I just about grabbed this game, your take seems on par from what I've seen videos of. A bummer as I wanted a game to fill my FFXV alternative and a game I simply loved.Completed Strangers of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin.
Overall, disappointed.
I played it on the PS5 on performance mode. The game though had some serious frame rate drops throughout. And while I'm a fan of the original NES soundtrack, I found some of the remixes grating.
Now in terms of gameplay, this game demonstrates precisely why I think action conversions of turn based RPGs still haven't gotten there. Your teammates are all but useless. The enemy monsters will target you 90% of the time, even if your teammates are 2 inches away from them. And half the time, they just stand still doing nothing. Some missions require killing Tonberries, who will insta kill you if they hit you. Your teammates though, almost never get hit. So, I ran towards the tonberry, had my teammates there, than told my teammates to go wild, while I ran away like a coward. Took about 10 minutes for them to kill the tonberry, though if I get lucky, I can kill it in about 15 seconds. Which brings me to my next point. This game is everything people complain about Dark Souls, but really isn't in Dark Souls. It feels like it reads your inputs. Once again to the tonberry, I time a maneuver, and bam, it does a 180, and lands the insta kill at the perfect time. And some of the later bosses on the hard difficulty basically require you to play perfect. Get hit once, and it's practically over. It's not like the bosses are difficult in patterns, but sometimes you have to change skills using the analog sticks, not only moving them, but pressing them down. And while it's instantaneous outside of the boss fights, it feels like there's a couple second delay in order to make it work in the boss fight, at which point the boss will hit you. And once your down, you're stunned for 3 seconds, while his next attack goes off in 2 seconds, followed by a few more attacks to land the killing blow on you. This only happens on the harder difficulties, not the easier ones. And while I understand playing harder difficulties is suppose to be more difficult, I find getting chain killed from full health is cheap, not difficult. There's a difference between getting hit due to a mistake and being able to recover vs being hit due to a mistake, and being chain killed before you have an opportunity to recover.