Looks like a few folks have review copies now, and watching this video in particular I learned a few things (and a few other things were mentioned I knew or suspected, but I’ll bullet point everything in case others didn’t know).
1 - While you can have any character in your party (eventually), you always have your character in the party. So if you pick Scholar to start the game with, your party will always be Scholar + 3 other members. He indicates characters not with you aren’t leveling up on their own (or not as fast) so even swapping members in and out you will always be higher level than the rest of the party, I assume?
2 - While you can recruit all the other 7 characters, you can do so in any order. This also means the characters don’t seem to have a lot of interaction with each other, which I hadn’t thought of or considered before, but now I think about it if he’s right (and I have no reason to believe otherwise) that’s a big whiff from what I can see. These characters should have feelings towards each other, some tension between two, another pair that becomes fast friends, that sort of thing. Ah well.
However, there are interactions between your character and everyone in your party as the game progresses. That seems to start in act 2, and this guy is only a few dozen hours into the game, so who knows how the story will unfold, and how it may do so depending on which character you chose (he was playing H’aanit, the huntress, I believe).
3 - He hasn’t had to, nor felt the urge to, grind at all so far. Because of the narrative structure of doing the first chapter for various (or even all, if you like) of your party members and then bouncing into the second chapters of their stories (which, I’ll be honest, confused me. I knew you could see everyone’s first chapter if you wanted but I thought past that it was only your own characters story?) and with the game world leveling up with you, rather than grinding you can just do more character stories until you are the level you want to be for the next area you are looking at exploring.
Chapter 2 definitely gets more intense/difficult though, and that seems to be as far as he’s gotten so far, so grinding may become a heavier part of the late-game, potentially. Who knows for sure.
4 - The combat mechanics don’t change as the game progresses, so far. However, he agrees that’s common in the format (and, to me, a strange thing to even consider - it’s not like D&D combat mechanics change as you level up, either, for that matter) but there are a lot more options, skills, and things going on as you level up (again, duh) so combat seems to be keeping his interest so far.
5 - He’s digging the music, it sounds like he’s really into the music and the graphics and such. Not sure how this is a “5th” thing we learned though. I guess 4 things we learned isn’t as catchy? He does mention the battle music changes every chapter, which is neat.
Now, moving on to another video the developers were recently (just this weekend) interviewed and they revealed something crazy - the 8 jobs/characters? Yeah, they aren’t all there are. 4 more hidden jobs exist in the game as well!
“We did know there would be a sub-job for each character in the game”. Me: Wut? So, no, I didn’t know that. Very cool. Sounds like you can give a Dancer, for instance, a Scholar sub-job to mix up their abilities. This is crazy to me, I had no idea.
So the 4 hidden jobs are not characters, but rather optional jobs that can be assigned as sub-jobs once unlocked. I won’t list them here in case anyone wants to be surprised/find them on their own, but know they exist and keep your eyes peeled. They do walk through them in the developer video above, however. I watched the first one and skipped the rest (for now).
That’s all I could find so far, but with the game a week away I’m certain we’ll get a lot of impressions like the above. I posted in the comments of the first video (who has the full review version) if you can do anything with encounter rates in the options menu, I’ll report back if he answers.