I was having quite a lot of fun with TOTK last year, playing it for about a week non stop, however, my exams in Uni were about to begin so I avoided picking it up for about 2 weeks. After the tests ended, I developed this extremely odd feeling of not actually wanting to play this ever again. Just the thought of it, made it seem like a chore, and I struggled to remember good things about it without feeling tired of doing it, for some reason.

It's been over a year since I left off so I decided to force myself to finish it, and after a day or so, I can finally take it off from my backlog. It was, still quite nice, but I'm beginning to think this is a genuinely cursed game because I don't think I've ever felt this way with any other piece of media.

When I was a kid, I loved Digimon a lot. I watched the animes on TV, I had some action figures, I had bootleg trading cards, I made silly songs with Digimon as their core, so of course I would have games as well. Digimon World was a personal favorite on the PS1, at the time (and I still have fond memories of it, which were rekindled when I played Next Order recently), and when I saw that there was a Digimon World 2, of course I needed to check it out. It had Veemon on the cover, dammit! (he was new at the time)
I did beat the game, but my memories about it were somewhat foggy. So now, as a grown-ass adult, I was reminded of the game, and decided to give it one more go. Immediately, nostalgia hit me like a truck, and I even said the classic "This game was my childhood!!!!!" out loud to my gf at the time. But then, as the feeling subsided, I was quickly reminded of the reason I was able to endure this game as a kid in the first place: Gameshark.

The game is a gigantic slog. It's a dungeon crawler with turn based combat, and the dungeons (or "domains") keep getting way deeper and more convoluted as you progress. That's expected for the genre, I guess, but for whatever reason, everything takes TOO MUCH TIME to load, especially when combat happens. The battle itself takes around 20 seconds to allow you to even select an option on the menu, and then when you do, you have to wait another six or seven seconds of idle animation PER ATTACK (it's a 3v3 combat at most, so a single turn of battle could take up to a whole minute). Thank God for frame throttles on emu[redacted], I don't know if I'd have any patience for turns like that nowadays.
Ok, we do some battling, slowly building up XP for your party (which demands some investment to have, since you have to buy items to lure new digimon from the domains), and then you hit a wall. A level cap. You can only go so far before having to sacrifice all your investment in a fusion ("DNA Digivolution", or "Jogress" in the original) where two digimon combine to form a stronger one. And when I say "stronger", I mean "The HP, MP and level cap increase a little bit but you're back to the base level of your previous evolution". Infinite grinding ensues.
(Spoiler alert: the game's intro shows a fusion of WarGreymon and MetalGarurumon to form Omegamon/Omnimon. That's a fucking lie, and all the kids felt that. Shame on you, Bandai.)
This might be a minor grip, but there's also no "dex" to keep track of the creatures you already found or fused. I know that's not the point with digimon specifically, but as a guy stuck with a "gotta catch em all" mentality, it's a bummer.

But ok, suppose you have a great party and only care about going through a handful of domains to progress through the story, it shouldn't take too long, right? Nope. There are TOO MANY DUNGEONS in this freaking game, and the only thing that changes inside each of them are the kinds/levels of digimon and obstacles you can find. And if you don't spend a lot of money upgrading your digi-beetle (your vehicle for walking around) or buying specific items to fit your very limited inventory space to deal with some of those obstacles, you'll have to quit near the end and do it allllll over again.
The dungeon maps are pretty standardized, and the floor/walls are the same through most of the game. Even the music (which is mostly pretty good, especially on boss fights) gets old pretty quick, and it takes a very long time for the game to start using different BGM. When there's finally some variety happening, and the story actually gets kinda interesting, it's just the game telling you it's about to end.
And it just ends. It's kind of abrupt, and the post game feels pretty pointless since there's no more progress to be had. Unless you just want to upgrade your party to the max and catch all the strongest digimon on Tera Domain (without being able to catalog them in game, mind you).

As a child, Digimon World 1 captivated me, but I think Digimon World 2 exhausted me. I could never bring myself to play 3, and I was never fond of dungeon crawlers ever again. As an adult, I tried having a new perspective on it, but failed. It feels even worse now. And yet... I don't regret the experience, I'm a sucker for creature collection.
But I wouldn't be able to recommend it to anyone who's not a diehard digimon fan. And I'm still mad about the Omegamon thing.