The follow-up to Black Fortress features a couple improvements alongside a few notable steps backward. First the good and/or neutral:
The backtracking issue isn’t as bad here and the skill trees aren’t as rigid, which while seeming like minor improvements, combine to result in a game that only falls apart in the very last mission rather than two-thirds of the way through. A new class has been added (bringing with it an additional companion)… but it appears to have been invented out of whole cloth and isn’t integrated into the setting well… which is particularly glaring if you play the class yourself since no conversations will recognize it. More minor things would be the slightly improved environmental textures and poison now working correctly on enemies.
As for the bad: The companions aren’t quite as fleshed-out as the previous game’s with noticeably less comments/banter, and the encounter difficulty is wildly unbalanced.
Wildly unbalanced. While traversing an area you can go from fighting a group of enemies that deal ~20 damage a hit and take 2-3 basic hits to kill to one that deals 50+ damage and takes concentrated ability use to defeat. Or a main mission throwing hordes of enemies at you followed by one that has a relative handful. In a non-linear game that sort of thing would make sense, but this game is quite linear as far as exploration is concerned. Another related issue is the abundance of gimmick battles; there’s a lot of them and most either don’t make any sense or feature infuriating railroading.
So. Worth playing? Not if you couldn’t stand the prequel. Skipping the prequel and starting here could work though.