I thought this game was cute. I played it because I got curious about what the game was after seeing a meme comparing its cover art in various regions. Possessing enemies was fun and there was a large cast of unique enemies, with every level introducing two or three new ones. I only ever saw one variant of an existing enemy which made every level exciting. The bosses weren't so great, many of them being extremely difficult and causing the game to slow down. There is also a lot of slowdown in bigger rooms which are very common in the later levels. Sometimes this makes it feel impossible. I played the gameboy version and was surprised to see there was an arcade version where the ghost you play as is actually the dead boyfriend of the girl you try to save, I was just told she was some researcher's daughter. I'm not sure if I got a full experience and I couldn't enjoy the later parts due to the difficulty & slowdown, but I was still impressed.

I ended up liking this game but not without really bad first impression. The mystery's set up telling us there's some sci-fi ploy we don't have rules for and Ryuki's anachronistic sense of time did not engage me to the story as there was no point to predicting or guessing anything. New characters had either dull or bizarre introductions and a certain major character is introduced with awfully long exposition. Ryuki's partner, Tama, was awful. Her constant unfounded sex jokes made me miserable. The game's story started boring me and did not pick up until ''She Was the Universe'' afterwhich I was excited to get to Mizuki's side. While I still enjoyed both her and Aiba just like I did in the first game their dynamic fell into issues of either sterile dialouge or repeated humour from Date & Aiba's dynamic (repeating jokes from the first game are a bigger problem with minor NPCs.) However in roughly the last third things started improving immensly. There was much more happening in the story including better interactions between the major and new characters. I also began to realise what the plot twist of this game would be unlike the first game where I kind of assumed what was happening as the last thing that'd make sense. When the twist came I really enjoyed the mystery that came out of it and the fantastic character arc it lead to within the best somnium of either game. By now major plot points, although many still feeling contrived, felt like they were aiding to fun character interactions which made it much more enjoyable. I'm not saying this is flawless, the game would still improve from having better justified plot points but they let stronger aspects flourish unlike how the first game built up to a dissapointing ending. I liked the ending of this game much more because it kept its tone and let its great characters shine.

I really enjoyed this game for its aesthetics, comedy and unique story-presentation but most of all the great and sincere character writing. I ended up enjoying a great deal of the cast and found nearly every main character effective at their role. I ended up loving Mizuki and Aiba especially. This game's best moments are emotional or comedic beats where its well developed characters interact with each other to drive the story, unfortunately this is not always what happens. The central crime mystery of this game is what ends up moving the main route of this game, which falls short. Several scenarios are too contrived and left me frustrated like getting incorrect information presented the same way as fact or exposition and the few times Aiba is out of energy for no justifiable reason. That's also the case for certain plot points which could've been fine if the scale of the game was kept to its character interactions but it instead developed into a climax that felt completey nonsensical and left behind things I thought the game did wonderful. It was mostly this, but also the heavy reuse of locations and some jokes that didn't land that ended up losing my love but I still think fondly of the characters.

Hey did you know that Renju did not inherit the storage company from his father and it was instead given to other people?