Amazing game, so much fun. I love everything about this game. When it comes to RPG this is the Apex !

I'll be honest here, I didn't enjoy this one very much. It feels less like Re:Birth 2 and more like Re:Birth 1 2.0, especially when you consider like the first game, Neptune's the protagonist again. Who the hell did the writing for some of her lines, because I swear Neptune is an idiot most of the time in this game. Keep in mind the second game is canon, so the Deity of Sin stuff from the last game did happen. And yet it feels a lot like DDD Sora, in which Neptune's intelligence levels decreased somehow. I will admit I was getting pretty annoyed by Neptune.

Gameplay wise, not much has changed between games. The main new thing is there isn't a collective bar for EXE Skills, but each party member's SP is their own EXE Skill bar. Since everyone only caps out at 1k, you have to be more careful...is what I would say, but in lategame, where money is no object, you can just buy lots of SP restoring items and nuke regular encounters with Plutia's Stress Relief if the formation is right that it hits all enemies. It made regular encounters, even in the final area, fairly mindless, but I didn't start using this strategy until Chapter 9.

Speaking of mindless strategies, we have the Oracles, or at least Histoire. Available super early, and even at Level 1 is a total monster, doing far more damage than everyone else. Yes, by endgame, she falls off, so she's pretty much a Jagen, but before that, she's basically the best party member in the game. On another hand, non-CPUs are less worthless than they were in the past two games. They can now use a thing similar to HDD called Awakening, but I barely used it since I primarily used the CPUs.

On the gameplay front, one of the worst changes was locking numerous things behind Stella's Dungeon. Symbol Attack Gains, one of the best plans in the game, is locked behind a high floor of Stella's Dungeon, a mechanic that requires you to wait through real time. You can't just blast through it either because if you try sending Stella up too high, she'll get defeated and lose her equipment, and you don't get that stuff back unless you got the DLC. Stella's Dungeon was in the last game too, but it was purely optional and didn't have Plans locked behind it. This game, however, locks several Plans, primarily Dungeon Change behind this mechanic.

Speaking of which, the changes to the hidden items, I didn't like either. Sure, before you were combing maps spamming the button to search for the hidden item, but once you found it, you were set. This time, hidden items are in blocks like Mario, but said blocks are invisible. The elephant in the room here is that the contents are semi random. Some of these blocks in certain areas contain weapons or Plans, like Credits Up, but good luck getting them without leaving the map and coming back over and over again.

The story is nothing to write home about. The Seven Sages are like Saturday morning cartoon villains with how bumbling most of them are, two of them are reused characters from the first game, and Rei's not a very strong antagonist. Along with that, we have another case of "the true ending is locked behind something dumb." First game was Shares, which hardly matter in this game. Second game was Lily Ranks, which mandated grinding Nepgear's Lily Ranks. In this game, there are cutscenes you must see in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 to get key items. Don't see them? Congrats, you're locked out of the good ending. Don't do all of Rei's events in Chapter 9 and that BS eggplant nonsense? Congrats, you don't get the best ending. If I had not been using a guide, I'd have been screwed.

On top of that, outside of the beginning of the game, certain guild quests are mandatory to progress the story. Usually, the mandatory quests are to get you used to the mechanic, but now they force you to go back and interact with it occasionally to progress the story.

There is one new thing too. Challenges, where you're rewarded with extra stat points or Plans on the character who fulfills certain objectives. This is character specific, so challenges done with Neptune don't count towards Noire, for example. However, they also locked EXE Skills not given through the story behind this mechanic. Another step back.

Many of the area environments are straight up reused from the first game. Surprisingly, almost no environments from the second game return. Nepgear's already the butt of most of the jokes in this game when she's on screen, but bringing back layouts from her game was too much too, apparently.

Anyway, I didn't like this game very much. The only reason it gets a 2 and not 1 is because it's not very PC intensive, so I can play it just fine. "It runs," is what I'm trying to say. I'll probably never replay this game again, though.