tl;dr - I played this game on hard; if you're interested enough based on the first game to buy it then at the very least do not play the game on hard-- it doesn't deserve the effort.

NnK2 nails everything that makes jRPGs great: boppin soundtrack, great visual style, effective storytelling, etc. And kudos to the team at Level 5 for innovating their combat, taking a significant departure from the combat system of NnK1. Unfortunately, they didn't do their research on what makes action RPGs appealing to players. Punishingly deficient party member AI, a troublesome in-combat party system, an approach to encounter/enemy design which runs counter to all the innovations they bring to combat, and a dodge roll with damn near no i-frames all plague the actual gameplay. It's very unfortunate that such an enjoyable experience is bogged down by gameplay which rewards you for doing nothing in combat and punishes you for doing any of the cool stuff they give you to do.

And they give you a LOT of cool stuff, by the way. The flair on the animations is spectacular. I enjoyed using some moves every time I used them, for the duration of the 74hr playthrough! Early on the game feels fine. The fights feel fair, and when they feel fair the gameplay is incredibly satisfying. However, the further into the playthrough I got, the more apparent the designers' unfamiliarity with the genre began to show.

My most minor gripe, to begin with, is a massive input buffer. If it was just that, I wouldn't even bother mentioning it. It comes across as a "git gud" situation. Just learn better input discipline, and the problem is fixed. But it's just the first straw on the camel's back. You see, there is no animation cancelling in this game, a design choice best left to the genre's professional designers.

Almost out of the gate, you aren't being given enough time on some attack patterns to even finish a heavy attack animation, so you quickly learn drop heavy attacks form your repertoire. Soon afterwards you are introduced to this games most interesting and arguably most fun mechanic, the Higgledies. These little rabblerousers run around the battlefield doing helpful actions until they're ready to be activated to use some powerful magic. The only problem: they have an animation lock longer than a heavy attack.

In fact, it turns out most spells, even the limited use player ones, all have very long animation locks! Have fun trying to use those while you're participating in the fight, better just sit in the back and hope you don't get targeted by a line AoE, or homing projectile, because if you take damage it will consume your resources and cancel the spell. The bosses are the worst offenders of this, as it genuinely feels like the designers didn't know how to increase fight difficulty, so they made it mathematically impossible to play the game in the intended fashion that's you know, actually FUN.

I spent the final boss fight of the game standing in the back for 25 minutes while the AI chipped him down, because the only reward I'd get for closing distance was a teleport or getting one shot by an attack that was cast as I'm rushing forward to get in my state-mandated 2 fast attack hits for a whopping 50 damage each before he teleports (overuse of teleporting around the arena is also a huge design issue with this game since ranged attacks are almost non-existent but it's just annoying compared to the egregious stuff that kills you for no good reason), so small I didn't even bother looking at the health bar to check my progress at any point in the fight for fear of fooling myself that I can rush down that last bit of health.

They really had something great and managed to make it feel like an insufferable slog with their design choices. If you really liked NnK1, or don't mind bad combat (I'm sure it's much more bearable on normal, although more than likely still bad) this game is probably worth your time. It has everything right, just one crippling flaw of hubris in the combat that brings the rest of it down, waaaaay down.