An enjoyable game which has a number of faults that do bring it down a bit and keep it from being truly great, but I'd still highly recommend it nevertheless. At present I've beaten the game with the true ending, having played through most of the DLC missions, save for Expert Level Skirmishes & the (assuming) second half of the A Captainless Squad DLC and a couple hours of my playtime would have been time spent AFK. It's been 10+ years since I played the first of the series, and I only played the second game a little bit, so I can't reliably make any comparisons to other games in the series, but I didn't find myself disappointed compared to those somewhat vague memories. The game doesn't really require any knowledge from the previous games to enjoy anyhow.
One of the primary flaws of the game would have to be training and weapons development aspects of the game. It's simply just much too tedious and time-consuming with the loading going between sections. Spending time to equip characters with different variations of gear only to have sometimes that gear unequipped when you develop other gear, usually only to realize mid-mission when trying to mortar a tank and being SOL because you have anti-personnel weaponry equipped. Worst of all the constant character interactions each time you do any sort of training or development, sapping away precious minutes of your life. A few hours of my playtime were unnecessarily spent in menus when they should have simplified things and/or somehow made it more interesting and satisfying.
The first few missions are far too easy, but once you break into the game a bit gameplay does get fun. Enemy AI tends to be fairly stupid throughout the game, which I don't necessarily think is an especially bad thing, really. It's definitely less about actions the enemy takes and more about breaking through enemy positioning on the map where they typically have some advantage of terrain and how you position yourself as you do so. If the enemy had the capacity to come at you with some degree of strategy, the game would likely become overly frustrating to play, I think. The ranking system for how well you completed a mission is pretty lame as it's all about how many turns you complete the mission in. It should be an important factor, but there should be more components that affect it. As it is, you're effectively encouraged to cheese to win; just rush past enemies, ignore entire sections of maps, only taking out the bare minimum of them to make it the objective point, which isn't as fun as totally dominating the enemy.
The story was alright, I thought. I played the game in Japanese and have no opinions on the game's translation at this point in time. Some up and down points for sure but all in all I enjoyed it. Honestly, I didn't find our protagonist to be especially likable, but for the most part the rest of the cast was pretty decent. I'm not a fan of how story is typically presented; still backgrounds with character windows with a few set poses/expressions popping up for dialogue. You do get a mostly still scene with posed character models some of the times which are preferable, and I'm not sure why they didn't do this more often, although it's still not the best. Then for some more important scenes you get a full on cut-scene. This part of the game feels low-budget, no question.

An enjoyable game which has a number of faults that do bring it down a bit and keep it from being truly great, but I'd still highly recommend it nevertheless. At present I've beaten the game with the true ending, having played through most of the DLC missions, save for Expert Level Skirmishes & the (assuming) second half of the A Captainless Squad DLC and a couple hours of my playtime would have been time spent AFK. It's been 10+ years since I played the first of the series, and I only played the second game a little bit, so I can't reliably make any comparisons to other games in the series, but I didn't find myself disappointed compared to those somewhat vague memories. The game doesn't really require any knowledge from the previous games to enjoy anyhow. One of the primary flaws of the game would have to be training and weapons development aspects of the game. It's simply just much too tedious and time-consuming with the loading going between sections. Spending time to equip characters with different variations of gear only to have sometimes that gear unequipped when you develop other gear, usually only to realize mid-mission when trying to mortar a tank and being SOL because you have anti-personnel weaponry equipped. Worst of all the constant character interactions each time you do any sort of training or development, sapping away precious minutes of your life. A few hours of my playtime were unnecessarily spent in menus when they should have simplified things and/or somehow made it more interesting and satisfying. The first few missions are far too easy, but once you break into the game a bit gameplay does get fun. Enemy AI tends to be fairly stupid throughout the game, which I don't necessarily think is an especially bad thing, really. It's definitely less about actions the enemy takes and more about breaking through enemy positioning on the map where they typically have some advantage of terrain and how you position yourself as you do so. If the enemy had the capacity to come at you with some degree of strategy, the game would likely become overly frustrating to play, I think. The ranking system for how well you completed a mission is pretty lame as it's all about how many turns you complete the mission in. It should be an important factor, but there should be more components that affect it. As it is, you're effectively encouraged to cheese to win; just rush past enemies, ignore entire sections of maps, only taking out the bare minimum of them to make it the objective point, which isn't as fun as totally dominating the enemy. The story was alright, I thought. I played the game in Japanese and have no opinions on the game's translation at this point in time. Some up and down points for sure but all in all I enjoyed it. Honestly, I didn't find our protagonist to be especially likable, but for the most part the rest of the cast was pretty decent. I'm not a fan of how story is typically presented; still backgrounds with character windows with a few set poses/expressions popping up for dialogue. You do get a mostly still scene with posed character models some of the times which are preferable, and I'm not sure why they didn't do this more often, although it's still not the best. Then for some more important scenes you get a full on cut-scene. This part of the game feels low-budget, no question.