How is the difficulty, though? Most of what you say doesn't really bother me ye (though maybe it'll be different when actually playing) but the only part I'm concerned about is how hard the game is. EO1-3 are pretty much easy modo and I don't have high hopes for EO4 being any different (even with the supposed raised normal mode difficulty).
I mean, it's not a breaking point by any means but ... I do hope for it to at least be challenging somewhat.
What I played wasn't particularly difficult. Rather, I'd describe the game as unfair and unreasonable. You have the classic dungeon crawler slow burn at the start, where you can survive maybe two or three battles before going to town to heal, and you definitely need to grind a several levels before you can start exploring the first and second floors of dungeon 1 comfortable. That's fine. Basically, the game is built around grinding and slowly filling in your FFX-style sphere grid for each character. That's fine too.
The trouble is, it's no fun to grind. You have to recruit monsters as minions. To do so, you need to get them down to at least half health and hope the recruit prompt triggers (it seems to be random). Once recruited, you can assign up to a certain number of minions to each party member, and they take attacks, do damage, buff your attacks and so on. You have to level them up as well, and after every battle they harass you about something or other, kind of similar to demon negotiations in SMT. However, it's basically a glorified guessing game, which is problematic because a) it's a constant interruption, b) you get penalised for angering your minions and c) b) if you ignore your minions, you can't proceed in the game. There are checkpoints where you have to 'test your strength', which means have your minions fight a group of monsters in a mini-game, and if your minions are underlevelled, it's literally impossible to win because no skill or strategy is involved aside from 'mash butan'. There's no other incentive to level your minions, because the only thing they tend to be substantially good for is taking hits, and they tend to die quite easily. The whole system isn't particularly fun or interesting; it just feels like a tacked-on chore. There isn't much to distinguish the monsters aside from stats.
Additionally, the 'economy' is horrid. Basically, you have to spend money to make money. The item shop only offers bog-standard stuff at absurd prices. So far, so Wizardry. To make your own stuff, you have to go to the item creation shop and make items from monster drops and foraged items there. Foraging is similar to Etrian Odyssey, except you need items to forage with and they have a high chance of breaking. Monster drops are fairly rare, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall that sometimes you need to kill monsters in certain ways. Making items costs money proportionate to the value of the item, and it can fail, meaning you lose your money and the drops. This is unfortunate, because selling the stuff you make from item creation is your main source of income. You get hardly anything from quests and fighting monsters, and basic items and drops don't sell for much. You won't have much money until you've spent a lot of time grinding, because you'll be spending nearly all your money on healing and healing items.
Additionally, you have to grind your item creation skill hard before it becomes in any way useful. So, for example, to get a better longsword than the one the item shop sells, you have to make XX longswords in category 1, then when you level up to category 2, make XX more longswords. This means you need to grind different kinds of armour, different weapons, potions, and so on. It's very frustrating.
So you have these two key systems which you have to spend dozens of hours grinding, in addition to grinding up your characters, while getting constantly harassed by your minions asking if you still love them. The item creation doesn't tend to be particularly rewarding even when it works, and managing your minions feels much more like a chore and overhead that sucks the fun out of exploring and developing the main characters.
I think this design is poorly thought out and half-assed. Maybe they were going for artificial difficulty - I think the game would have been far better if they ditched the annoying minion system and improved the item creation and foraging systems to be a bit less stacked against the player, and found more fun ways of providing a challenge.
Incidentally, when you finish the first chapter, you get switched to a new party, and you have to start
everything all over again with a party of 3 rather than the party of 4 you have in the first chapter. I understand that in the third chapter, you have to go solo.