I am sorry to say, I really cannot recommend this game for people like myself. It is everything the first game was, and much much more. It is beautiful, the writing is funny, characters interesting. Everything is top notch... expect combat. You might have heard people talking about the difficulty problems, and for me they are inexcusable. On tactician mode (the default difficulty, therefore normal as far as I'm concerned), fights just get so ridiculously hard. The dependency on the levels is stupid. Example, you start in a fort, cannot kill anything without some difficulty, 2-3 characters dying. Then, 2 levels later, you come back, and sweep the floor. That is just silly. In the first act it was frustrating, but I pushed through, you get who you need to kill in what order and it is fine. That is, until the second act. The game just breaks there. Wherever you would go, the game would just throw a too difficult challenge for you, and you had to turn back, try some other way. At the end, there were 5 "paths" I could take (quests to finish, roads to explore) and the game itself told me in 3 of those to turn back because the enemies were too strong. And I was level 10 already, enemies were level 12. Excuse me, but I do not have the time to repeat 30 hours of the game with different characters, just because you did not design the difficulty properly. And, lowering the difficulty just makes the game too easy, and there is simply no challenge. So, if you are one of those people who are fine with either no challenge to your game, or want to spend hours barely progressing until you are so powerful nothing can kill you (that is, until the next act), this will be no problem. I am not one of those people.
