Yeah it's buggy
Yeah, it's story is mostly a mess, that you can predict the ending of in the first 3-4 hours.
But the world is really cool. The saloon is fun, and a great place to see the commentary on your ongoing playthrough (it kinda reminded me of intermissions in starcraft 2, where you got to speak with a lot of the characters. Speaking of characters - they are pretty fun! The old crew is back, and the new additions are welcome as well.
The gameplay is improved, the new stances are great (i love the shooty-tooty), and the 3d platforming sections flow much better this time.
I'd say that the setup for an ending this time was a bit worse, comparing to the first game, but I had fun all the way through.

It’s genuinely impressive how much of an achievement this game is.
Straight up hours of highest quality 3D anime right into your veins, and great gameplay give one of the most fun experiences I’ve had with final fantasy.
I get the “bloated” allegations too, but for me this is a game about chilling with these characters and world, which has existed for many years now, and I love almost every aspect that got explored in-depth.
I just love the way they managed to translate the world, the character, the over the top moments, basically how they would’ve envisioned them in the original.
The ending is something I kind of expected, going from remake, and I’d say that it sets up something quite interesting in the next instalment.
Quite excited for the last part of the trilogy now.

Finally got to finishing it.
I’d say that the gameplay loop here was somewhat more fun to me than even the DS original, however I think that the decision to make the length the way that it is was a mistake.
The gameplay is fine, but having to fight some bosses the second time was whack, everything about the repeated “capture the territory” days was filler af, and I kinda think that some characters got development from out of nowhere. The final week is great at delivering everything that was set up before, but it’s my belief that it could be set up if not better than definetly faster.
Overall, it’s a good package for the fans of the original, if only it was not 30 fucking hours.

A lot of cool new mechanics and jobs, bunch of fanservice for the series players, a whole new location. By all accounts this should be my personal 5 stars.
And yet, I kinda felt that some parts of the experience were underwhelming. My gripes are mostly with the story part being (once again) locked by a pretty bad grindwall, that you basically have to do, if you want to progress. This is the second time RGG studio does this, and if they wanted to be faithful to the dragon quest roots (I still remember the grind in XI), then I guess they succeeded, but the grinding dungeons are generally pretty bad in this one. At least in lad:7 you could just spam auto and let it grind by itself in the tower, but here you have to go through these cookie cutter dungeons that are really boring. I’d say that even Tartarus in P3P was more fun than this.
Kiryu is cool as always, Kasuga continues to be a perfect protagonist, the new characters and all the old ones are great. The cast is almost perfect, although that one character being voiced by Toru Furuya even in English is still a bit weird to me.
Ultimately I feel like it’s an almost perfect JRPG for me, if only they made the grind somewhat more fun.
Oh, and dodonko is fine I guess.