It's a bad game in almost every way, but you will have a lot of fun playing it anyway. It has a lot of weird, off-beat charm. The playable character in particular is incredibly charismatic, which makes it an easy game to like. You'll almost certainly be frustrated whenever you have to play a combat stage - but whenever anyone talks, you're in for a good time.

It's well worth playing, esecially with a friend, just so you have someone you can turn to and laugh with whenever York says something eccentric. And so that you can make them do the combat sections.

AI 2 isn't without charm, but in order to make a certain late game meta twist work, the rest of the game suffers. Characters act weirdly. Any number of dialogue lines or lore have been awkwardly written to hide the twist. Most investigation leads go either unadressed or nowhere for many hours of playtime, leaving you feeling like the story is dragging you in random directions. Four separate characters have to wear masks all the time. One of them is too dumb an inclusion to be believed, but she had to be like this to have the twist work at all, so in she goes.

Scenes end and transition abruptly. Instead of elaborating on the previous games' sci-fi elements like, you know, AI and the somniums, they had to introduce entirely new, unrelated ones. There are plenty of bizarre retcons to the first AI Somnium. Things that in the first game were just jokes or red herrings are serious plot elements here. On top of all this, one of the viewpoint characters has to be an unreliable narrator who is established to hallucinate and have short-term memory loss. You seeing all the nonsense they had to do in order to set this dumb twist up?

AI 1 had a plot that could feel meandering as well, but funny banter would help alleviate that frustration, especially the dialogue between the two main characters. The new playable characters in this game, Ryuki especially, just can't measure up. The action sequences, which in the first game were funny scenes where Aiba helped Date do some trick shooting, have changed to boring, long-winded martial arts Quick Time Events. Somniums still vary widely in quality and can feel like roadblocks to the story rather than the selling point of the game.

Iris and Mizuki were standout side characters in the first game, and I thought guys like Moma could be pretty funny. While they're all here in the sequel to some degree or other, there haven't been any new side characters introduced that are as strong to give a heart to this new story. Kizuna and Lien in particular fall completely flat for me at least, and the less said about Komeji the better. A lot of jokes and elements from the first game get brought back and repeated, but you can't just tell the same joke 10 times and still expect to get a laugh.

AI Somnium 2 is an annoying game that only sometimes has the charm of the first one. It keeps undermining the funny parts to cover up a pointless plot twist, repeats old elements without interesting changes, and has an underwhelming new cast. It ends on a good note - but only because once the twist has finally been revealed, it's free to pay off the drama before having a silly and funny finale. Would've been cool if it was more like that all along.