I really don't care for the direction this game takes. The first AITSF game was not a masterpiece but I consider it to be a great return to form for Uchikoshi, and I was glad to see that his team could output quality-looking stuff after VLR and ZTD were a bit disappointing in the visuals department, and the writing, characters, and the very cool gameplay idea of Somnium, having to wade through and play along with the logic of someones dream to direct them to revealing information which furthers your case, was really really awesome. I was very happy with it.

While AINI continues to improve on the visuals department, I'm really sorry to see that it's a downgrade in pretty much every other department.

Characters have their personalities gimped or are mostly shelved only to make returning gags from AITSF or are the victim of M Night Shyamalan tier twists, the story lacks a real meaningful hook and the ongoing mystery simply is not as interesting as either of the AITSF routes and often takes hilariously stupid turns that harm not only this game but the original too, and ohhh god they destroyed any complexity in regards to Somnium. Gone is every object having multiple ways to interact with it, gone is the creative thinking asked of the player to steer somnium in the right direction, and gone is the branching that somniums used to provide within the story. The somniums were the highlight of the original whenever they came up, and now it's just a linear chore of a break from the linear chore of a story. Even Zero Time Dilemma, despite being a complete mess story and presentation-wise, still managed to deliver a fulfilling gameplay loop on-par with 999 & VLR, there's no excuse here.

It's depressing, I had a lot of faith in both the team and the sequel, but it's a complete rejection of what I enjoyed in the original. Why did the team take it in this direction, I wonder? Who knows. May Team Zero Escape move on to another original IP because they've squandered this one.