Reviews are all over the place.
Also 30 hours is too short for a jrpg imo. I hope that was just people rushing through it.
From what I've been hearing, those times are indeed coming from not putting up with Level 5's bullshit grind.
That said, of the three main timewasters, the two biggest are pretty much lifted straight from Suikoden with a kingdom building sim and Pikmin battles (which sound like they're as meh as anything tactical that Suikoden did, if not even less interesting), while the third sounds like DQIX's Grottoes again.
That said, I wouldn't dive right in quite yet because it seems that Level 5's tendency of including everything down to the kitchen sink is alive and well here, so who knows how deep the grinding rabbit hole really goes or how far can you progress before the microtransactions start rearing its ugly head.
At the very least, it sounds like the Poke/Digi/Whatever-mon mechanics that they had in NNK1 was ditched, and the basic gameplay has been improved over NNK1's (not that 'herding suicidal AI' was a high bar to clear).
The tl;dr is that Level 5 learned something from the trainwreck that was NNK1, but its still too soon to say whether or not this one can jell into a cohesive game or end up buried beneath yet another forgettable pile of Level 5's grinding excrement.
