Ok, so I don't understand the Natural Doctrine haters at all.
This game is awesome. I'm fairly early in, but so far it's everything I wanted to be. All I can guess at is that some people don't understand the combat system, but I picked it right up and have never read anything on it.
And for the record, I'm playing on lethal and am having no issues.
Combat is very tactical.
A somewhat simplified description of combat:
1) On your turn, you can move freely within zones and attack within range. Most attacks allow for chaining if you meet certain conditions (ie, 'attack same target'). Your units auto-attack other enemies in a zone if the first dies.
2) As you set up attacks, your position matters. First, your distance from other characters affects your bonuses. Second, characters with guns need line of sight to avoid friendly fire. And in some cases, there is a 'Valkyria Chronicles' style sniping of enemies that cross your gunners' vision.
3) A character in a chain can 'reserve' a turn (not move) to allow for turn linking.
4) Initiative switches teams every 'turn'... unless you kill the next enemy up and have someone with initiative ready to go.
SOOO... putting that together, what this means is you'll want to chain attacks and make sure to kill the enemy that's supposed to take a turn next. Leave someone in reserve, and bam, you link a turn (which in practice is no more complicated than in any other SRPG that shows turn queues - kill the enemies going next to avoid getting hit more).
The reason it 'feels' harder is that enemies are also smart enough to chain attacks, so if you're not careful, you can get hit with a piles of chained attacks on the enemies turn. This is usually a result of over extending.
However, careful advancing and defensive posturing prevents this. For example, if you're not in position for a full fledged attack, rather than stretching thin you should go defensive -- something like, have one character guard your gunner (preventing them from being sniped but allowing for cover fire), have another character in the frontmost zone 'guarding'... and the enemy will be unable to do much damage to you and you'll be able to counter effectively.
You are able to 'undo' all your moves before you set it into action, which is nice. There are lots of special skills that work well together -- for example, you can break someone's guard with one character to open him up for attacks with another.
There are also checkpoints within dungeons so if you do die, you don't need to start from the beginning.
Graphics -- i don't understand the complaints. It's no killzone but it's perfectly viable for a srpg. you aren't buying this game for the graphics, so don't let them stop you from buying it either.
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Honestly, this game is awesome. I'll report back later to see if it suddenly ramps up in difficultly or something, but again, I'm playing on 'lethal' (harder than 'hard') and am not having issues.
If you're on the fence and like tactical games, my early review is that I highly recommend this. I'm playing the vita version.
