YMMV / Criminal Girls 2: Party Favors

• Broken Base: As with the previous game, the changes made to the Motivation images has created an uproar amongst the fanbase. Having the images redrawn instead of being censored with pink steam was an attempt at an Author's Saving Throw by NISA, but it only fueled fires even further. Some were okay with the change and felt that it was a better option than the censor steam from the first game while others are still not fond of the game's censorship and the fact that it was banned in Germany anyway showed how useless the changes really were.
• Even Better Sequel: Anyone able to get past the Audience-Alienating Premise of the Motivation mini-games or the controversy over its censorship liked the first game's surprisingly likeable cast and the interesting turn-based battle system. The sequel brings back the battle system and a new set of likeable characters, but a few tweaks to the battle system, a more tightly written narrative, and general visual and audio improvements put it over the first game. Critics seem to agree. While a Metacritic score of 67 may not be all that great, critics seem to be more lenient towards the second over the first, which received a score of 55.
• Game-Breaker: Mizuki's Treasure Boat skill, a full-screen attack that gets stronger the lower Mizuki's health is. Get Mizuki's health low enough and the skill will kill pretty much anything outside of bosses. While getting her health low to do so sounds dangerous, her ridiculously high speed means she'll almost always get the first hit and the skill almost always procs whenever her health is low, making the health trade-off worth it. This gets especially useful as enemies in later floors become more difficult.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Poor Sui. In the previous game, her Operation skills would've been potent and useful force-multipliers. Here, not only are they unreasonably difficult to set up, requiring that the right person be on the field and have the right move equipped (and the game fails to tell the player which move will activate with the appropriate OPR skill), but most of them just aren't worth the effort. It doesn't help that she's the second-slowest character in the game, meaning her efforts can often be thwarted by faster enemies. Special mention to Operation END. In the last game, the user would unleash a powerful single target skill before prompting all teammates on the field to use their most-powerful attack. Here, Sui doesn't attack at all and it instead prompts all teammates to make a random attack, which is not the same thing at all.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Like the first game, the Motivation mini-games. Even putting aside the Audience-Alienating Premise of putting girls through kinky torture and the censoring of the game for those who would be into it, playing the mini-games is required to learn new skills and abilities and money is required to play them, forcing players to grind whenever a new set of skills are available. What's worse is that, unlike the first game, the mini-games are less forgiving and require more precision despite both the touch screen and traditional controls being far from precise, meaning that if a player doesn't perform perfectly in a Motivation mini-game, they get less points towards learning the next skill and thus spend more time grinding for money to play again. On top of that, just like the first game, the Instructor being The Heart of the group makes it very hard to accept that he would put the girls through such humiliating torture.
  • Coaching, which buffs or debuffs active characters based on their skill set. The idea of giving the Instructor another ability beyond just selecting attacks and items is a good idea, but the application, unfortunately, is undermined by being interwoven with the S/M system as whether a character gets buffed or debuffed is entirely dependent on whether their skill set places them into the S or M category and the game fails to distinguish which character would benefit from the Coaching options. Furthermore, at least on Normal difficulty, Coaching is a necessity to get a leg-up on later enemies, which forces players build their party around the Coaching system, taking away the customization of the S/M system. This is especially bad for those who want to use Lily and Mizuki as none of the Coaching options benefit both of them at the same time.
• Tear Jerker: Kuroe's breakdown after the series of traps in Bloody Hell when, in her despair, she reveals to Sui that she committed suicide. The song that plays during it and the scenes surrounding it only make it more so.
• That One Attack:
  • Any move that induces speed reduction. Speed in this game not only affects turn order but accuracy, making almost every skill a gamble whenever one of your characters gets hit with speed reduction, including healing and support spells.
  • Moves that places all status effects on both single targets and the whole party, a favorite for end game bosses and mobs. This hits your characters with a quadruple wammy of poison, paralysis, confusion, and being locked out of switching characters, damaging them and either preventing them from using their skills at best or having them attack each other at worst. The fact that the bosses and mobs can and will spam it multiple times in a single turn makes it all the more frustrating.
• That One Boss: The True Final Boss. First, it has everything that made the initial final boss and the previous game's final boss a pain to fight — a powerful multi-hit attack that randomly targets everyone in the party and a skill that places all status effects on everyone in the party. The fact that it can act twice in a single turn means it can and will spam these skills freely. What makes the boss especially frustrating, however, is that it is aided by two enemy units, an offensive unit that deals heavy damage (including an instant death attack) and a support unit that can buff either of the two or cast healing spells. The latter is especially annoying because its healing spell is a party-wide skill that heals up to 2000 damage. By level 60, outside of Treasure Boat, 2000 damage is the most your party members can deal, meaning that any progress made against the boss or it mooks is wasted the moment it uses its healing spell. Speed reduction and paralysis might help, but you have to pray the game is on your side.
• Waggle: The Motivation minigames. The player must pick their poison: frustratingly unresponsive and imprecise touch controls, or frustratingly difficult and complicated key controls.
• The Woobie: While all the girls have very tragic pasts, none are as broken by them as Kuroe. From early on, it's blatantly clear she has very little self-esteem and as things get worse for her, it plummets hard. Her past reveals that her inability to keep up with her academics like she did in the past and the toll it took on her parents' relationship sent her past the Despair Event Horizon and was Driven to Suicide.