Order Of Ecclesia manages to do a lot of things well. The graphics are quite good (or the new ones, at least), the music is excellent, and the bosses are some of the best in the series. The glyph system gives an unprecedented amount of variety in attacks, allows for a number of cool challenges, and interrupting an enemy's attack by stealing it never gets old. Though it has you going through stages in a linear fashion, the stages themselves involve plenty of exploration, and reward said exploration well... but not with equipment or healing items*
There are some, but not many, and the equipment really isn't very good
, which leads me to the thing the game does very badly:
Sidequests. If you actually want to be able to take a hit you're going to need to indulge the whims of the villagers you save. While a few quests are fun and/or interesting, most of them are some variety of Twenty Bear Asses. While a few of these can be completed through natural progression through the game, most require both grinding and looking up what to do in a guide, as all of the drop rates are hideously low. And then, more often then not said items are added to the store rather than given to you. All of the prices are exorbitant, so you'll need to farm some cash to get some good stuff. And between the horrible drop rates and sell prices being quite low, there's really no way to get fast cash...
Some other things:
The game is pretty hard. I'm mostly neutral on this.
The game tries to make you pay attention to enemy strengths and weaknesses. This is kind of neat and kind of frustrating... until you get a decent spell, since resistances to physical damage types are much more common than magical ones.
Unless you have a guide or obsessively check for breakable walls, you're going to get the bad ending on your first try.
Specifically, they're fueled by hearts, and you get upgrades that increase the number of hearts you can hold
means that the later bosses can be beaten or heavily weakened by spamming them, which is somewhat disappointing (on the other hand, I like being able to see the ending, so not all bad).
The various areas all have fairly distinct sets of enemies... except for Dracula's Castle, where many of the enemies are in multiple areas.
Good in most respects, but with a crippling flaw
Order Of Ecclesia manages to do a lot of things well. The graphics are quite good (or the new ones, at least), the music is excellent, and the bosses are some of the best in the series. The glyph system gives an unprecedented amount of variety in attacks, allows for a number of cool challenges, and interrupting an enemy's attack by stealing it never gets old. Though it has you going through stages in a linear fashion, the stages themselves involve plenty of exploration, and reward said exploration well... but not with equipment or healing items* , which leads me to the thing the game does very badly:
Sidequests. If you actually want to be able to take a hit you're going to need to indulge the whims of the villagers you save. While a few quests are fun and/or interesting, most of them are some variety of Twenty Bear Asses. While a few of these can be completed through natural progression through the game, most require both grinding and looking up what to do in a guide, as all of the drop rates are hideously low. And then, more often then not said items are added to the store rather than given to you. All of the prices are exorbitant, so you'll need to farm some cash to get some good stuff. And between the horrible drop rates and sell prices being quite low, there's really no way to get fast cash...
Some other things: