Blue Lions route. I really liked some of the characters in this game, and a lot of that group was in Blue Lions, so that's nice. Dimitri is especially good and is a great take on the standard "Lord" character, though I think even he could've been done better.
this game having 3/4 routes was weird. the way that the early chapters's conflicts tied especially well in with BL characters made me think that pre-timeskip was different depending on your house, but i guess i was just lucky. the game not changing stuff around based on what route you pick in the early game is pretty lame and is the main reason i haven't done a replay. also i was falling asleep mid-combat towards the end of the game and started skipping months just to finish the game sooner. still good but too much content for its own good, i think

This entire game is carried by Komaeda. I dislike half of the cast and only like about 3 characters total, counting him. Komaeda is a very cool character but this game uses him as a crutch for its dramatic tension. Unlike DR1, there's no real "beat the mastermind" thing going on behind the scenes. You're just existing until either Monokuma or Komaeda stirs enough shit for someone to get killed. There's no agency. The ending is a cool twist but the protag yelling the same words at an AI until he wins isn't a very satisfying ending, especially considering that it essentially means the entire plot of DR2 feels like it was meaningless from the beginning.
The only reason this isn't a 0 is because Komaeda is in the game and 2-5 is the best case in the entire series

this game really introduced 10 main characters to you at the start of the game and expected shit to just work out, huh
it's a good game and i give it some credit because it's the first one in a long arc, but man, that was a very bold writing decision and i don't think it paid off. i also think this game's sidequests were significantly worse than previous games, partly because for 70% of them Rean is the only guy in the party (less screentime for other characters, less interesting dialogue) and because that same percentage has all of them in the same fuckin small town. now, crossbell showed us that focusing on an area can work, but for whatever reason it just doesn't here. i feel no attachment to trista, thors, or the students despite spending a good amount of an 80 hour game with them. it does not improve next game

I wish I liked this game more. It has the best combat in the series and has a super cool premise for its plot, but it just falls flat. The debt cripples the pacing pretty damn well, but even without that, the first half of the game feels super dry as it takes longer than necessary to give you your old party members back and nothing interesting happens while it does that. The alternate universes premise is super interesting, as is the fact that you're wiping them out, but the game doesn't do nearly enough with this as a moral quandary or as a storytelling device. I can think of a ton of AUs that they could've written in that would've been more interesting than some of the ones they kept. The villain was incredibly lame unlike in the last game. Though I will say that the bad ending was peak fiction.
I see why people love this game, but I can't bring myself to do it.