[S1x]

I haven't gone through every piece of this game yet, but I did a basic playthrough and (apparently) saw the best ending, and there's several things I thought about it. Minor spoilers apply to this list, but nothing too much.

Pros:
- Meeting and fighting with each of the old characters was always neat
- There's a lot of side quests for stuff, all optional. I didn't really try any but I'm going to go through each of them on another playthrough
- Having monsters on your side was pretty neat; because even if you don't have 4 characters there will still almost always be 4 allies fighting
- Like before, the way you start fights with monsters is perfect for the times when you want to grind a little bit and when you just want to avoid most of 'em
- Skits are way more entertaining to watch. The voice acting on every one of them probably helps out too
- You don't have to waste time on the world map since you can instantly travel to any place
- THANK YOU, you're actually able to freely roam around the battlefield if you need to
- The remixed music is neat, and the "building #2" music was awesomely intense, heh
- I haven't read the game in any other language or anything, but the dialogue and stuff didn't seem messed up really. There were some typos here and there, but they were far less frequent than in some other games I've played
- The last part of the ending made me smile

Cons:
- The main character did get on my nerves a little bit. This feeling became less the more I went through the game, though
- There's only two people you can fully customize
- It's sometimes not obvious which battles I'm supposed to lose. Quit making me waste all those items >_<
- It was nice to visit most of the places from the last game and see what was going on, but there didn't seem to be enough new areas
- There were a lot of normal-looking doors that you couldn't open, for whatever reasons
- A lot of the story would very likely go over the top of people that haven't played the first game
- The whole monster system was fine when I needed it but not that engaging. I don't think I ever switched out somebody about halfway through the game when I already had 3 quite powerful guys
- If, at any point, you are surrounded by a group of small monsters during a battle, you are screwed and there is nothing you can do
- Nobody, not even the final boss, could fully guard my 15-hit combo I learned to do easily. It made it too easy to flinch everybody and get in hit after hit after hit. Maybe that'll change if I crank up the difficulty
- The main game seemed pretty short
- Okay, the final area could have been one of the neatest mazes ever, but I think the developers just got lazy or something at that point

Despite plenty of the things that bug me about this game, it's definitely not bad at all. It's just a little underwhelming compared to the first game.