I've been messing around with the game over the weekend bouncing between various modes and so far cleared about around ten or so character stories, the first another story chapter, and the main story up through chapter 4. The grid-based combat feels like it has so much potential but I really haven't felt like I've seen anything yet that required me to strategize, and normal battles feel like a slog; the lowest point was near the end of chapter 4 when the game inexplicably had 4-5 nodes in a row that were all virtually the exact same four-wave fight with the Amane bosses. The randomness of the disc system seems to massively discourage any team size above three characters, and even then since it doesn't deal from the deck the same way FGO does, you can't predict what hand you'll get for any given turn (I did hear some characters have unique equippable skills that let you force their discs for a turn, which I guess is why they're higher tier).
I appreciate you going back to type all that up and I'm going to keep playing for a bit more in hopes of finding some kind of interesting battle content, but for the time being I'll probably set the main story aside to farm materials. The inventory doesn't organize/delineate them in terms of rarity as well as FGO though being able to pull up a list of every quest that drops a specific item is nice, but I guess I need to check a wiki anyway to see which is most efficient. The fact that you need to level back up all from level 1 after promotion is a buzzkill too, especially when I'm almost out of the XP items as things stand. It's been two and a half years since the beginning of FGO so I don't really remember what the XP situation was like back then, but I guess it must have felt similar. And I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with memoria; needing to get skills from the gacha feels weird (even though connects are supposed to be the primary means of getting buffs/etc in battle, it seems).
I had skipped over most of the cutscenes for story chapter 2 and the early part of 3, but once we finally started getting human opponents in chapter 4 I started caring again. None of the characters besides Iroha, Yachiyo, and Momoko have anywhere near the charm/personality of the original quintet though.
The fact that the game launched with Double Madoka as a viable strategy to destroy any single-player content when it took FGO three years to get Skadi memes does make me wonder about overall balance, but I'll see what I can find.
