(This is just about the septentriones section, I played record breaker, but haven't done the second campaign yet)
I have a lot to say about this game. This is a very bizarre game for me, because I love the first game so much. And as a result of that, this one is still a lot of fun. Truly one of the most fun games I've played, but everything good can be attributed to the original. In just about every single way it is worse, from the writing, the story, the music, the atmosphere, the characters, and even the gameplay. The writing is truly just awful, it is written like an MCU movie. Sentences like "he's right behind me isn't he" genuinely get uttered in every scene in this game. The few enjoyable moments are only enjoyable because mentally you forgive it for what they are actually saying and pretend what they are saying is more enjoyable to listen to. The story is really pointless. Things happen, and there's never really any rhyme or reason. A character will say 75% of a thought and then get cut off, just so when it is completed later they can pretend like it was incredible foreshadowing. The stakes are always either really fucking high but treated like its nothing, or will be extremely fucking minute but treated like it matters. The music is actually quite good, but often grating. The main skirmish theme gets so fucking annoying instantly and only gets worse. This game has a really bad case of doing the thing most lazily written and soulless megaten games do where they clearly are just assigning the music to emotional flags. So someone will say something a little sad, their portrait will go sad, and the music will change to the designated sad song, just for it to return to the previous song 3 lines of dialogue later. Not saying that they don't all do this, but on some of the lazier ones it gets really obvious and makes the music really annoying and predictable. The atmosphere is just stupid man. In the first game there was a vibe of actual urgency, when characters were serious, they were serious. When the world was at stake, they didn't take a break from the important stuff so you could watch a 25 year old trying to see a 15 year old naked, but that is not the case here. And that goes into my biggest problem with this game, which is the characters. All of them are all so one note. They're all horrible joke characters that they expect you to give a shit about. There's some exceptions to this, I quite liked Fumi and Yamato. Fumi has a really good personality as a believable asshole, but occasionally turns into the annoying, gibberish-spewing, smart-ass you see in movies so that the dumb character can go "hubuhwuh?!?! 🤯English four eyes!". Yamato is relatively cool, but he just constantly feels like a discount Naoya, who I love dearly. Even if he is just discount Naoya, I like Naoya enough to make me like him still. That sentiment of "well its almost as good as the real deal" is the entire reason this game even receives this high of a review. Even though I probably seem like I'm ultra-critical, I'm really not. I had fun and could just laugh at it the whole time. The only problem with this dumb fun is that the gameplay gets really bad near the end. By the end, for every fight you have two choices, either make one completely overpowered and invincible team, or grind endlessly. I chose the former and blew through everything late game. The final boss was a very, very long bore, where I had the protagonist just kill every single enemy and land every hit on the main boss because him, and his demons, reflected basically everything, thanks to barrier and repel phys. It wasn't really hard, just not really the most fun way to go about things, but I wasn't going to spend the next ten years grinding, this game doesnt even have the hard free battles from the first one.
I've only witnessed one ending, but I was disappointed. Obviously Yamato's ending is the worst one morally, but I don't care anywhere near enough about these characters to want them to live a better life. And for entertainment value, it sounded really funny. There's a certain joy in being able to pick an evil ending in a game you resent, but this just was not evil enough. We don't kill anyone, and for some reason, some of the characters not on Yamato's side just yield super easily and join you. Why would you agree to this Otome.
Overall this was a fun enough experience, I will eventually go and do the other campaign, and maybe some of the other endings(probably not). I just can't help but wish instead of trying to imitate the magic of the first one, it was either its own thing, or it just imitated it better.