I picked this up and I’ve played the first chapter, about two hours or so of the game. There’s some fun ideas in here. I appreciate that melee fighters, archers, and mages all have clearly defined tactical positions they want to take. Archers get a HUGE bonus against targets lower than them – I think enemy defense is lowered by 50%, plus their accuracy is higher – but have a lot of trouble dealing with enemies on higher platforms. Mages have spells that are very good at attacking targets on their level or higher, but have NO tools for attacking enemies lower than themselves.
The game was pretty easy until stage 1-5, the first boss stage, which features a pretty sharp jump in difficulty and tactical interest. First, you have another showdown with the scantily-clad pirate gal, whose superpower is “has a gun”, but once you beat her you have to cross a long horizontal map full of zombies and ghosts, which are repeatedly summoned by the necromancer boss at the far end of the stage. Zombies are annoying foes, because while they don’t do a ton of damage, they cannot be permanently killed unless you cast Raise or use a resurrection item on them. You may recognize this enemy type from a certain other tactical RPG.
The real issue with the zombies is not them resurrecting – it’s that they leave corpses behind. When you’re moving, you can “displace” your allies by moving onto a tile they currently occupy. Everyone in the line will shift one tile back to make room. You cannot displace enemy corpses, so if you kill two or three zombies in a line on flat ground, you can make it impossible for some of your units to advance past their bodies. This can result in, say, your units getting bunched up in a convenient spot for the boss to float over and start casting a Poison AOE on your party. This is one of those games where poison actually hurts you a lot, so there was a bit of a scramble for my healer to run over and start stacking Regeneration on as many people as possible (I hadn’t bought Cure Ailment yet so using Regen’s health restoration to counteract the poison was my best play).
Hopeful that the later chapters will build on these kind of tricky situations more.