Got this yesterday, first thoughts:
The game is really solid from a pure combat perspective. But some very minor details seem off. Most of the time the character models look fantastic, but there are times when they look worse than SCIV. Honestly I thought something was wrong with my display when I first started the game, despite it looking really sharp some of the characters models seem low quality, not bad, but like there is something missing compared to IV. I checked my TV display info and it says the game is running 720p. I don't get it. It looks good but it doesn't look better than SCIV to me, it looks worse in ways. Some special effects look god awful. Any fire animations for charge up effects look like ass. The move where Aeon spits fire(not his CE), the fire looks really low quality. There also doesn't seem to be as much shine on the characters, or the textures are really dull or something. This is much more apparent in CaS with certain pieces of clothing.
Pretty nit-picky, but something about the whole presentation seems off to me and it's annoying. I could be completely wrong. I've abstained from SCIV for a few months in anticipation of this.
But other than that I think the game is good, I might main Aeon, I have yet to try everyone else though. I tried using Ivy for a bit, and I like the changes to her, but she also feels weaker, is there any setup to combo into her command grabs/CE? IMO, her command grab CE is REALLY slow and easy for the opponent to stuff. It's almost worthless unless you're playing against a complete turtle.
I played through arcade twice, something I didn't know about arcade is you could pick regions to fight certain enemies or even pick ranked. And let me tell you, using Aeon, Ranked Arcade was goddamn insane. My last opponent was Siegfried and he was a complete tool. If you're not blocking before his CE animation starts you are boned. At what seems like any range.
I like how Quick Battle is structured. Some... well... most of the character designs are ridiculous but it's cool that you can unlock over 240(?) titles from that mode. So assuming there are some insanely hard opponents in there getting some of those titles could be real accomplishments. That adds some nice replayability to the single player portion.
Another good aspect is the persistent leveling through all modes, clearing a few arcade rounds and leveling up with some new CaS parts as a reward is fun and makes me want to keep playing.
CaS mode is better in a lot of aspects but worse in a few. You can change height and weight now, which is goddamn awesome. I made a dude with a gut and it's kinda hilarious. The CaS models look more detailed now but at a cost. I guess since it's harder to make equipment pieces that scale to the size of a variable weight CaS they just made some pieces big and as a result they look huge and like they're not even resting on the characters. As much stuff as there is, a few more generic pieces of equipment would be appreciated as well. All the undergarments are pretty blah, but I guess Scamco wants to sell all dat bikini DLC so we gotta suffer. Then again some of it might be unlockable, so that comment isn't really justified at the time of this post. I find most of the Special slot items are pretty much garbage unless you're making something silly or weird. Though the fact that you can take 3D objects and place them on your character wherever you want and adjust the size/color/texture/rotation/scale/etc.. is pretty damn cool.
CaS is still great though in spite of the bad aspects. There is a ton of equipment, adding designs and textures is a huge bonus. There are 4 slots for each piece of equipment that you can add a design on. Plus you can combine all that stuff so you can texture a piece of armor, color the texture, color the armor itself, then slap 4 designs on top of it. That's pretty unheard of for a fighting game, or any sort of customization really outside of wrestling games. There are all kinds of facepaint/makeup options, you can put textures on weapons and recolor them as well. All that stuff is great.
Training mode is fantastic, despite the way that it's set up which is confusing at first. The best part about it, IMO, is if you turn on help while in the main moves section there is a little pop-up window on the bottom of the screen that tells you what a move does, why it's effective and when/how you should use it. This is an amazing under-looked addition. Something so simple but so goddamn useful if you want to learn a character for the first time. This feature should be available for every single move in your move list, it should be mandatory for this to be in every fighting game with a move list. And after using it you'll think it's absurd when you see a move list without it again.
Those are just my initial impressions. I might have been wrong about how the game looks, I'm going to start up SCIV tonight to compare.