A big improvement to the original, but still somewhat flawed by the whole tag duel system. You no longer have to gain a relationship with characters to choose your partner, now it's done at the very start, and gaining hearts progresses the story. I was a little worried at first since I thought this meant every duel in the game would be a tag duel, but the game actually let's you choose single or tag duel for all opponents, which makes it an improvement on the original which only allowed tag duels on sundays, and then during the latter parts of the story.

The story is told via 8 "events" per hearts filled. The weirdest part about this is that the first 4 events are not only the same regardless of who you choose, but they're even single duels. This means only the last 1/4th of any given characters "story" is actually about them, and you're only forced to duel with them 4 times in the entire game.

Of course you're likely going to want to team up with your partners during specific other times. Sundays are still tag-only duels if you want to participate in them, and you can get some big rewards for beating the Sunday "tournaments" (beat 5 opponents in a row). Likewise the class tests, which I think happen randomly? Not sure, after the initial test portion (which btw is waaaaay more fun than the first game) has you tag duel. You can theoretically skip these too since I think if you "end day" before class time it'd skip the exam, but you're actually forced into the exam if you get to that point, and you won't know it's coming, so I guess it's semi-forced, but generally speaking, unless you want to, tag duels only make up a tiny part of the game. Which is pretty good, because the starting line up of possible partners is still only the major characters, so your deck options if hoping to synergise is very low. You can edit your partners deck once you reach event 4, but they have key cards you can't remove, so the best you can really do is make theirs a hybrid deck that works with yours, if you don't wanna use their deck-type.

Partner AI in this game is soooo bad though holy shit. I have seen my partners ram a 3000 attack monster into an opponents "your opponent will take any battle damage from this card" card and lose us the duel. While I could kind of understand if they just didn't know how to use cards they don't originally use, my partner (Tyranno Hassleberry) straight up made the dumbest fucking decisions from his unedited deck. I saw him tribute a 3000 attack dinosaur to activate "big evolution pill" (a card which lets you tribute a dinosaur so you can summon any level dino without tributing for 3 turns) and then summon a level 4? I swear to christ the partner AI is a straight up handicap in this game, and I don't notice it being nearly this bad on the opponents. If the AI knew how to duel even somewhat competently, I might have given this game 4 stars.

Anyway there's some QoL improvements that were good - Unlocking packs is now more flexible, with multiple ways to unlock certain ones. There's also more ways of gaining cards in general, AND BP is rewarded in much higher amounts.

There's also a few things from the original I didn't like which still exist. Animations still can't be customised, so if you wanna watch something like only life point and summon cutscenes, you're out of luck unless you also want "My turn!" and card drawing cutscenes every turn. One big bonus though is that boss monster animations CAN be activated by you now! Too bad there's no way to have them on without duelists animations.

The card converter still kind of sucks and requires a guide to make any use out of. It realllllly needed a way to like "Insert X amount of spare card copies at once" button instead of having to add them one by one.

Overall it's a fun game though. Less grindy than the original, and though the story was nothing amazing, having it be different for each character encourages replay value a lot more.

Oh and every motherfucker in this game uses Snatch Steal, which got annoying very fast.