I was a pretty big fan of the original back when it came out and after ten hours of the sequel I'm not too sure if I'm that excited about it. Kinda just feels like a really iterative sequel to the original and for a ten year long wait that's just not particularly exciting, especially since we've got games like the two open-world Zeldas, Witcher 3 and Elden Ring in the meantime, which have all raised the bar for open-world RPGs in some way. Here the combat feels pretty clunky, the healing and saving mechanics are pretty archaic to say the least, the story seems pretty damn uninspired, the map never feels particularly interesting or expansive and there's very little enemy variety with most of the enemy types coming straight out of the first game.

I'm also just not quite sure if the pawn system is actually a good idea. The fun of the game comes from roaming the world with an actual rpg party but I don't know if the game wouldn't be better if they were just actual characters with actual personalities and not just weird magic robot slaves without any autonomy. So much of their dialogue is just "hey there's a ladder" or "you can combine materials to make items" which doesn't really rise above microsoft word clippy levels of usefulness or interest.

I guess in the original the most interesting things happened in the last act of the game, so maybe the game will actually get more interesting as it goes along. The performance issues certainly don't help my enjoyment though.