Through some miracle of God, Legaia 2 was completed before Alex went off to China. You may have heard bad things about this game, and I can assure you it's pretty accurate. The plot is short and weak: The world was created in the "Source Forge" by three crystals. Some crazy person wants to destroy the world and create it anew by misaligning these crystals à la Kefka. Somehow both the protagonist and the antagonist were directly smithed by the forge — how and why wasn't revealed — so we are "Star Shapers." I guess that means we're more powerful and special than others, but like Zidane I don't see how the protagonist is stronger than the rest of the party. Through the Power of Hope and the Will of All Living Things we managed to put the crystals were they belong. I guess. On top of that there are people called Mystics who have these summon spirits that perform magic and everyone hates them, but no mention why they have it or how they were chosen. Really the whole thing didn't make much sense.

Characters are pretty blah. They're not terrible but none really stand out in my mind that I'll keep with me like with other games. The writers wanted to demonstrate how layered a people's personalities are; two siblings who were nothing but dicks the whole game had a touching death after revealing they were abandoned by their parents for being Mystics. It's just the writing is so bad that the heart strings are never tugged.

Music is aight, but the first game was better. Clearly the composer thought so too because about a fifth of the tracks are just remixes. The original song is probably the final boss.

Fundamental game design could've been tweaked too. If you've ever played the first Legaia, you know these are long battles. To reduce the time, they could've stopped a combo if the first hit killed the enemy instead of making us watch the whole thing. They didn't need these long zoom-ins of the enemy after an attack. But if they insisted on keeping those, they should've realized it is a fucking long battle system. By the time we're done, we forgot what we're doing in a dungeon. So what would've been better is to adjust the experience gained and needed, and lowered the encounter rate so we could fucking get shit done instead of spending seven hours in battle for just one dungeon.

Speaking of dungeons, holy shit. So at one point we needed to sneak into a castle via the sewers. A really complicated thing involving water levels and sluice gates. So we get to the end... and it's literally a ladder leading manhole cover at the end of town. We could've just walked there above ground. It didn't bring us to the castle. Apparently you're supposed to punch a hole in the wall right next to the ladder which brings you forward except it doesn't look anything different from the rest of the walls so without a FAQ it's impossible to know. Why did they force us to do the entire sewer dungeon then if we could've just gone down the manhole then? And even worse, after we went through that hole, there was another fucking dungeon afterward that was just as long! What the hell! And then the castle was another dungeon! Three ridiculously long dungeons in a row with puzzles and a high encounter rate. And the worst fucking part was we needed to go back to the castle again, meaning we had to do all that bullshit over again!

So yeah. I would not recommend this to anyone unless if they're out of things to play. It's not the worst thing out there, but it's not high up by any means. I can see why the series died with it.