Good for Picross fanatics, but on the easy side
First off, I also have Hudson's earlier Illust Logic game (Puzzle Series Vol. 6), and I feel some comparisons between the two are in order. The earlier game had 300 Nonograms (Paint-By-Numbers Puzzles) ranging in size from 10X10 (worth four stars each) to 25X25 (worth seven stars each). Depending on how quickly you completed each puzzle, you received stars. In practice, getting all 1650 possible stars was incredibly difficult, especially since you only had one minute to solve the 10X10 puzzles in order to get all four stars.
There was also a ranked mode with Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum ranks. Platinum required completing a random 25X25 puzzle in only seven minutes. This was virtually impossible by logic alone for all but the easiest two or three puzzles (I managed it on a picture of a gorilla with lots of full rows).
Anyway, this game is basically more of the same, but with a few new modes and with DRASTICALLY lower difficulty.
First of all, 25X25 puzzles are gone entirely. Given the near-impossibility of solving them with the stylus (I used the buttons only), I can understand this to some degree, but on the other hand, the 25X25 puzzles were by far the most challenging in the original.
Secondly, getting stars is MUCH easier. Out of the 400 puzzles here, I only failed to get all 4-6 stars on my first try once (which adds up to 2059 out of 2060 stars on my first try). Compare this to the first game where I only got 1100 or so out of the 1650 total stars on my first try. For me, that actually added replay value, as I pushed myself to my limit to get all 1650 stars (which required partial memorization and dozens of tries in some cases, I must admit). I'm not sure what the new time limits are, but I took almost three minutes on one 10X10 problem and still got all four stars.
And then there's the ranked puzzles. This time around, the highest rank (Illust Logic Master) requires only that you complete a 20X20 puzzle in nine minutes. I finished this with more than four minutes to go and laughed out loud when I got a congratulations screen with credits.
Finally, the puzzles themselves are easier. On the majority of puzzles, there's at least one full line (for example, "2 2 2 1" on a 10X10 puzzle), and this makes things a lot easier.
Okay, with that out of the way, I'll move on to the good news: aside from the aforementioned drop in difficulty, everything about this is superior to the original Hudson DS Illust Logic game.
The original game had simply generic monochrome puzzles. This adds puzzles with Hudson characters (Bomberman, Lode Runner, Adventure Island, etc.).
There are also two new modes - Colorful Logic and Awaseru Logic ("Combined Logic"). Colorful Logic adds color to the puzzles, which changes strategies somewhat - two numbers may follow each other on the grid without a space in between, so long as they use different colors. The completed puzzles also look MUCH nicer. Awaseru Logic involves standard puzzles, but in 2X2 or 3X3 grids, so you have to finish four or nine puzzles to see a whole picture. My one complaint about this mode is that you don't get a gallery of completed pictures, and in order to see a picture, you'll have to complete one of its constituent puzzles again. Be that as it may, it's still a welcome addition.
And this game not only has better playability than the original, but now it's better than Picross as well. Aside from the addition of a feature where numbers are greyed out on completion (which Picross had but the original Illust Logic didn't), it retains from the original Illust Logic the handy option of having a little bubble showing how long the line currently being drawn is (both vertically and horizontally). This is very useful for speed demons.
Overall, in spite of the fact that it's too easy, I'd definitely say this game is worth getting for fans of the genre and for casual gamers in general. It provides a lot of puzzles, and they'll take many hours to complete, even if few of the puzzles are all that challenging individually. I'd even go so far as to say that this game would take months to get through if only played sporadically.