Finished the Seinarukana demo yesterday.
That was pretty long for a trial, I think it took me 5 hours to work though it. ^^;
In general, I really liked it. As expected for a trial version, there are some scene skippings. And I actually really wanted to find out what happened between the scenes (like how Nozomu and the gang met up with Katima), which is always a good sign for a game I want to play.
The writing is good too, nicely paced and structured: there's always something happening or something that needs to be done (like securing food and water in the beginning, or arriving at certain towns later on). It certainly gives the story an RPG feel.
The battle system appears complex at first, but is actually really simple. It reminds me of digimon card games in a sense that everyone has a set of skills divided into 3 categories: attacker, defender, and supporter, depending on the role they have been assigned to. In combat, an attacker's (attack) skill rating is (generally) directly compared against the defender's (defense) skill rating, while the supporter's skills can have various offensive or defensive effects against certain targets.
The battle process is quite straightforward too, since you can't switch skills halfway, besides swapping roles between characters in the team, all there is to do is watch the characters fight it out. The 2D sprites and effects are quite nice though, as well as the sound effects.
The green halberd's (鉾) combat reactions made me laugh so hard.
The music is top notch too, especially the ones that are played during tense moments or combat. Xuse really caught that RPG feel nicely.
One thing I noticed while playing is the progression speed: while fighting on the world map, I notice just how big the "world of sword" is. In the trial version, the story takes you through two major towns (each has about an hour worth of reading associated to it), but there are dozens more towns and cities on the map! And considering this is just the first world out of the many that were introduced officially, I wonder just how long this game will be?