BD2 is an incredibly bland JRPG with no obvious audience. It's too hard for genre beginners, too badly designed for veterans, and too boring for pretty much anybody. The story is the same generic crap we've seen in a thousand other games going back to the very first Final Fantasy. The dialog is mind numbingly boring and the side quests and dungeons seem to be designed to waste as much of your time as possible.

BD2 is not fun to play. Bizarrely, it very often hides critical information from you. You can see what weapon/element monsters are weak to, but not what they're strong against, what they will counter, or even what level they are. There's a card game, but you can't even change your card deck outside of the duel menu. You can only see some stats of items in some menus, and the "weight" system is one of the dumbest JRPG mechanics I've ever seen.

The game also expects you to run back and forth constantly, mostly for very underwhelming rewards. There are many times where you'll find yourself running down a long dead-end path for a single chest which contains a consumable you could have purchased in the very first town. Side quests will most often give you rewards from several towns ago. This is absolutely lazy game design that was done better even 30 years ago.

But most puzzling is the fundamental brokenness of the game. It's as if the developers didn't play test it at all. For example, one of the earliest classes you unlock has a special trait to gain stat bonuses based on the (uncapped) number of monsters you capture. If you do this AT ALL, this class will immediately overpower every other class in the game multiple times over and turn the rest of the game into a trivial mess.

I bought this game and I wanted to see it through, but boy, was it a chore. The single best thing about BD2 is that you can skip 99% of the cutscenes and party dialogs (of which there are MANY.) Which is strange given that there is no remarkable content of any kind. Don't buy this game.

This game has best "turned-based combat" system I've seen.

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