A complicated one. It's a big improvement over the first one, but the attempts at making the game more of a game are a mixed bag.
The art is great, and it just keeps improving between the titles, while the animations just get more polished. The story is also a big plus, the usual cute fun time with the undercurrent of "the girl is a horror monster in another context" as seen in 1 and Arrogant but evolved still even over Arrogant.
The actual gameplay though is kind of a dud. In explore mode it's still simple decisions except there's even more and starker RNG to them than in Arrogant with sharp and arbitrary success/failure rather than "I guess we defeated fewer/more enemies and lost fewer/more troops", and the "optimal" way to play still takes up a lot of time. Planet explorations aren't interesting once a route has been completed since nothing changes on re-running it, yet they take time. "Quick explore" isn't a real solution to this problem since while it does pick up money and ingredients, it does not pick up the stat gains that the decisions in regular exploration would give. Still, after a certain point it's fine to just go all-in on cooking for the stat gains; which a player might want to savescum for, but still. The H mode, it's less mandatory than in the previous titles, but mechanically it's still all about filling up bars up to a certain level that the player has to eyeball so that they get reached simultaneously for maximum effect before unlocking a "okay just hold it there" toggle which trivializes it completely, but on the upside it's not necessary to do that for long since it won't give stat bonuses once achievements are obtained and the player can just enjoy the good quality animations.
All of that adds up to a decently good game (which, perhaps, would prefer to just be a VN really), just one bogged down with some mechanical tedium. If you can put up with it, and it's worth a play.
The art is great, and it just keeps improving between the titles, while the animations just get more polished. The story is also a big plus, the usual cute fun time with the undercurrent of "the girl is a horror monster in another context" as seen in 1 and Arrogant but evolved still even over Arrogant.
The actual gameplay though is kind of a dud. In explore mode it's still simple decisions except there's even more and starker RNG to them than in Arrogant with sharp and arbitrary success/failure rather than "I guess we defeated fewer/more enemies and lost fewer/more troops", and the "optimal" way to play still takes up a lot of time. Planet explorations aren't interesting once a route has been completed since nothing changes on re-running it, yet they take time. "Quick explore" isn't a real solution to this problem since while it does pick up money and ingredients, it does not pick up the stat gains that the decisions in regular exploration would give. Still, after a certain point it's fine to just go all-in on cooking for the stat gains; which a player might want to savescum for, but still. The H mode, it's less mandatory than in the previous titles, but mechanically it's still all about filling up bars up to a certain level that the player has to eyeball so that they get reached simultaneously for maximum effect before unlocking a "okay just hold it there" toggle which trivializes it completely, but on the upside it's not necessary to do that for long since it won't give stat bonuses once achievements are obtained and the player can just enjoy the good quality animations.
All of that adds up to a decently good game (which, perhaps, would prefer to just be a VN really), just one bogged down with some mechanical tedium. If you can put up with it, and it's worth a play.