I finished the demo. First off, I want to say that the game looks and sounds good - very good! It has very good art and music direction foundations. I also really like the touches of animation the UI has, which makes it very dynamic - it avoids a very common JRPG problem of having boring UI.
However, I found the gameplay to be not fun: I found the core gameplay both simple and boring. And, if this is a vertical slice (and thus somewhat representative of what the "best" of the final game should be), it does not bode well.
The combat is very slow, with a lot unnecesary pauses between enemy attacks and between your input and your characters acting. The fact that enemies have loads of HP slows it down even further.
Combat has absolutely zero strategic depth - no items, barely any skills, barely any resource management... It has the mechanics implemented, but doesn't use them, so hopefully there's more to see than what's here right now.
The real-time elements don't add anything for me. It could make combat more dynamic and engaging if combat was already fast, but because everything is so slow, it feels more like a chore than anything else. If perhaps enemies attacked at the same time, or switched up attacks more, it might work.
All in all, I'd say that, despite the very modern UI and art style, it plays like the worst of old-school JRPGs with a real-time paint job barely covering it. It's a shame, and I hope you iterate much more on the concept so you can do it proper justice.
Other random notes:
- There's a random encounter with 4 enemies right after starting, before picking up the other party member. Feels like it's a debug thing or something, since it comes before the proper tutorial.
- You can't see enemy HP or statuses if you're not targeting a skill: thus, you have to pick a skill to actually see what the situation is like, then go back and actually pick what you want to do.
- The skill menu blocks view of the enemy characters, which is information essential to picking what you want to do.
- The basic enemies are trivial to dodge, but then the boss pulls either projectiles or very fast attacks with confusing telegraphing, which has nothing to do with what was taught previously and feels unfair.