Played for 4 hours and really enjoyed it. I'm very excited for this game. Amazing work so far.
I made a party of 5 characters and didn't recruit more than that.
Things I especially liked:
- The spider enemy walking around the was useful indicator that the battle would be particularly challenging, which made me feel more enticed to try strategies like using items and status effects. Maybe other players don't experience this, but I find I am more likely to use a variety of strategies when a battle is called out as a mini-boss/strong foe in some way, so I would like to continue to see enemies like that in the final game.
- The skill tree seemed quite interesting. For example, I thought it was cool that the medic class could be specced as a simple healer or buffer, but also as a tank, or debuff specialist.
- I really liked the interplay between the caster classes skills. Things like buffing the next skill, or retriggering the last skill with some modifier. This is the kind of feature that makes me want to recommend this game to other players.
- The nox glove item that adds a special effect to your regular attack was very cool to me. In general, I like when RPGs make me feel like I have a reason to use a variety of skills. Until I found this item, I felt like I mostly wanted to always use TP skills, unless I was much stronger than the opponent. As soon as I found that item, I gave one of my fighters two slashing weapons and tried to strengthen their debuffs, and was deciding between normal attacks and skills.
- I failed to defeat the spider the first time I fought it, but I felt like I gained enough info from the fight to look at my character's skill trees and see how I could reallocate points to have more of an advantage. That was a really positive experience to me.
Things I wished for while I was playing:
- ability to add mods to equipment without unequipping it first.
- ability to revisit tutorial text/some kind of explainer for different mechanics. In general, there were terms I'd run into that I felt like I could guess the meaning of (debuff atk? like poison damage?) but I wasn't sure. In the final game, a glossary would be great, but even a text file with some common points of confusion in the game directory would be nice for remote playtesting.
- that useable items was not the initial tab when you enter the deconstruct menu. I think it should be the materials tab, since that's what I always want to sell, want to sell items and equipment more infrequently
- If my entire front line dies, and my back line swaps places with them, it changes my party arrangement and I have to change it back after reviving my party members, which is annoying. I wish it just treated the remaining backline party members as being in the front without actually rearranging my party against my will.
- Maybe this info actually was available, but being able to investigate what skills an enemy has and what body part they use, so you know what to bind. Or, some feedback that an enemy failed to use an ability because they were bound. It was questionable whether many enemies even had arms, legs, or heads.
- If there is a color-coded condition on a skill description, it would be nice if that same text/color appeared on the related other skills. Like, if eg echo says if [SINGLE/COLUMN] in blue text, then I would like skills that target single to have a blue tag [SNIGLE] and skills that target a column to have a blue tag [COLUMN]. Or, more fundamentally without proposing a solution, it felt difficult to know which skills affected or relied on each other, and I wanted it to be easier.
Other things that stood out to me:
- It felt hard to assess the binding mechanic in this demo. I think I only ever encountered my legs being bound, but all the abilities I tried were hand abilities.
- The columns are confusing in the following scenario: two enemies in the front, one in the back. Sometimes you can target either of the front enemies and the back enemy will also be affected, but sometimes only one of the front enemies causes the back enemy to also be affected. There was no visible difference, so it was confusing.
- I don't think void damage appeared in the tutorial text about damage types. Maybe I missed it.