izigame.me

Review in Progress: 60 hours in
Had spent around 300 hours on Coven of Dusk on Switch so this one is an easy day one for me. I was gonna get JP version earlier but eventually decided to wait for EN release to fully appreciate the story, since the first game had left quite an impression.
Core Gameplay: Great DRPG to scratch my OCD itches of filling out every single empty spots on maps and looting all the gazillion chests while slaughter my way (and getting slaughtered) through the Dungeons.
Team building is one of the games' selling point with maximum 40 party member slots (15 Combat members and 25 Supports) You begin with party of 5 but it gets expanded when you have access to better Coven pacts. Dozens of customizable classes and weapon choices.
Team building in this one is a lot more flexible than the first game. Each Character/ Class now has its own Donums available (active skills) as oppose to having every single Donums tied to various Covens in the first game. And You can inherit Donums from one Coven to another. So you can have a good Coven slots with good Donums easily. However this game introduce a new mechanics called 'secret crest' serving as the game's "limit break" skills which are still tied to each Covens, therefore there's still some consideration to be made when choosing Covens to use.
Ridiculous amounts of (gameplay) upgrades and unlocks gradually made available over time, both for Progressing and QOL. Such as map actions (good old Wall break/ Hide/ Jumps/ Hazard mitigations), post-combat recovery/revive, easier auto-mapping, pitfall recovery, more team building options etc. The QOL make the game a lot less tedious than Coven of Dusk imo.
Combat: Turn based but a bit more unconventional. It's less obvious when you first start but (normally) in combat you're not making command to a character but to a Coven (1-3 Characters) as a whole (similar to The Last Remnant but a lot more agency). Nonetheless You can spend some resources to make each character do some limited action like using items or defend.
This game also introduce new summon mechanic which add some more depth to the combat than the first one.
Usually consists of auto battles except bosses or some formidable enemies. But imo still quite satisfying to spend time staring at normal battles, having millions Chibis flying around tearing off enemies part by part and Landing Crits and Critical Gore is ever satisfying.
Story: The Meat on the bone of the franchise imo. For this game at first it didn't impress me as much as Coven of Dusk and I thought the first game story is a lot more personal, nothing is really happening in the first 20 or so hours and I started to miss Dronya and Luka already......now that I got 60 hours in? Damn I was wrong. Haven't seen through the end yet but I'm confident it's gonna be worth it.
Overall: Great DRPG with dozens of customizations and phenomenal story but some mechanics can be overwhelming as expected from NIS titles.