I was very cold on the first game but this iterates - and more importantly improves upon everything. Dual swords is its own stance (and there's two more stances that are better!), there's 90% less shitty sliding sequences, the story is more in-depth, there's dark troopers and magnaguards...

there were a few sequences that were still awful or poorly conveyed or just not fun, but significantly less than the original.