Man, I really can't agree. Even a little bit more care was put into designing the encounters in the first game, compared to this game's incredibly lazy "take out 100+ enemies in as little time as possible!" mentality that's basically what you do in every single stage in Legend mode multiple times over. Even when the game has tried to change things up like with the Devil Rebirth boss fight, the result has been the most pathetically easy boss fight I've ever done in a Musou title.
I also dislike how the game feels like it doesn't have a sense of progression. Aside from the act of clearing the stages themselves, there's very little to actually denote how much you've developed a character due to the severely downgraded upgrade system. Having the whole movelist that a character can perform from the start (barring Circle moves) only adds to that since it means you'll never change how you play a character from start to finish. I'm gonna be spamming square > square > triangle with Kenshiro from Chapter 1 to Chapter 35. And why shouldn't I, since that's a move that does a ton of damage, covers a huge radius, doesn't use up any aura and, since most characters have been homogenized to the 9th degree, there's little need to pick up on the nuances of each.
I wouldn't even mind the above as much if the stages were fun to play. Would it have killed them to do more than do back to back to back "Kill X00 group of enemies!" objectives for the entirety of a chapter?
I'll admit that I'm not a huge FotNS fan, but the first game managed to keep me interested and challenged even without being one. This game just seems like a rushed retread that only exists because most of the assets already existed.
