The minute I booted up this game I felt all of the almost five years it's been since Spirit of Justice hit North America. While I wish these games didn't take this long to get localized, I'm ultimately happy I got to play them back to back as they're essentially two halves to one whole. Not that they're bad games standalone just the first game creates and leaves so many loose ends I imagine it was just begging you to buy the sequel when it came out.

Outside of all that, the stories are good, the characters and the writing are good, the music is great, the new mechanics for the trial and investigation periods are great and the presentation is absolutely fucking phenomenal holy SHIT.

The game is pretty much every bit of the classic it's made out to be. Aesthetically the game hits on all fronts and it plays well too. Only real issues is it's a tad too short and it tries to make up for it with the inverted castle gimmick and I couldn't be arsed to will my way through it. I also found that by the end of the game it's too easy to be overpowered if you bother to do any exploring and you can fart through most areas with relative ease. I killed the fake final boss in four attacks which is probably the point but also felt like the culmination of my experience with the last couple of areas of the game. None of this matters though because you get to hit giant ghost books with nunchaku.

LORD I WAS BORN A RAMBLIN MAN-AN
TRYNA MAKE A LIVING AND DOING THE BEST I CAN
AND WHEN IT COMES TO LEAVIN
I HOPE YOU UNDERSTAND
THAT I WAS BORN A RAMBLIN MAN

just follow my moves
and sneak around
be careful not to make a sound
alerts guards on oopsiedent
"oops don't touch that"
lets self get killed, tries again

This game is essentially Fire Emblem: Slightly Different but Mostly Worse. The game never really feels like its own thing and most of the core changes to the Fire Emblem experience don't really pan out well at all. Probably the best changes here are no forced deployment for the main characters, most support conversations reference and play off of story beats and the 2000 health raid bosses are actually fun.

My favourite level is absolutely the level that tries to do the Ike and the Black Knight gimmick from Radiant Dawn. Because of the aforementioned no forced deployment gimmick, you don't have to deploy Ike! If you don't deploy the main character, you can still complete the level by defeating enemies with your other units, as defeating an enemy does damage to the boss or something. Can't actually verify that's how it works but after like 9 turns I won the level for no reason so that was funny. Dumb game.