I was initially drawn to this game because I had heard that the combat system was similar to one of my all time favourite games - Grandia. So when I went into it I was looking for something to scratch that specific itch. It didn't scratch that itch and the rest of the game around it was not enough to keep me entertained. If you are thinking of buying this game because you liked how Grandia combat works the rest of my review is for you, otherwise ignore me. (I'm serious, if you are coming to this game for anything other than looking for a Grandia alike, the rest of this will anger you, please don't read it)
TLDR - Play for the story, not for the combat.
Tactical Depth:
Something that this game tries to get you to do is block, you can see when an enemy is going to attack you so there is no point in attacking it as if it's bar is filled first it'll hit you, cancelling your attack and leaving you feeling stupid. So instead if you can act while that enemy is gearing up for an attack, you block, reducing damage taken and allow you to hit them next turn. On the face of it this is a good thing, You can see how fast their bar is charging know how fast your characters are, try to hit them first, there is some risk and reward. But they flubbed it.
Say you have two characters, one of them has the option to act now and a monster is charging their next move. You can't see what that move is, the game won't tell you, so you have to guess based on the speed they are moving up the bar if it's a standard attack or magic ability (which could be a non damaging buff/debuff, or a powerful attack). Most enemies have a pattern or you can generally tell what they are doing. Let's say you are confident they are going to attack, so if you attack them their hit will smack you first and cancel your action, so you should defend, reducing the damage and hopefully letting you hit them next turn. If you defend and they do attack there is a 50% chance you wasted that action, because you can't see who an enemy is going to hit. They can go for character A or B. So the scenarios are
Block on Character A - Enemy hits character A, You take less damage and will get another action soon
Block on Character A - Enemy hits character B. You don't take less damage and wasted a turn
Attack with Character A - Enemy hits character A. You take the full damage, but will get another action soon
Attack with Character A - Enemy hits chracter B. You Hit the enemy and character A might be able to finish them off on their turn.
When you action is cancelled from being hit it doesn't reset you to the bottom of turn order, just knocks you back a little, so there isn't a big drawback for being cancelled, In Grandia actions have a time delay to happen and also a positional delay as well and not all attacks can cancel an enemy action. You can also see who an enemy is going to hit so you know who to block with or who to go all out with. The reduction of this information's availability to the player means that the use of blocking gets reduced to "I only use this if my character will die without it" because without enough knowledge on what an enemy is doing it doesn't really make sense.
Elements:
The game introduces elemental weakness relatively early in the game, but without a good way of seeing what element the enemies are, some of them are obvious, but some of it is maybe based on the the different colours of the enemy, like I think that Spider A is Blue and Spider B is green, so those are different, but it's not always easy to tell and the game has no log book for the enemies you come across, no way to check their stats in a combat or anything. So you can figure it out by trial and error but if you take a break or can't remember the game doesn't have an easy way to check, so you have to trial and error it again. It's just kind of boring.
The Wisp:
Using the ball of light to slow your enemies or heal you is interesting, but never as interesting as I think it should be. The healing from it is fairly limited and by the time you get to the point in the combat where it'll be needed, your wisp is out of juice from slowing enemies down. Once you know a few enemies it's never used for anything more than "Enemy X is the most annoying, I'll focus on taking them out, so I'll slow enemy Y". Sometimes it comes in clutch if you want to slow a specific enemy long enough so you can get an attack off and cancel their action. (Making defend even less useful). But I quickly found it to be very annoying and a little big of a pain having to long press on my mouse for lengthy fights.
Summary:
It's pretty, combat is not the best, characters are a bit flat, but I didn't play a lot of it. Definitely a game that just wasn't for me, and I had the wrong expectations going into it. No fault on the devs or designers. If you aren't looking for something like Grandia or what I said above doesn't deter you, go nuts.
