Now that I've had a little bit of time to think on it: NTWEWY is a great sequel and more than worth the wait. I don't think it's as good as the first game, but that mostly comes down to the first game having more story beats that I like in media as someone who prefers character-driven content (and tbh TWEWY is just a big character study).

The pacing is a little rough and there isn't a lot of forward momentum until the main plot kicks up, making the game kind of hard for me to play sometimes. But the fights are fun, if not a little confusing, the aesthetic is lovely, and the music, of course, goes hard. If you liked TWEWY, you should like NTWEWY. I'm just happy to see this game come back from the grave in any capacity, really!

This is one of the best 3DS games ever made. There is so much thats great about this game. First of all, the gameplay. I think it's mostly really well designed, braving and defaulting allows you to play either really fast or really slow depending on the enemy. Play carefully and default or spam brave points and nuke everything, the game encourages each play style. The job system also encourages you to play how you want. This has like over 20 jobs, each job is very unique and most are viable to play as. There are dozens of party configurations, and different strategies, this allows you to play how you want. This also makes it so if you fight a boss you a struggling against a change in job strategy will most likely help you beat it rather than grind. Dungeon design is kinda boring, it's better than the first game since it has more gimmicks like the mist area that gives different status buffs per area, but mainly it's just basic corridor sections you run around in with random encounters. Also another mild criticism is that I feel like the game is a tad too easy. The graphics for a 3DS game a pretty great, I love the hand drawn backgrounds, it makes it feel like a story book almost. The music is damn good since it's Square Enix. The story is really interesting. The game is very cheesy with it's story, like a lot of characters are one note tropes, and a lot of characters can't be taken seriously. However I feel like this makes it charming when paired with the serious nature of the game when it comes to the world and it's politics. The cast is spectacular, really well balanced. They all bounce off eachother really well, Tiz is way more interesting than in the first game. Edea is Edea so she's awesome, Yew's growth throughout the game and his underdog attitude is endering, and Magnolia is funny and kind. I would say it has a better cast than the first game. The story for the first 3/4s is great since it tackles Yews past, the villains and their motivations, the politics of the Church and the state, and the sins of your forefathers. It's really interesting world building. Then the last 1/4 happens... This is where the game reaches peak fiction moments, like the first game towards the end it gets meta, like really meta. But it takes it up to another level. Not gonna spoil anything but I was amazed at the final boss. So overall, for a 3DS game it's pretty incredible and worthy of your time. A worthy sequel to the first game.

Warning: Wall of Text
Controversial take up front: The "Dexit" was actually a great thing and I really wish they would remove more bloat from the games. Who fucking cares if Stantler is not in the game, get over yourself. Use something you've never used before. People who transfer Pokémon they used previously into a brand new game file are weirdos tbh.

Anyway... Sword and Shield definitely have some good aspects to them, but thoroughly disappoint with the execution.
- I liked the setting, with the Gym battles growing more and more in popularity, more people recognizing you, etc.
- Lots of great Pokémon designs.
- I loved that Regional Variants returned, as I was concerned that it'd stay a Gen 7 thing only. Even better, they also added Variants of Pokémon outside of Gen 1.
- Obtaining Pokémon that can be used in competitive fights is now easier than ever, thanks to Raids and items that change a Pokémon's Nature or Ability, for example.
- Some Characters are charming and have decent writing, while others have completely nonsensical writing or an obviously lacking/lackluster character arc.
The thing is: Pokémon games don't need a good story to be fun at all. But the fact that they obviously tried to write one but failed in almost all aspects makes its existence very grating and leaves you with a bitter taste once you finish the main story, and possibly also during some post-game stuff. It's just... so bad... It's extremely obvious that they ran out of time to flesh out anything in the ending.

There's plenty of other parts of the game where you can practically feel the crunch that Game Freak was very obviously forced to work under, whether it's obviously cut content or severe lack of polish of existing content.
Graphically, the games borders on amateurish. Ugly textures, stiff animations for some Pokémon and NPCs (especially cutscenes), FPS issues. The Wild Area is conceptually a nice idea, but the way Pokémon just pop up 3 meters in front of you is awful. Yes, I get that it'd be tons of work to optimize it, making a low LOD model for each Pokémon or whatever. At that point I'd rather just not have the Wild Area at all. But you gotta have cool features to advertise your game I guess!

Sadly, there still is many things I can complain about:
- The terribly obvious, grating lack of any sort of voice acting. Especially since there are several cutscenes that focus on a character speaking or even worse, singing. Can one of the most successful videogame franchises in the world really not afford to have JUST SOME voice acting in a mainline game?
- The Online functions were awful. Terrible to navigate, stupidly hard to play together with friends.
- Gigantamax is just another tacked on marketing feature that will be forgotten and irrelevant in the next game.
- Speaking of Gigantamax: Raids made it especially obvious how fucking s l o w the fights are whenever status effects of any sort happen. Fighting a Raid Pokémon with Intimidate means that you'll have to wait a fucking minute before you can perform any action because it has to play the animation for EVERY SINGLE POKÉMON and then have the dialog for "X's attack fell!" pop up for EVERY SINGLE POKÉMON AGAIN. PLEASE, make a toggable fast-mode for this shit.
- Some Pokémon are ridiculously hard to catch/find - and they are usually not even good. I really wanted to use a Solosis but it had stupidly specific conditions to appear. And then there is shit like Runerigus. WHY?
- Forced EXP share. I tried to be open to the idea and used a team of 12 Pokémon instead of 6 and rotated them in and out, but I rather wouldn't have needed to. Also I was still overleved most of the time lol
- And last but not least, one of the worst and most annoying "features" is level restrictions for catching Pokémon. Once a Pokémon is JUST ONE SINGLE LEVEL above your current(!) mon, it's near IMPOSSIBLE to catch. What the fuck? Yes, I get that they didn't want people to catch something 20 level above their current adequate level to steamroll everything. But surely that shouldn't stop anyone from catching a level 13 Pokémon when most of my team is level 15 and my leading Pokémon happened to be level 12?? Absolutely infuriating bullshit feature implemented in the least elegant way possible.

In the end, it sadly still is a Pokémon game, so people will buy it - including myself, full price and all. I love Pokémon, I really do. But it's been obvious for several generations that they let Game Freak - still a relatively small company - work on a shoestring budget to produce mainline games for one of the biggest and highest grossing video game franchises in the whole world. That grade of greed is just sad, but sadly it works.

While not as strong as the 1st game. Most of the cases don't feel as strong as the 1st one and a lot of the killers you can see a mile away. However unlike the others, case 4 is easily one of the best and most compelling cases in the series. It completely inverts everything about the previous games and is really engaging all the way through. I will say cases have a lot better pacing and you don't spend as much time faffing about investigating and a lot more time is spent in the court room, which is a good thing. Also I was kinda disappointed that Franciska's development is not really there compared to Edgeworth's in the 1st game. She felt like wasted potential. Overall though this is a solid entry albeit not a good as its predecessor.