I picked this up Friday and am having a blast with it. Like @KallDrexx I found myself getting to the second stratum after over 10 hours of gameplay. My party is inches away from level 20 and we have most of 6F mapped now. It’s really good - lots of what made every past EO game great is here but with further refinements and mechanics that fit well and make the game that much harder to put down.
My party consists of the following classes with my thoughts on each.
Fencer - seems great, I still after 10 hours don’t completely under stand his chain abilities or how best to use them though. :/
Samurai - I can’t possibly pronounce/spell the actual class name, but the katana wielding one. She has lots of decent attacks and abilities though, including one that hits once and then a second time after her target performs an action.
Dragoon - rear line … tank? He’s invaluable as he can summon bunkers and provide defensive buffs. Doesn’t deal much in terms of damage, but can be a trigger for my fencers chain attacks and can debuff the enemy now with a pretty useful skill he learned.
Warlock - Finally starting to pull in numbers that make me happy, going with Fireball and Lightning so far with plenty of points in passives to bump up his power. Levitate is handy as well.
Houndmaster - again, not the name of the actual class but I can’t remember it, I summon a badass hound where most of my points have gone in, and it acts as an extra protection layer (tons of health and defense) while also being able to heal and debuff the enemy depending on which actions I want it to use. Her bow skill is actually doing solid and reliable damage as well.
I am wondering about the other classes, there are several, plus I can re-class my existing characters. I always wonder in EO games if I’m gimping myself by not trying to re-level up my guys and get them to be more powerful than they would have been had I not, or why I have only 5 characters when I could have 30 registered to my guild. Maybe that stuff comes into play later in the game more than it does now?