I played a lot of Huniepop 1 and thoroughly enjoyed the game play in the characters as well as the photos in that game, so you can imagine my excitement for when I heard Huniepop 2 was out!

I'm all for innovation and mixing it up with gameplay but I feel like they kind of took a step in the wrong direction with this one mechanically.

The girls are interesting, good reward photos, dialogue, as well as having a wide range of personalities. So you'll definitely find one you'll like similar to the first one. I really enjoyed the though process and attention to detail the girls have, each feeling unique in their own way, while also having a good range of different outfits and hairstyles to choose from!

That being said, mechanically, this is an incredibly frustrating game compared to the first Huniepop. Here are some of the reasons why:
- the game incentivizes you to actually not really talk to the girls to learn more about them. A mechanic called "baggage" provides negative effects while you're playing the match portion. Some of these effects can be REALLY backbreaking ( I'm looking at you Nora ). By not talking to a lot of these girls you don't learn their baggage, and thus make the match section easier.
- Another problem was this one is WAY more grind-y than the first. Midway through the game you'll need to push shoes, unique items, and smoothies in order to level up your character for bonuses in the match section. Contrary to the last game, you need to wait until the shop stocks a certain item, use the fruits you get from successful / failure dates, and give them to the girls which ALSO drains their stamina. You can only feed both girls a total of 2 items as well, so you really need to plan out your dates beforehand. Which brings me to the next section of this review.
- STAMINA. I think it's really cool that you can go out with 2 girls at once, manage their likes/dislikes, and bounce back and forth. HOWEVER, it's very annoying and tedious to be punished for making larger moves ( 4 or 5 of a kind matched ) and watching the stamina deplete heavily. Not only that, but with stamina comes another type of piece to match inside the match section of the game. This dilutes the other actual point making pieces. You still have a limited number of moves, but HALF the pieces don't progress you further toward a successful date. This will mean a lot of failures based solely on RNG, which can be incredibly frustrating given the curve of difficulty the game leads up to.
-Finally, item micromanaging is even worse. Each girl has her own set of date gifts you can give on her load out and will stay unique to that girl. This means you'll find yourself grinding for more of the same gifts to stock the plethora of different girls to make sure you'll have something to spend the sentiment tokens; otherwise they're completely useless when trying to achieve a successful date.

It's really a bummer, because the girls are all great and I really had a great time with Huniepop 1, but find myself getting frustrated at some of the gameplay choices the game has made. It's definitely fun to listen to dialogue and talk with the girls, as well as the artwork being top notch, but the actual gameplay mechanics have to make me give this a not recommended at this time, even after achieving all the photos of the pairs of girls.

TL;DR - Great girls, great art, frustrating gameplay, and VERY grindy.