Played Theia a few months ago and thought it was alright, so I've had my eye on this for a while now. Tried out the demo this morning. I have to say, so far it feels very messy.
Visually the game is extremely noisy- basically everything on the map has the same sort of visual importance, which led me to miss some doors, overlook some chests and other such things as well as sometimes bump into scenery that looked traversable at a glance. Combined with the soupy, floaty camera (which I really can't explain, it seems functionally unnecessary) and the overbearing neon/bloom effects in places, it made movement and exploration more of a chore than it needed to be.
Outside of that, even the UI is kind of confusing at times? The gab windows appearing on the screen mid-exploration is an odd choice- I miss 90% of that dialogue if I don't just stop in my tracks to read it, at which point it may as well be a normal cutscene. I get this is intended to be like squad/ambient conversations in games like Mass Effect, but I don't think it works very well in this kind of game, or as text only. Those windows sometimes cover up the player or elements of the map as well, lending to visual clutter and confusion. That kind of element-stacking happens elsewhere too, like objectives covering map names, or exceed activation warnings ironically covering the actual exceed button during combat.
As for the mechanical content in the demo, as an intro it feels like there's a bit too much tossed at the player right off the bat. There's no real easing into the setting or much of the mechanics, and almost out the gate you're given this huge map to wander around on with the random rogue-like elements, idk. It just feels sort of jumbled up? I'm not a huge fan of persistent sidequest-y stuff in JRPGs to begin with, so I guess its a grain of salt thing, but I felt like maybe opening the map up should have been more gradual, so the player became better acquainted with everything before they had a chance to mess around.
The combat as well felt like it didn't really know what it wanted to be. You have these concepts like armor breaking, or debuff/status stacking, or bonuses for hitting weak points, but they all just kind of compete for space. This not even mentioning customizable skill trees and class swapping, which I didn't really get much out of here for a demo. The encounters didn't feel like they were set up very strategically in that regard, it was kind of all over the place without one real "click" moment of learning how to deal with certain enemies or squads. It's a bit hard to explain, I suppose, but it felt kind of off overall. Compare something like Fuga, where these kinds of elements form a very solid strategic core. The bosses especially felt like they were kind of devoid of strategy, they basically wound down to spamming exceeds, even without attempting to use it as a crutch, since they charge/activate so quickly and do such heavy damage.
Further, the touch encounters feel a bit off, especially coupled with the exploration issues noted previously. The monsters are so easy to avoid that I feel like I have to deliberately go out of my way to bump into them and ensure I'm getting leveled appropriately. Combined with the soupy movement/visuals, some brief loading times entering fights (on a high end PC, mind) and generally clunky feeling combat, and it made things really unpleasant rather quickly. The fact that the number of enemy formations is so small compared to the pacing of the encounters made me feel even more like just avoiding them altogether, and that's not really a good sign so early into the game.
Overall, none of this is enough to make me say I'm not interested in the project anymore, but its definitely tempered my expectations more than a bit.