When launching the game I get an error "Could not initialize Direct X." and then the whole system freezes, I cannot even access the task manager, so that only a hard reset helps. What a waste of money. I hope the developers do charitable work for the rest of their lives to atone for the mess they have concocted here.
Game starts with a bug that lets text flicker in a cutscene. Then you start playing this young man who lets himself be commanded around, who lives the most insignificant life you can imagine in the middle of nowhere. Not relatable at all. The graphics are remarkably ugly. I don't mean that the game depicts an ugly town, which is fine, but the graphics style itself is ugly. Sure, the game offers much more details and higher texture resolution/polygon count, better animations than the predecessor, but it all looks so videogamey, jumbled together. It looks like an amateur/hobby project. It lacks any immersion. The interface presents you hints in handwriting, which is so small that you can barely decipher it and the user interface is overall ugly. The camera angles are fixed and chosen badly. I rarely had the feeling I could see what I wanted to see, nor does the game naturally make it obvious where you can go. The camera is even in dialogues far away, which saved the developers the work of detailed facial animations. You feel distanced from the characters, this hurts immersion and makes it even harder to connect with anyways flat, cliché characters. Sound is not mixed at all. When I left the shop (first scene), you run into a character and the ambient noises are so loud that the conversation was largely unintelligible. I had to turn down the slider for noise from 100% to 31%. This should have been adjusted better from the start. The scenes contain too many objects to examine and you are given no reason to examine them. The gameplay seems unfocused. After half an hour I had enough and uninstalled the game. There was nothing fun about it. The first title of the series offered great story and atmosphere at least, but was also bugged by bad design choices and gameplay flow to the point of killing all the fun and making me quit half-way in. This title offers nothing of that atmosphere and does not even entice me to play half of it. They really botched this one.
