izigame.me

I recommend this game with the following caveat. Do NOT buy this game at full price, wait for a sale or some sort of discount bundle.
The good; The game is great in a lot of areas, the art style and music are incredible. I found myself really addicted to multiple tracks and loving so much of the art, from backgrounds to characters and their animations. The gameplay is really solid, though it takes about an hour before the combat opens up beyond punch block jump. Enemy grunt attacks and AI is pretty fun, I like how many different enemy types there are PLUS the wide range of attacks each enemy has that is unique to them. Boss fights are all pretty good, they feel mostly unique outside of each boss having the same segmented health bar where they all predictably enter another stage once you hit the threshold. Capturing different assists from the enemies you fight is great, really fun to see a palette swap and get excited to "catch" it to complete your collection. Also fun to wonder what kind of attack it will have. Some have the exact same attack or such a small variation is can be a bit of a let down, but it's still fun.
The bad; my biggest gripe with the game comes from the lazy writing when it comes to characters other than Kiyoko and Misako. The main girls are written pretty great, I loved them in the first game and I enjoy them in the second. The problem comes when you select any of the other SIX characters to play as (a total of eight). During the game, if you are playing as one of the other playable characters and have your partner (coop or otherwise) also selected as any of the other character, the dialogue barely changes. The best example I can give you is one character is introduced as a subject of brainwashing, and she joins the squad to find out who brainwashed her. I was playing as Misako but chose the new girl as my partner (who, if not in coop, just appears in dialogue scenes). I thought I might get some good dialogue since her entire reason for joining was to catch who brainwashed her. Nope. Her dialogue is almost identical regardless of who your partner is. Kiyoko, in the dialogue meeting the villain, says she will pay for brainwashing Marian. If I bring Marian as my partner, she says "You'll pay for brainwashing other me!" This just further breaks down in the 8$ DLC to play as Jimmy and Billy Lee, as at the start of the game, the 4 original playable characters arrive at school late and end up expelled. The four original characters ARE high schoolers. Marian, Jimmy, and Billy are in their 30s yet the dialogue barely changes. 40$ for a game with 6 playable character (add 8$ to the 40$ to get Jimmy and Billy) all individually voiced, and yet they couldn't bother to write a more original script for the other characters. Whoever your player 2 is will always be the reason you're late to class, because they wanted to stop for double chocolate donuts. It seems like a small grip, but with DLC you're looking at a nearly full price game that couldn't even be bothered to give every character actual character in their voice lines besides adding a word or two here and there. Jimmy saying dude and bro a lot is fine, but the other 90% of his dialogue is just word for word the same as the main girls'.
The other gripe I have is the voice acting. Seems the developers hired a bunch of their friends or I guess popular youtubers and it's very telling. Billy is so bad, it sounds like he is just reading his lines directly off the page, it's disgusting. Marian isn't much better, the actress sounds like she doesn't even want to be there. She's bored and uninterested. The main girls and some of the villains are spot on amazing, but again. For 40$ for the base game you'd think they could have afforded more talent than two 40 year old youtubers who can't voice act.
Again, the game is pretty good. I haven't fully beaten it yet, but I am getting close to the end. I assume 20-25 hours to 100%, but I don't think there's going to be much replay ability since there are almost no new voice lines or dialogue despite having 8 total characters. I just feel like the price is a bit steep when corners were cut so heavily with dialogue and voice actors. Games good, just buy it on a sale to get value out of your purchase. Or buy it full price to support the devs because while I suggest buying it at a discount and I have valid complaints, it's still a good game and I think the studio did a really good job in so many other areas.