How's the difficulty for everyone? As a fan of the genre my concern was it would be too easy.
As a big enthusiast of the genre, the standard difficulty in the main campaign was indeed too easy, and was one of my letdowns about the experience. It's not easy to the point of being
uninteresting, as scoring Perfect on the first try on every map you can (without even knowing the benchmarks for the maximum number of turns you should be taking) is still fun to shoot for; but I really had to force myself to mix up my party in arguably suboptimal ways just to explore the range of mechanics, as simply playing solid, reliable setups on every single map gets boring fast. And indeed, the biggest letdown I had about the game was that the range of possible party setups just isn't diverse enough to let you do much with this.
But I say this not having finished the post-completion challenges, which at a glance look properly challenging. And I still have to replay a good chunk of World 4 for full Perfects on every map, as by that point the enemies have options for flushing you out of position, and incoming damage ramps up so much that on my first attempts I sometimes lost a party member to an unfortunate chain reaction. I really think the campaign could have used a hard mode, though, as I was never, ever in danger of outright failing a map, nor was I ever dependent on RNG to get the job done, like I sometimes am when getting out of a tight spot in FE or XCOM. For strategy veterans the objective here is to play quickly and efficiently. It's not a game where the tension comes from a fear of failure. And the rich get richer: if you score Perfects across the board in the early worlds, you won't have any trouble stocking your characters with the best available weapons at all times.
I don't want this to sound discouraging, though. The game is still tons of fun, as there's a generous, roomy ceiling on performing well. And it moves
fast in a way I haven't truly seen in this genre outside of SteamWorld Heist.
