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Never played it.

An interesting take on a sequel. If multiple creators picked it up to finish it after its incomplete release, then it must have been doing something right. And personally I liked it; admit it's been a while though. Probably should sit down and replay mods to see how well they aged.

I was originally gonna respond here, but as I wrote out my thoughts, the review grew into a monster, and I realized it would be more appropriate for me to just write a post in the mods general discussion thread:

new bosses were fun for the time, probably didn't age well if I had to guess.

I've only ever played ZarroTsu's version, and that was over the last two months (for nine years in this community I never played it). I made a rant in the modding Discord server about how the concepts of the puzzles aren't inherently bad (I was able to solve everything almost completely blind with enough time), but the difficulty is something you'd find in actual puzzle games and is significantly higher than what's expected for a broad-audience sequel (which the mod has been made out to be). It's everything surrounding these puzzles: the order of them, giant maps that are a maze in and of itself, awful placement of some save disks and having no way to back out of some puzzles, and other bizarre and frustrating choices. One could make a mostly-universally more fun version of Zarro's mod while keeping every puzzle solution if the elements and hints surrounding them were reworked.

Also the story... uh... I lost myself in utter deranged laughter over some lines of dialogue during the true ending. What I am told are the additions of Zarro to the plot of the original mod are baffling in execution.

Both Shmitz and Zarro do some cool things though. They put a lot of time into the mod and it shows that love of the original source. I'm just in the camp with most others that it probably shouldn't be the mod on the pedestal for those outside the community to see first and foremost.

The level design visuals of ZarroTsu's version looked pretty impressive, and the new game+ was a neat idea, but I think that's most of what the mod had going for it. I briefly played an early demo of Zarrot's version, but wasn't very enthralled with it - the story execution just felt very bland. It eventually got to the point where I was really turned off from giving ZarrotTsu's rendition much attention due to the blatantly hateful attitude he expressed toward Doors (now known as Slither) before beginning work on his mod, and the passive-aggressive disrespect that he showed toward Shmitz all throughout development.

I liked the ZarroTsu version more, to be honest. I haven't played much of the Brotherhood version since its release years ago, though. Any versions before that, I don't think I've played before…

Hayden - didn't you make some sprites for the Brotherhood version of JN?

i'm sure you've seen me ramble on about it on discord more than once but tdlr i think it's (specifically the ZarroTsu version) a mod with some incredibly high highs (the attention to detail with things like mr little/NG+/level decoration/etc, the way it writes the characters - specifically their relationships with each other and dialogue all feel really good)

...and some incredibly low lows (kinda poor level design, the puzzles outside of sand zone, shitty difficulty design, the twist of quote/curly being directly related to the sakamotos but if i go into that i'll be here all night) - though even a lot of those i can, like... respect the skill/creativity, i just don't enjoy it for one reason or another

also some really middling middles (doctor being behind it all, sand zone teleporter puzzle, the criminal lack of malco throwing a tea party)

It is my happy place