Just had a bit of a mess around with the Iron Giant fight, fought him some 10-20 times just seeing what I could do in the battle system and I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was more in the demo than I thought. The warping up the building seems abuseable, but I'd guess other enemies will be able to counter it easier. Air combos are surprisingly easy to perform with reasonable control so dodging doesn't strip all focus away from the health, mp bar and limit break bar. There was a counter to a grab QTE I missed before too that uses the warp to escape, and while QTE's usually bug me they aren't very frequent at all here. I do wish I could activate Armiger in the middle of an air combo though which I've not found a way to do yet.
Main thing I noticed that gives me some hope though is once you know how to use the battle system there's quite a rift between fighting the Lv1 Iron Giant and the Lv15 one. Sure there's no threat of actually dying at all here, but it did give me some hope that higher level enemies could actually prove challenging whereas in Duscae it felt a lot less relevant, probably due to being heavily condensed.
The only thing bugging me is we never truly get to test the combat system until that last fight. I'd really like to test it out instead in Duscae where I can fight larger groups of enemies and a more challenging boss. I know it won't happen, but I'm itching for a Duscae 3.0 made public for everyone to try a better version. It's definitely a better combat system than before but I don't feel like I'm getting a very good opportunity to test it out here.