I am going fucking insane trying to work out all these fusion daisy-chains to . It's a roller-coaster of fusing up and down to get as many skills up to my next big fusion and christ, it makes my head overheat sometimes. Satisfying when it all comes together, of course.
I'd played DeSu2 before, but never much. I stopped at the second day on my go-through on the DS specifically because of this announcement, uh... a couple years ago, lol. But now it's finally here, and it's pretty good. I don't think I'm far enough to make a judgment on story, but I'm definitely not feeling some of the... atmosphere of DeSu1. It did a really good job of emphasizing tension and desperation, of being way in over your head. DeSu2 is way more empowering, in that sense. You're with JP's, so you're not exactly worried about finding a place to sleep and no one really deals with, uh... surviving. The reality of the circumstances might be a better way to put it. There's just less dramatic momentum to everything, which is a shame.
This is much less of a big deal, but I think death clocks/Laplace Mail was a way cooler take on the same general premise. Death clocks might not have meant much in the grand scheme of things, but they really helped instill that sense of inevitability and dread to the first game. Nicaea just doesn't really manage that, and doesn't seem to do a lot with its' own premise either (of not knowing the exact time or place of the event).
That said, I am overall much more satisfied with the characters in this game as opposed to the DeSu1, where I really only had a few characters I really liked. Daichi and Io are much better characters than their counterparts in the first game, especially. Airi is already my favourite DeSu character, and Makoto and Jungo aren't far off from that distinction either.
I'm really impressed by the dub overall. Airi, Fem!Tico (like seriously, wow) and Fumi are huge stand-outs in particular, but the quality of acting is overall really good. It's pretty surprising to me, actually, since I wasn't wholly impressed with Overclocked's dub, but there's really not a single performance I've heard so far I'd call worse than okay.