Had a little play with it last night. Going to compare it to FFRK as that's the game that I had sunk a heck of a lot of time into before I finally got bored of it a month or so back.
The sprite artwork looks awesome in battle and I love how both they and the fiends are more animated than say FFRK, but the world itself looks very very rough. Like, they took the basic aspects of RPG Maker 2000 rough. There's not quite a charm to it (at least not from the first few parts I'd seen) despite several attempts, like beams of light moving through a tree, etc. There's an effort to make it more alive and feel great, but it doesn't quite hit it yet. Again, I've only explored the first few tutorial levels, but so far, FFRK definitely has significantly better artwork.
The battle mechanics are really cool. I love being able to chain multiple attacks together, and the game gets a massive bonus for not having so many restrictions (unlike FFRK) in terms of usability and the available commands for each character. So glad about that.
And of course, there's an actual story! Yeah I know FFRK has some weak semblance of a story that might be mentioned once every 6 months in an update, but here we get a concrete story and two central characters in Rain and Lasswell.
Like FFRK we have 'hero' characters that can be summoned and made into party members. In the welcoming / apology package was 10 summon tickets and (aside from the unknowns) I managed to get:
3* Shadow
3* Krile
4* Penelo
Their abilities and stats seem pretty cool so will be using them for now.
Each character has certain abilities and magic that can be used. Magic needs to be manufactured with the right recipe (or gained as a reward). But a nice RPG attribute is that they also gain new immediate abilities via leveling up. A further 'special' ability can be accessed if you gain 100% trust with a character. This can happen slowly by making them participate in battles and leveling up, or by fusing duplicate characters together.
An actual surprise to me is that the gameplay itself has a small framework for a world! So you are not just clicking into battle scenarios. You can walk around towns and some dungeon areas, as well as having that click interface for others. The artwork for the world / town itself kinda hampers this cool feature, but it is pretty cool and different.
So yeah, so far there are a lot of positives with this new game. Definitely going to give it more of a go.