Well, I played a few more hours of this on my 360.
The short of it - it's going back to EB (Gamestop). What a waste of ~$20 (I paid $55, but I'll likely get about $35 credit as it's still so new) and 3 months waiting for release.
Perhaps I'm an impatient and "console" gamer, but I just can't take any more of this game. I loved TW1. Not because it was "good", in really most any sense. But it didn't take itself very seriously, which completely redeemed it of it's many, many faults. The combat was somewhat entertaining and the item-stacking "minigame" kept me playing to just see if I could find another magic card or a piece of gear I already had. I had fun with it - it was dumb, self-effacing, and just… fun. I even finished it, something I *rarely* do.
So I was looking forward to TW2. A lot. I knew it was going to be more "serious", but I guess I didn't realize that meant that they'd taken all of the charm out of it as well. To make matters worse, I found the first few hours of it - I played about 5 hours total - to be so incredibly frustratingly hard as to nearly make me hurl my controller into my TV. I must have reloaded about 20 times trying to defeat some of those Groms. Finally I got past that part.. how? By ignoring them. I went back, completed the silly quest and moved on to the next island. Yeah, great quest design and gameplay there… Maybe I'm just no good at the game, but it really didn't make me want to play more either. On top of that, the controls are clunky, the UI is stupidly enormous (though not really that bad, in a usability sense), and there's an annoying (half-second) pause
every single time I try to use magic - on a console. That shouldn't happen. Yeah, that'd get tiring after 30 hours, let alone over the 5 or so I played.
As an odd comparison, around about the same time, I got Drakensang: TRoT. They had release dates that practically coincided, and I couldn't pass up the $18 steal on Impulse. I know they're not the same type of game in the slightest (although they're both RPGs from European devs), but D2 is pretty difficult in its own right. But I was driven to keep playing D2, whereas with TW2, I just don't really care. Nothing is interesting enough in the gameplay or story to make me want to try again… or keep trying to like it. Drakensang 2, on the other hand, is rewarding, challenging, interesting and beautiful. Pretty much everything my admittedly short time with TW2 wasn't. So I ended up playing that about 12-14 hours this weekend, instead of TW2, and loved every minute of it. I even played it for about an hours at 6:30 this morning, before I went to work. A testament to it's addictiveness. I just can't get enough of harvesting those damn plants. Yeah, perhaps I have an addictive, slightly OCD personality, but a great game will make you WANT to collect the things it literally sprinkles around. I finally found some Firemoss and I was unreasonably excited about it. Heh.
Oh well, at least I can use the credit to preorder Divinity 2.
My two cents.