I came into the early Final Fantasy games with basically zero expectations. As far as I was aware, the first game in the series worth talking about was 6. Imagine my surprise when FF2 managed to fall FAR below these nonexistent expectations.
The most impactful feature of FF2 is how stats grow. Instead of level ups, your stats now improve with certain actions (attack to improve attack, use magic to improve magic, etc.). And while this sounds interesting in concept, playing the game reveals just how awful the system really is. For one, growths seem to be somewhat character specific. If I spammed attack with all the characters, Firion and Guy's strength stats always increased 3 or 4 times over before Maria's went up once. It doesn't feel like much of a "guild your own character" when you're still trying to railroad me. Secondly, since there's no longer a hard number of predicted battles to fight before I take on tougher foes, the stats are all meaningless numbers until you've gotten thrashed by enough enemies to know when you're outmatched. For example, in FF1 and most other RPGs, you'll know when your levels are adequate because you aren't struggling with the current enemies you're facing, and because the amount of exp they give you are pennies. In FF2 however, your stat growths are battle-specific, so the only way to know if your stats are adequate is to test out each and every one on a multitude of different enemies, which is obviously ludicrous.
This leads us to the fact that FF2 wants you to GRIND. Not just fighting a certain number of enemies, no. You've got to be nose-deep in whatever stats you're trying to improve to even be able to keep track of your improvements.
The saving grace of grinding in a lot of other RPGs is that you can simply disassociate while you do so. FF2 does not have this luxury. Despite spending around 3 hours less on FF2 than FF1, 2 felt it had been going on for WEEKS.

Then there's the issue of story. FF2 has a far more involved world than FF1, both in story and in layout.
In FF1, you don't really have much to go off of other than solving a town's problems and restoring the crystals. This makes your goal easy to keep track of, since at any given point you know exactly WHY you're doing what you're doing.
In FF2 however, the overarching plot has far more say in what you do and where you go. So I stead of simply finding the next town and continuing your adventure, you must constantly talk to the same NPCs over and over again to get your next objective.
This also means that your movement is very restricted to the progression the game wants you to move at. FF1 progresses you from land, to seas, to rivers, to skies, naturally allowing the player to figure out where they want to go next through the number of areas that were previously inaccessible. FF2 tells you to go from town to town, but only after you talk to a specific person. FF2 tells you to fly across the world, but not in an airship you explore in, but rather from paying Cid to constantly be your taxi driver. By the time you finally unlock sea travel in FF2, there isn't even anywhere you'd want to go. By the time you unlock full air travel, you're at the end of the game.

Perhaps it's unfair to compare FF2 so heavily to FF1. But FF1 was a mediocre game to me. It did the bare minimum of everything it needed to get right, which means that it's the perfect springboard for how FF2 gets it so wrong.
It astounds me that there are people out there who consider this game to be the hidden gem of the franchise. To those people: did you think 2 was good because it's UNIQUE, or because it was actually of quality? Because if it's the latter, that hidden gem must be a pretty tough dig.

Danganronpa has made me seriously consider the worth of a visual novel as a video game. On the pessimistic side, my opinion of games such as the Ace Attorney series have soured now that I know visual novels can be far more than glorified movies with point-and-click elements.
But as you can probably tell from my score, this is a VERY good thing for Danganronpa. The class trials have so many elements to them that you'll still get introduced to new mechanics into the second to last chapter. These all exist to engage you with the material and actually feel like you're playing a video GAME as the story plays out.
And speaking of the story, it's incredibly good. Obviously I won't be spoiling anything here, but know that this game puts a lot of work into properly pacing its story elements across its runtime, making the climaxes as satisfying as they are.