You know, the biggest reason this one feel weaker is because it is inconsequential. Everything is given to you, while the first one made you work your ass on dumb annoying jobs and showed you how pathetic that is, that helped with the pace of the game and you felt some kinda of uh accomplishment when you got it.
Here, after removing the requirement and making the bosses easily accessible you wonder why you should care about them, not only it is easy to fight them, there is a lot of them and just a few are iconic and are going to be remembered.
Also, they really toned down the difficulty, you know? Almost all of the ranking battles you can win making a LOT of mistakes, i even checked more than once if i was on the lowest difficulty. I feel like they tried too much to improve on what most people complained about the first one, like the empty and clunky open world and dumb annoying side jobs but i felt like they just removed a lot of personality with it and while i do think the nes like minigames are super cute, there is no incentive to play them since you dont really need it, you know? What you gonna do with the money? Buy tshirts you dont see? Well, you see them when you complete the revenge missions if you get the no jacket but even then you are already finishing the game so whatever.
But, while trying to improve on what the first one, they got some things right, the ost here is way better i love this song. The combat feels way better and it is way cooler. And BEST of all, they added a super cute cat minigame, it was all i was hyped for, taking care of that fat ass cat jeane. Okay, i made her lose weight, yay i won.......
But yes, while i feel like the gameplay is way better here, i cared way less about characters and all, so in the end, it was a slightly worse game for me.

The best and worst thing about this game is working. You spend a lot of time on this game driving the same roads, doing tedious jobs and is wondering all the time "is it worth it?"
Then you get like omg its just like real life and you start to realize that no its not worth it, but it needs to be done, after all, you need to pay that rent or enter that ranked match (in travis case). Yes, this game showed again how working is hell, and you get the full experience, riding in a super ugly open world with questionable physics and when you arrive in the job you do something dumb like grabbing coconuts while the npc says omg you need to be hardworking it will get better but it never does.

Super charming game that does a lot of things right for me.
The timed combat is something i had not played yet and i had lots of fun testing my reflexes, the most fun i had with it was at the start of the game when virgo was alone and if you made mistakes you were basically dead. After some hours, you know, the game got too easy for my liking, you know? Having a party really dumbed down a lot the difficulty of this game, making combat way less fun. Specially after you mastered crafting, which is something i didnt have much fun, while it was cool to have a lot of weapons with advantages and disadvantages, there was a point in the game virgo was so strong that it didnt matter much what you pick actually. Please note i played this game on normal which the game said it was the correct one and what it said it was balanced for.
Besides that, all the game atmosphere was cute, i liked all character designs mostly and while i think the music was a bit repetitive it was still fun in the end.
Last but not least, this game is super gay, so grab it if you want to see gay zodiacs dating.

Awful dungeons that not only are repetitive, but they always forces you to take longest path.
Boring and simplistic combat where you'll probably set it to auto or just press one button all the time.
The only saving grace when navigating through the mazes and awful combat was the music. Some of them are so good.
Well, I would not say this is a good game. It has good characters, touches some themes well, others not so much. But would you say dragging yourself through 20~30 hours of an annoying experience is okay? I'd not unless it had excellent characters and an excellent story. That's not the case here.