And you can tell that the Nihilus fight is right about when Obsidian got told to just ship whatever they had, given how anticlimactic just taking his mask and leaving was after all the buildup.
The game reaches way higher highs than the first game. Nothing from the first game is as memorable as being inserted onto Onderon in the middle of a civil war breaking out in the old Mandalorian war droid and both sides freaking out at the sight of the droid and it turning into a three-way free-for-all clusterfuck. The fact that Obsidian wasn't allowed to finish the game is the only reason it's not talked about the same way as the first game but given the highs they managed to reach in the gimped version, a finished version clearly would have eclipsed the first game.