Love is All Around 2 Review

Disclaimer: English is not officially supported, but user-made English subtitles are available.

Set in ancient times, you play as Cheng Ye and begin investigating a fire that killed your family. You initially become a servant for the Xie family and are later assigned to another household to uncover the truth. You will meet a princess, an assassin, a courtesan, a writer, and a few mysterious organizations that really like swords. While LIAA 2 layers the narrative and has secrets, most go nowhere interesting and the story flow is poor. This is also true for most of the six romances.

The opening chapter is probably the best. It focuses on the two Xie sisters, Xiaoxiao (Wang Han) and Ke (Zhong Chenyao), who are equally charismatic. Their conflict dynamic is amazing, especially when they fight over Cheng Ye. But this greatness is short-lived. Both sisters go MIA in the middle chapters so the narrative feels chopped up and characters isolated.

The missing middle becomes a pattern for most character arcs. In the first chapter, you meet an intriguing assassin, A Ning, who subsequently reappears at random. Her relationship with Cheng Ye remains on the precipice, as you never build a meaningful connection. The courtesan, Liu Shishi, has a fantastic initial goal. She wants to kill you! But, during one attempt she reneges and sleeps with you instead. The game sets up good characters and then teleports their arcs to the end.

And while talking about endings, LIAA 2 stumbles there too. Many are just too abrupt. Some bittersweet endings are decently emotional, like with A Ning. Although, if you only romance certain admirers, like Xie Ke or Liu Shishi, then the story will seem woefully incomplete. But even after seeing everything, the whole narrative is unsatisfying. My Journey had worse endings, but its overall story was substantially better. And God bless, or Goddess had barely any story, yet its simplicity worked.

LIAA 2 will take 4 hours to beat and about 8 hours to see everything. This is average, but given how much time it spends treading water, and divided across six women, it feels short. Audio is inconsistent, with both the princess and writer characters having a horrible case of ADR-itis. The 2K videos are below average, possibly with some face blurring. The game does have some nice ancillary features, like a music player with amazing songs performed by the six actresses, and fun behind-the-scenes videos. So Love is All Around 2 is not bad, but it could have been much more.