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Octopath Traveler 2 improves upon OT1 in visual design, exploration, and combat, with the music being as awesome as ever. It manages to shake up the formulaic story progression found in the first game, which is refreshing.
The story starts off perfect (easy GotY material) then decides to go off the deep end 70% through. While the game attempts to improve upon the interconnectedness of the characters, it is still sorely lacking in many areas. Additionally, the way the 8 stories connect feels forced, especially compared to OT1.
The EN localisation is abhorrent. Over 10% of the skills in this game are horribly mistranslated, often to the opposite of what they actually do. The story is similarly butchered, with mistranslations abound and liberties taken far beyond what is acceptable.

Music & Visual Design

The music of Octopath is a technical masterpiece. In OT1, character motifs transition seamlessly into boss music, a technique that is still present. With the new day-night mechanic, we have 2 separate tracks for many areas, both of which transition smoothly into each other at every point.
Octopath has my favourite pixel art design of all time, along with particle effects that are a joy to look at. Also, character sprites now move a lot more, breathing life into battles.

Exploration

There is so much content. The way the world is joined together, along with the myriad of dungeons scattered throughout, make exploring this world feel like a much-improved version of OT1’s exploration.
The new Path Actions add a lot of depth to gameplay and exploration, and the side quests were a joy to figure out (when the localisation wasn't butchering the hints).
Secondary jobs now come with side quests to acquire legendary gear and additional job permits (i.e. items allowing you to simultaneously have the same secondary job on multiple characters). Special secondary jobs are also more varied in how they’re unlocked (as opposed to fighting a boss like in OT1).
Still, I wish they had included CotC’s mechanic where the world map kept track of the chests you’ve opened and Path Actions you’ve cleared in each area. It would have made searching for NPCs easier, with the only solutions now being a) using a guide and b) searching every inch of the map and hoping you get lucky. A bestiary would also have been useful.

Combat

There are many more options and strategies available now. Every time I unlocked a new EX Skill, I lost myself in the endless possibilities of how it could synergise with other skills and characters to make an insane combo. The journey to build a set of unique monsters/skills for Ochette/Hikari was also really fun.
But.
A good set of synergistic skills needs good enemies, which is where this game suffers.
You're almost never responding meaningfully to the enemies' actions, and there's no point in taking advantage of the amazing synergies between skills when most mid/late game bosses die in 1.5 hits.
There were only a handful of fights where I felt adequately challenged, with all else being "solved" by putting damage buffs on 1 person, defence debuffs on the enemy, and pressing the highest damaging ability.
Combat was really fun and challenging in CotC, which also had the QoL of having numbers on skills/items, so I don't know why OT2 is like this. Hard to believe that the designers of CotC's amazing boss and arena fights were responsible for this series of boring stompfests.
Overlevelling is a major issue. I had flashbacks to Pokémon and Elden Ring, where I overlevelled everything by virtue of being an exploration completionist.
You can’t even safely run from trash mobs, because the flee success rate seems linked to level. Your choices here are to overlevel by killing them or waste time failing to run away 5 times in a row.

Story

The plot, worldbuilding, characters, themes, and (JP) dialogue were absolutely perfect at the start, and subversion of expectations was spectacular for the first half. However, the story began falling off past that point, then gave me Game of Thrones Season 8 PTSD at the end.
They reused plotlines and arcs from OT1 and CotC:

Agnea’s story is copy-and-pasted from Tressa’s
Mindt is a worse Cerephina (MAJOR CotC/OT2 spoilers)
They reused Galdera instead of designing a new superboss (MAJOR OT1/OT2 spoilers)

Almost every single character is one-dimensional—especially the villains. Villains don't all need to be Jaime Lannister, but when every bad guy is going, “Oh me bad guy because world bad destroy world hahaha”, it gets old. There were a few well-written, complex characters in Triangle Strategy, so I don’t know why OT2’s characters are more one-dimensional than even OT1’s.
They tried to add interconnectedness between the travellers with Extra Stories and Travel Banter, but they don’t interact with each other outside of that. Travellers should really feature in main stories not their own—otherwise, it feels disjointed insofar as the OCTOPATH theme is concerned, such as how Temenos’s story was The Crick & Temenos Show.
Unlike how every character's story in OT1 connected together meaningfully at the end, that connection in OT2 felt very forced, such as how (MAJOR OT2 spoilers) Ori for Partitio and Tanzy for Agnea were those characters’ only link to the overarching plotline.
There was a LOT of buildup in the story, most of which went nowhere. I’m not talking a few loose ends—I’m talking worse than Game of Thrones Season 8. “Who is that person? What did they want? Why did they do that? What does this mean?” All asked; never answered. It feels like OT2’s story was cut or rushed, or maybe they’re DLC/sequel-baiting.
I’m changing this review to negative if it turns out they cut OT2’s story to place in CotC.

Localisation Gore

I’m pretty sure the localisers who butchered OT2 also handled Triangle Strategy’s localisation, which mistranslated “Armlet” to “Amulet” and “take over the city” to “sack the city”, which is like translating “restrain him” to “rob and rape him”.
They clearly feel that the English-speaking audience is filled with pearl-clutching Karens, as evidenced by how Temenos being called a dog is localised as “hound”, which fails to recognise that insults are meant to be insulting—not awkward. Or how they PG-13’d Agnea’s sister talking about Agnea’s boobs, changing that conversation to a euphemistic cringefest involving the word “talent”.
The localisers also believe that English-speakers are mentally inept, as they translated プラットじいさん (Grandpa Platt) and プラットばあさん (Grandma Platt) to “Platt” and “Platt’s Wife”. To them, English-speakers are too stupid to understand that the couple running the orphanage aren’t the orphans' biological grandparents simply because they have "Grandpa" and "Grandma" in their name, so the solution is obviously sexism, where they reduce a woman’s identity to her relation to her husband. Good job.
Speaking of mental ineptitude, this is the second Octopath world where they decided to fuck up the speech of the Huntress’s homeland. When they aren’t busy making H’aanit speken like she wille to the 15th Century returnen, they’re making the beastmen sound like they have a mental disability. This is a problem, because a) they speak like innocent children in Japanese, and b) beastmen are humans with greed removed, so the localisers are trying to tell you that humans without greed are mentally disabled. Amazing.
The goal of localisation is to improve natural readability at the cost of accuracy, but there’s a reason “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it".

Conclusion

Octopath Traveler 2's early game was absolutely fantastic in damn near every single way. Yet, while the aesthetics and exploration remained strong throughout, the combat became a cakewalk, and the story left too much unfinished and unresolved.