This game is really freaking awesome. I played the first one before this one and I can say that this is an incredible step, almost like there was an entire generation apart. But not, both are from the 6th gen. Maybe some of the progress was done in the second entry? Dunno but I've heard it is not really good. I don't think I can say much about the gameplay since I am not really too experience in hack and slash games, but I do want to say, the game has STYLE. I don't mean with the style meter in the gameplay and that stuff, but the visual, music, and audio department along with the great cinematics and characters. It embraces the silliness to a point where it is cool without taking itself too seriously, and at the same time it manages to combine some serious parts here and there really smoothly. Just overall a great freaking game. My only complains are with the level design, which is sometimes confusing as hell. And with some aspects of the weapon and style variety. I find the combat styles to not really be a great addition. I think that instead of it giving more variety to the game it incentivizes to keep always the same style since once you already learn the moves it is more convenient to keep practicing with it rather than experimenting with more. Kind of the same happens with the weapons, but even more since you have to upgrade them separately. I used the Rebellion and Cerberus for pretty much the whole game. Pretty much the same with swordsmaster, only changing it on the final boss for trickster. I think that if they focused in one style or implemented systems to incentivize changing your "build" the game would have benefited greatly. Though I do understand the appeal of having variety for replayability purpose and I do respect that design decision in part.
I was about to give it four stars just because of the level design problems but honestly I really loved it and I think 4.5 is fair, specially since I think that if it was not for those two problems it could easily be even a 5/5.