I still don't have my Switch copy and obviously I don't have my PS4 copy, but I'm going to provide my demo impressions. This isn't full game impressions obviously, but many of these criticisms aren't going to change when the game gets a full release.

What I want to say is that the core gameplay is still Brigandine and it's great. I mean, obviously it's going to be good when you're lifting the entire core concept off of groundwork someone else has built for you, but I'm going to state that the developers are straight up incompetent. Now this is based partially from actual experience in the demo, others from knowing Brigandine like the back of my hand and being able to look up all upgrades within the demo.

Now the first thing I'd like to point out, is they clearly didn't understand the balance between monsters, because yes, the Lizard Man, being specifically designed as a high accuracy dragon killer(especially on Grand Edition) with all around stats and a low rune power. This class is at its best simply because it's got power in numbers, but as you can only fit six monsters in a party, you'll cap out at 150 points on Grand Edition. The Lizard Guard upgrade gets the benefit of gaining a breath attack that they can use one time, twice at the absolute best, and then the Lizard King adds two turns on top of that.

Unfortunately, the Lizard Guard not only has had an increase in cost, now 40 points, but the blue sphere was also removed, meaning that the entire reason for this character at the start is removed. You can upgrade it to a Lizard Guard and you do gain the blue element, but it now costs 55 rune power. The most notable thing is that they no longer gain a breath attack. They literally get nothing but the second turn as a Lizard King. So on that note, there's literally no reason to upgrade the from the base class as that is a massive jump for very little to pactically no gain. It wasn't like the Lizard Guard was just overpowering, they had a role and this role was just completely removed and the character was essentially neutered.

What further shows that these developers had no idea what they were doing were with the upgrades to the Siren and the second tier Imps who were once the Fairy class. Now, on the original Brigandine, the Fairy had one role, pair them with a magic user for a very powerful double geno nuke. You're wasting 45 rune power for that but it's worth it. However, on Brigandine The Legend of Runersia, the class still fulfills that role, for 40 rune power, but they are so much more powerful, and before I explain it, I will go over another character. Why do the Angels and Demon's cost so much in the original Brigandine? The reason? They both have an incredibly powerful nuke spell, and even then, it's only a range of two so they're still limited in what they can do. The Demon has a weaker poison spell that can also attack from three spaces and poison. Now, I bring this up because both the Siren at 55 rune power and the second tier imp at 40 rune power have frost and thunder. Each of these have a hex range of three and you're either taking 150+ or 200+. The ridiculously low rune cost of these two monsters mean that you can have a party of four of them and literally evaporate any enemy per turn at any range of three hexes. They could essentially focus fire on a leader and just wipe that entire party off the board. Not only that, but the Siren has Flight, can 100% charm a character provided she's in water, and cast an ability that removes all buffs and debuffs. When working up from a zombie costing 15 rune power, you didn't just jump to 25 rune power and then 40 rune power with a Vampire Lord who was exceedingly powerful. Went from the vampire at 35 rune power all the way up to 85 because the power of the Vampire Lord is essentially that of a second tier or third tier monster. Yet they gave the rune power such a pathetic jump while giving these characters long range single target nuke spells allowing them to attack with 100% accuracy for several turns in a row with very powerful attacks.

On the original Brigandine, people might go the route of choosing the Pegasus, and to a leser extent the Nightmare. Now I want to say that the Nightmare is an underappreciated unit because it really is a great unit, but the Pegasus is "safe" since Nightmare loses healing and gains Dimension and Weaken. However, Weaken is incredibly powerful to mitigate damage from a powerful enemy completely, and Dimension if it works can take a character out of combat for good. Now this has a lot of strategies to it. Against magic users who have high intelligence, Dimension is going to have a worse chance at working, but against any physical based class, especially those at a lower level, Dimension will work great. You can of course cast it against a Salamander either killing the leader, but where Dimension works best is using it on one of the leaders. By sending one of the rune knights across the map, that knights monsters will now drastically weaken completely taking one of the three opposing forces out of the battle. So why go through the explanation? Because now there's little reason to bother with a Pegasus unless you want Halo, because the Nightmare now has Heal that carries over, Dimension, and Weakness. This gives all the benefits of the Nightmare and none of the previous weaknesses and these are some major benefits, the entire reason to choose between the two in the first place.

So not only were the Lizard Man classes removed from the running as Dragon killers. Dragon's no longer gain the ability to fly when first upgrading them, but it's debatable that they gain an even more powerful upgrade, and that's to be able to change to any of the five elements on class change. Are you lacking a capable party in literally any aspect? Then change the dragon to that color. Lizard Man is no longer a Dragon killer, but the Dragon class can certainly become a water killer. It's like they added this in for more balance, and it wouldn't be such a bad idea if everything else wasn't so broken.

On top of all that, there's also training, so you could essentially take any rune knight and a full party of six mermaids or imps who have a very fast level up rate, and have them train extra single month on quests while your other party members are defending and attacking their choke points. It's just so clear that many facets of the game are just straight up broken compared to the original and they literally had to do nothing more than essentially steal the core gameplay and then build on top of it. You couldn't atleast properly balance the additions you made? Brigandine has its own issues, it's not a perfect game, but there's so many different monsters and characters to build and nearly all of them work in the original Brigandine. About the only ones that you could say are bad and are really of little use are the Mermen, the Giant Scorpion, and Mandrake which you can avoid using. However, even Giant Scorpions have their uses if you actually do level some up, of course you need to use them defensively, so you move your party backwards out of the range of magic and the enemy moves forward into counterattacks. Provided they're used in that way they can actually be a solid character as they are then safe from magic damage, but it's easier to just avoid using them since it takes too much effort to use them well(and by doing so you're essentially taking advantage of the AI.)

So again, it's a well made game simply because it's got the core gameplay of Brigandine, but the additions that they've added on are broken.