OK, finished. Good to know that the other gods are also written halfway decent the further you get in the story.
The weaknesses are still with the execution. It's funny how it's become a meme to attack the narration and the verbosity, but POE2 is actually not that verbose - the problem is that sometimes the narration goes overboard (i.e. anytime it's more than one line, you should be skipping it), and then in the truly important and dramatic moments, it's over too quickly. You have this Hollywood "alright men let's BREACH THE DEFENCES" moment that's over in a couple of equipment checks, and it's almost laughable to hear later in ending slides that you performed the impossible to do so. The final area is far too threadbare; Sun-in-Shadow was not massive either, but it had enough of a mix of dark corridors, dialogue points, a couple of fights, etc., to let you get into it, whereas here it feels like you have three rooms. The final dialogue with Eothas, too, ends too quickly - that's one place where they could have afforded a far more drawn out conversation, similar to the one with Iovara.
Anyway, the verdict stands, I think. It's a very good SOZ, which to me is a great addition to the library of isometric party RPGs. If they can patch up POTD difficulty and some of the combat/XP balance, it will have pretty good replayability with all the multiclass combos as well. But like DOS2, it doesn't really take that massive step forward into greatness by building on its predecessor, rather it takes a lot of lateral steps and becomes its own thing. Probably the one area where they really made a big improvement is itemisation - we haven't seen so many items with all sorts of unique properties since BG2, as others have said in the thread. The really unnecessary flaws are rendering attrition trivial (a combination of super empowers, downtuned POTD, no camping supplies, no health/endurance, no per-rests, etc), and the shitty narration.
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