Rondo of Swords is proving to be a fun time-sink. I have a few complaints.
The lack of a skill table and stuff is really irksome. It's hard to know which skills are worth investing them without burning a point on trying them out, and even then, it's hard to know how much a skill will be impacted by subsequent points. On that same note, it's hard to know which characters will wind up getting worthwhile skills, in the absence of some kind of guide.
They did a fair job diversifying the casters, though in the process (as with many other games) they didn't wind up that balanced. Ingraine wound up a good sniper with high upkeep, Cotton wound up self-sufficient, with generally poor range and enormous power (and eventually nice PBAoE). Marie was set apart from other healers by natural MP regen that none of the other casters (that I've tried) had, etc. Late-game skills may change this. Not sure yet.
The game might have been balanced around getting a very powerful archer early on, and I kind of missed him. This put me at a pretty significant disadvantage for much of the early game.
The AI seems pretty inconsistent, possibly related to an inherent "visibility" stat hinted at by some accessories. I can park a weak archer (Shino) just outside of the movement range of a large group of enemies and they won't advance, so as to force her to retreat. (This was most noticeably abuseable in the battle in which the objective is to kill a "mounted guard," on some map with a river. Not sure which mission it was.)
Optimizing use of the smith and card quests seems like a possible source of annoyance, too.
