like the ending though, it gives you some pretty cool abilities in the late game, the final section is pretty fun, and the story conclusion is decent.