This is a somewhat meek thumbs up. This is a very cute game and I definitely think it's worth a look if you like ADV games, but if you're like me you might end up feeling a little disappointed at how short it is. It has the length and complexity of about one and a half Ace Attorney cases; by the time you'd assume you've hit the one-third mark of the story you start to realize it's about to wrap up.

For positives, the game looks very pretty and the CD-ROM aesthetic it's going for is very cozy and easy on the eyes. All the character portraits are adorable, and very expressive, too.
I overall enjoyed the writing from start to finish. Character dialogues are very fun to read through and the humor worked for me, and all the characters are very "believable" and easy to feel sympathetic towards. The deuteragonist, in particular, is incredibly likeable and you'd probably kill for her by the first hour of reading.
The menu-based control system is very unobtrusive and it's easy to intuit what action bears progress without the game holding your hand for each step. It's like a cute mixture of Ace Attorney investigation sections and classic point-and-click dialogue trees. The game is admittedly somewhat aggressively linear, although this is arguably preferable to allowing the player to get lost.

I don't have that many complaints, but the ones I do can be argued to be mild spoilers, so I'll blackbox them below.
Both of the major complaints I have with the game naturally stem from the short length of the game. You can posit that it's my fault for overestimating the game's scope, but my feelings are what they are.
The first issue I have is that the characters don't really have many surprises to them. Once you get your first look at each of them, you can more or less surmise their entire character by reading their vibes and the game never really subverts your initial assumptions of what they'll end up being like. Granted, there is one character whose big secret was not quite what I expected, but even in that case I already had a feeling that something about them would be unveiled sooner or later. I imagine that if the game was planned to be longer, a lot of the characters would probably have a lot more room to breathe or twist around as the story progressed, instead they just kinda have their one thing and then they're done.

The second issue is that the ultimate mystery just wasn't that satisfying to fully unravel. It has the Ace Attorney problem where there just aren't that many characters who would plausibly be behind everything, instead you have a bunch of characters who are putting up a front but are obviously hiding something other than murder, and then you remove them from the equation and by process of elimination you only have, at most, a couple of characters who are the most likely to be the killer or mastermind, so whatever conclusion you end up with doesn't feel like much of a surprise. The ultimate resolution of this mystery in particular feels somewhat lukewarm since there is still a big loose end dangling off after everything, but it's considered "out of scope" for the protagonists, so, that's all folks.

Despite my complaints, it was nice being able to get in relatively early on a small game like this, and I do think that there's potential here for a sequel, or at the very least more adventure games from the small team that put this together. For this game in particular, I'd say buy it if you consider yourself a patron of the arts, but keep your expectations humble.

I'd put this up as a "moderate" thumbs up if Steam allowed me to.

Without wishing to spoil, the pace at which the story progresses with each successful run is oddly fast; this is likely in part because the completion runs need to be split between two different campaigns in order to keep the length comparable to Hades 1.
In addition, the story in general doesn't feel as satisfying as Hades 1's story progression because, unlike in Hades 1, the stakes are more direct than they are personal, Zagreus wanted to defy Hades because he wished to right the wrongs he deemed his father caused to Zagreus and his mother; Melinoe seeks to kill Chronos because He's A Bad Guy And He's Gonna Kill Everyone Unless We Stop Him. Melinoe wants to be reunited with her family, sure, but since she was never really a part of her family in the first place, I found it odd that it was her most important motivation, when her relationship with Hecate and Nemesis were far more interesting.
As I was playing, I also found myself wondering "how the hell are they gonna wring out a post-game out of this story?", and the answer turned out to be that, without wishing to spoil too much, they have to do some REALLY sudden and contrived turns at the very end where you can practically hear screeching tires.

On the gameplay side of things, the balance is pretty busted, which you could argue was also the case with Hades 1, but I do think it's worth mentioning that the Poseidon attack/special boon is absolutely broken with at least three of the six weapons, and snaps the game's difficulty clean in half.
The bosses are alright (though I thought the third boss in the underworld was kinda lame) but a lot of the common enemies kinda feel like filler. If you have a good source of DPS then nothing's really stopping you from zonking out and holding autofire most of the time, since very few enemies have shields and those that do can have their defenses circumvented. Common enemies just aren't as obstructive as they were in Hades 1, so you spend less time having to adapt new strategies on the fly since your general gameplay is for the most part one-size-fits-all.

That all said, I didn't dislike this game, in fact I thought it was good fun and it had me hooked enough to play it for over fifty hours, which is pretty good for a game as repetitive as this.
Finding out what the best synergies are is very satisfying, and it feels good to be able to melt the lifebars of bosses who you previously had issues with killing in the first place.
However, I do think that the "meta" is a lot easier to get a hold of compared to the first game, so a lot of runs can basically be played on automatic if you know what buttons to press, so I don't think I'll commit to speedrunning or grinding out fear levels beyond what's required for the three statues. It's alright for what it is, but I don't think this game could cause the big explosion that the first game did.

something needs to be done about that zappa guy

Gold Ship

So, so, so happy with the new chapters, and I will continue to be excited for the remaining three chapters for as long as they're not out. What's already here is already worth the full price, but you already knew that.

i like it when guile goes "shooting"

Nowhere even close to being done with the game but strong first impressions. The gameplay is honestly really fun and writing-wise, anyone who's played DR and/or ZE will feel right at home-- if you've ever feared that Kodaka might have matured in the slightest, don't worry, he's still an edgy 17 year old boy at heart.

EDIT AFTER 70+ HOURS: oh my god man. oh my god. holy cow

i love bouncing on balls

balance is messed up beyond belief and theres a bunch of stuff thats either totally useless or takes way more effort and investment than its worth, but you can't get too mad at a game where you can vault up ledges without a contextual climb button. also the soundtrack is pretty good

Hinako my beloved