The biggest positives are that exploring dungeons/caves/castles is a more active process and enemy encounters can almost always be avoided. If you hate random battles, you'll at least respect VP2's approach. You still get some weirdly abstract situations, though. If you're standing on top of an enemy imprisoned in midair when the photon crystal breaks, you'll be snapped into a battle in a separate 3D battleground. If you flee the battlefield, you'll find you're still standing on top of the enemy's head.
The battles are very engaging at least. Moving and attacking take chunks out a yellow gauge at the bottom of the screen, and if you step into a red area projecting from an enemy, you'll be attacked yourself. The trick is to get the enemy into your red area first, which can be helped by using tricks like dashing through the red zones, taking out the enemy leader, and splitting your four-member party into smaller groups. Typically, though, you'll be attacking as a team. Each character is assigned to a button and can launch up to three attacks in a row, and hitting buttons with the correct timing will result in one long string of hits that can be capped off with elaborate and deadly "final attacks." The visual payoff and ridiculous damage are worth the effort. Considering the high overall difficulty of battles so far, final attacks are often essential to put a foe down before your entire party is buried by reprisals.
Valkyrie Profile 2 certainly has standout qualities that are evident after spending only a bit of time with what promises to be a meaty, lengthy experience. Other elements are harder to judge: an involved item-creation system relying on parts broken off of monsters in combat, the multitude of recruitable warrior spirits who can be reincarnated into the game world, and the exposition-heavy story. Whatever the fate of Silmeria, we'll deliver our unwavering mortal opinion when the game comes out of the ether to materialize on store shelves near the end of September.