izigame.me

UNMARKED SPOILERS FOR COFFEE TALK 1
If there was a 'neutral' option I'd pick that.
I played the first Coffee Talk because I wanted an experience like va11halla. The game ultimately disappointed me quite a bit but I could see the potential in it and I was looking forward to giving this one a try.
The mechanics and story beats between the two games are largely very similar. This one has a few more drinks and the ability to give items to patrons. Honestly I strongly recommend playing this game with a guide. Replaying days to get drink orders correct is a pain in the ass due to the fast-forward feature not actually fast-forwarding through character animations and the like, and the expanded menu and choices mean little in terms of branching plot content. The good options are objectively more interesting and satisfying than the bad ones (at least from what I experienced).
The story and character selection has somewhat improved as well. I found Freya from the first game to be fairly obnoxious due to her constant meta conversations about stories and narratives. Glad to say that she's pretty much gone. The new characters aren't the best and some of the storylines are utter bores, but at least there's nobody in the cast I hate.
In my review of coffee talk 1 I expressed my disdain for Lua and Baileys' story and the very forced allegory to racism and inter-cultural marriage. A lot of people mistook this as me hating the game's 'SJW agenda' or something but I have no problem with games tackling contemporary political issues. The reason it was such a bad storyline is because it failed to be interesting within the context of its own world. See, coffee talk has this problem where it gets so caught up in allegories and dialogue that it seems to forget that it is supposed to be a game in its own world. Succubi and elves have no obvious cultural differences. Any historical context simply isn't mentioned. The language they use to talk about their conflict far too strongly resembles the language of our world despite Bailey and Lua literally being different species. I know this isn't Coffee Talk 1 but this tangent applies to the alien storyline in Coffee Talk 2.
Between the talk about being accepted, changing your appearance and pronouns to better fit with who you are, and coming out to the person you're dating. Silver (previously Neil) is a somewhat obvious allegory for gender identity issues. However when the allegory is this intentional, it starts becoming a little weird that your stand-in for a trans person is literally an alien being pursued by the men-in-black because... well actually they never give us a good reason why. It's like this story was written as an allegory first and a story in the world of coffee talk second. However this story comes across as extra bizarre because Silver and the other alien spend a lot of time teaching you about the nature of their species. If you remember the reveal from the first game, you literally are one of these aliens. Why are they telling you all this?
Coffee Talk really has a tendency to use most of its dialogue for the benefit of the player while sacrificing more organic conversation. Gala and Hyde remind you explicitly of their long lifespans multiple times. Why? Your player character has talked to them a fuckload of times. This should be common knowledge. It's like if you asked a Chinese bloke what he had for lunch and he told you "I had a delicious bowl of white rice, the staple crop of us Chinese, which I ate with chopsticks, the cutlery of choice for many Chinese folk." It's bizarre and immersion-breaking.
Even Jorji's storyline about the mysterious spooky vandalism cases has shades of this. Some of the conversations very quickly stop feeling like conversations and start feeling like a Wikipedia page written in casual speech.
Although I just spent several paragraphs shitting on the game, it's not all bad. The newer sprite work is subtly but noticeably an improvement. The first game's art was fine, but some sprites looked more like low-res paintings than active uses of pixel art. Coffee Talk 2's sprites lean a lot more into the pixel art aesthetics. In some places such as the sprites of the drinks, and pictures on the social media app, the improvements are a lot more obvious.
A lot of the casual conversations in this game unrelated to the main plot threads have very strong character building. Lua and Hyde specifically get fleshed out a lot in this game, and are much better for it. Rachel was one of the stronger characters from the 1st game and although she only shows up here and there, she's still a lot of fun in this one. The new characters do manage to have their share of interesting moments as well.
In spite of everything, I do think this is an improvement over Coffee Talk 1. If you liked the first one, I am certain you will like this one. But I still think it is too flawed to earnestly recommend.