So far I'm enjoying it, it's a classic beat-em-up style game with great background design and some awesome enemy design. The characters work, but the fighter and dwarf take a little getting used to with their weird dimensions their hit boxes aren't always where you expect them. The moves themselves are nice but the magic using characters can have some stuttery combat as its almost impossible to watch your mana in the middle of a fight with so much going on, on the screen.
This is another problem with the game, the flashy attacks are beautiful, but with 4 players on the screen the whole thing tends to get drowned out in giant flashy spell and attack effects, I have literally lost track of my character for 10-20 seconds, unable to find him in a flood of explosions and magical tornadoes. The skill system is nice and varied from what I've seen so far, although I hear the melee classes skills can be a little underwhelming compared to my wizard who can drop multiple meteors on the battlefield and make the whole screen look like one giant explosion.
The game can get grindy towards the middle, as soon as you unlock online mode you will basically be required to grind quite a few of the earlier levels to get to the later stuff without being grossly underpowered. It does encourage you to use the online mode, which to me is this games crowning jewel the online is just hours of fun.
Basically it works like this. players can drop in or out while your in a level and will replace AI allies if you have them along with you (pretty much a seamless transition friendly AI jumps out and player jumps in). When you complete a level you'll have the option to continue to another level with your party or to quit back to the town, continuing gives you mounting bonuses for every level you complete, but you can't restock your items and special spells except in town (potions and spells restock automatically, but you only get a specific number of uses per adventure). You also unlock bags that let you store additional equipment loadouts, spells and potions, which you'll switch to as your weapons lose durability and you lose item use, this also lets you tailor loadouts on the fly to adapt to a different levels enemies, you can only switch bags at the path select screen though right after the beginning of a level. In effect it becomes an endurance competition to see how many rounds you can last before needing to return to town and accumulating as many round bonuses as you can, since they improve score, xp, loot quality, and gold amount gained. There's also a camping minigame between levels that lets you cook food and eat it for bonuses, like many past Vanillaware games.
That is another criticism of mine though, it takes way too damn long to unlock online mode, it's a good 5-6 hours into the game before you can play online with other people, and you've got to beat a stupidly hard boss before you unlock it (or at least hard for me since he can shut down spell casting, and I was a wizard, and the AI allies are not nearly as good as human ones.)
The story is there but honestly it's just a paperthin excuse to put you in various dungeons, and is very generic, I'll probably forget the story as soon as I'm done with the game.
As a final note, I know you said the sexualization wasn't what you wanted to talk about, but it is a fair warning for anyone that actually cares about that sort of thing. The sorceress is really only the tip of the iceberg, and hardly the most over-the-top thing in the game when it comes to sexualization. Every female character in the game (except the princess, she's just classy that way) will shove their breasts, ass, or crotch onto the poor camera, and usually be dressed more like they are in a fantasy porno than a fantasy video game. It's not horrifyingly bad but the nun and mermaid especially made me roll my eyes, and I can at least see where polygon was coming from with its criticism of the style.
Also, is anyone else playing a wizard, I'm the only one I've seen so far in online mode, I've seen plenty of fighters, sorceresses and elves, and even a few dwarves and amazons, but not a single wizard that I've seen so far other than me.
