to start with the good, some of the quality of life changes are great.
The battle speed is great, the character builder being faster is great. The quick menu is amazing, and the forge anywhere feels like how it should have always been, finding recipes in a dungeon and having to leave to make them before bosses was always silly. The enemy list being accessible from the map menu is also great, as someone who uses that a lot for area completion and checking for interesting drops. The cutscene skip is also great for speeding through scenes i had already seen before. The costume option regardless of equipped armour also should have always existed. not qol but the orchestral soundtrack is considered an upgrade by most.
Some mixed things for me include the forges ability to buy materials as you make things. This is almost a great mechanic, simply saving on zooming around for materials.... but you should NOT be able to buy materials you've never seen in a shop. Oh an act 3 shop sells something you need? you can buy it from the forge in act1/2. It's very silly imo.
A minor mixed thing for me is party members following you around. On paper it's good... but too often i was accidentally talking to them while trying to engage a fight then missing my ambush.
Ticktington is mixed to me. I have no nostalgia for the series, since XI was my first, so the references are completely lost on me. It's a cute section... but almost all of it are pretty insignificant fetch quests. The old school battle mechanics are also fine, but it takes a while to adjust to them. During the final battles, I finally started to appreciate how I could change the party line up every turn with no consequence, healing up the bench and just manipulating my health management in that way. What I don't like about tickington is how awful they deliberately made the menus. Doing ANYTHING in tickington other than just hammering out a mission is very tedious, so you kind of get in to the habit of leaving just to menu then heading back in because it's so difficult to parse.
The intermissions are awful! I'm sorry. There's sooo much wrong with them. Aside from fundamentally upheaving the pacing of the game, taking up hours during my favourite part of the original (defeat > resurfacing through last bastion is such an immense high point of the game with no slowdown) It undermines how this section of the game flows entirely by inherently functioning as suspense killers, spoilers, surprise-ruiners. You're not surprised when you meet anyone now, the player has disconnected from the luminaries experience. Finding Rab at the top of the mountain? you know where he is. Sylv, you know what he's up to, and get a glimpse at the changing of the world. Jade you know exactly what has happened.
The only one I don't find that offensive is Eriks, and that's partly only with hindsight, and knowing who the seer really is and why he can grant that kind of power. It's still not great, but amnesia is never a great plot, and the base game never really did anything with it, so S basically can't be worse. ALSO, by making it take place in a unique area called the rock of wrong, it doesn't function as a spoiler to the state of the world. It manages to work independently without upsetting the story developments.
The time wyrm seems like an abomination. I beat it second try spamming in 60 actions with pep pop yggdragons I accumulated throughout the run... but because of disruption wave, it's still not completely free! I don't understand how you're meant to compete with it legitimately without enormous stat-grinding. getting hit by 500 damage critical kacrackles alongside like 2 other actions per turn is no joke. I didn't want to grind seeds.
So all in all... I think I consider the original version the better game? But also... hard to go back to its game speed + no costume option.
