Played it at Best Buy for far longer than I'd like to admit, then went over to a friend's who got in on a WalMart slip-up before they stopped (bastards). This game feels even better upon first getting my hands on it than any Calibur including (what had been my favorite up until yesterday) SCI. There were things I categorically didn't like when I first played every other iteration in terms of the system but this one feels so gooooooooooood.
Despite Mitsurugi losing a good number of moves, his selection of * usable* moves has increased greatly, IMO. I couldn't be any more thrilled with how this game feels. The biggest issue I'm having is that the meter is in an awkward place, not clear enough, and I'm not much of a 2D player so I keep forgetting to look anyways. In time, in time.
Just Guarding is hard enough to do when you know what's coming because the window is sooooooo small. It's akin to Just Impacts in SCIV (I think it might be even stricter). Very few people could consistently pull those off just in practice mode, let alone a real fight. I think we'll see them more as the game's life cycle progresses, but not every other string or anything like that since you have to release guard to make it work. The risk isn't a high as a guard impact, but it's still there. Keep in mind even if you recover fast enough to block, you are still eating guard gauge damage.