I 100% the game in the 20th but haven't had the opportunity to summarize my thoughts, so here we go:
+ OST, Sugiyama is a frikkin' God
+ Gameplay loop
+ Sense of exploration
+ Sense of being in a vast world with dangerous monsters and locations
+ Exactly the kind of brutal difficulty I wanted from a 2D-HD experience (Draconian difficulty)
+ Optional content felt rewarding, be it through dialogue and/or loot
+ The vocations felt very diverse and every character seemed to fit an essential role to the team
+ My favorite looking 2D-HD game out of the bunch. Never too over-satured, relaxed depth of field and perfectly balanced bloom
+ Perfect JRPG length. I'm starting to burn myself out on these 120+ hour JRPGs so having a 50-60 hour game is VERY welcoming in my books
+ Monster capture is distracting enough to keep me on the look-out and doesn't become obnoxious either
+ After having 100% two Atlus games in a row, this whole "straight-to-the-point-story/gameplay-loop" is such an unbelievable fresh of air to me
- Not enough bosses
- Not enough (different) songs
- Never been a fan of spamming X to find hidden obstacles (when they're not in a pot, drawer etc). Even with a thief, having to spam Nose for Treasure and Snoop abilities is not my take of "fun"
- End game XP farm sucks massive dongles. I haven't experienced a tedious shit-slop like this in a whole while. No "real" place to farm XP end game besides 1: finding a place where Liquid Slime-fucks spawn 1/20 battles and when they DO show up, there's a 4/5 chance they flee despite having 850 agility (trust me, I tried). It's not rewarding to look for them, it's not rewarding to see them flee - and heck, it's not even rewarding to FINALLY land a killing blow because at this point you're so fed up with this shit. And killing one gives 1/5th of a level, WOOO!
And yes, I had all my characters with boomerang, high enough agility to sometimes initiate before the metal slime AND had every character sub-class into thief for assassin's stab. Still an AWFUL way of grinding. I don't care if it's nostalgia or not, Dragon Quest needs to get away from this metal slime-exclusive farming come DQXII.
Neither + nor -
I had wished to have seen our character models even during combat animations (like we did in the announcement trailer)