>>94871
I'm looking forwards to it.
From the demo, the two things are noticed are that:

A. The new combat mechanics seem primed to be less opaque than SE2's and more strategic than SE3's, which I support. SE3's combat had an issue where combat was meant to be a statistics game. That's why losing a normal fight just took away your shield, which you can always replace by spending a few coins in town. But it would sometimes throw you into do-or-die fights where a bad roll meant "you died with extra steps" rather than "go back now or the next hit might kill you". The android was the worst example, but all boss fights ran at odds with this philosophy. Unless your companion took the bodyguard perk, setting the level slightly high probably meant that a boss encounter would kill you unavoidably, or at least get your companion, and the bodyguard perk made the rest of the game too easy. The new system seems to function off of a health mechanic, which should mean that there's a much bigger gap between "so easy you can't lose" and "so hard there's nothing you can do but grind more", which is an improvement. Maybe there will even be a level system where the game has ways of challenging you without you having to ask for it.

B. The series has always had a bizarre world full of incongruous elements and design choices and dialogue that was clearly odd even in its native language, but this demo has it cranked up to heights never before seen. In your trial fight, half the screen is covered by brightly-colored flashing and blinking buttons, and both of you dropping your sword so you can briefly have a quickdraw showdown is hilarious. That's not what really takes the cake for me, though. In the past entries, janky text-hooked yandex translations were the only way to experience the game for non-japanese people, and it could be necessary not only to understand the story but also the gameplay at times. Well, bloodiba has cut out the middle program and added in a machine-translated english version. For some reason, though, he used one which would have been mocked for being insufficient if it came out fifteen years ago. Menus, characters, EVERYTHING speaks like a japanese character from a Looney Tunes cartoon… made in 1943. I'm not kidding, the button which switches it to english language text is labelled "engrish", and it's priming you for what hell you're unleashing by selecting it. It's glorious and hilarious and I'm torn on whether I prefer this to a good translation of good dialogue. (I would call the SE stories "interesting", but not "well-written"… but they're not what the game is about, anyways).