The Spirit Engine 2: First Impressions

For some reason doubleclick is hooked up to new blogs.  Weird.  Anyway:
 
I've been playing Spirit Engine 2 for a few hours now, and I have to say I'm enjoying it quite a bit.
 
You have a party of three characters, each character being of three classes, and of three roles within the story.  The classes are knight, gunner, and priest, while the roles I'd classify as the friendly, the wise guy/gal, and the...  jerk?  I guess that fits.  Depending on which named character you pick for each of the roles, you get different dialogue, and each of the characters reacts slightly differently to each other. This makes for a total of nine characters, each with their own personality quirks, and past that will revealed through the course of play.
 
So far there don't seem to be many alternate paths, and exploration is mainly just picking slowly unlocking locations on a map, then sidescrolling through beautiful environments, battling monsters, meeting people, buying stuff in shops. The setting is fantasy with many races of humans, gunpowder, and the occasional airship, but not to the gaudy extremes we're used to from stuff like Final Fantasy.  It's understated the way I prefer. There are also some interesting mysteries and strange creatures that aren't common in your standard fantasy fare.  I never played the first game (it's not necessary, and even the designer says he wasn't satisfied with some of the writing, so starting with the first probably isn't necessary), so I don't know how well-known these things are, but I'm thinking there is more to this strange world than it first seems.
 
When you gain enough experience, you get a skill point you can sink into different skills.  Each of the nine characters starts with a different skill set, even characters from the same class start with a different starting allotment and a slightly different set of base skills, which I find fun.  That means you can actually have three priests, three knights, or three gunners each starting with abilities the rest don't have, although I imagine three of the same class might make certain sections rather difficult (and maybe impossible on higher difficulty levels).
 
I'm playing on Hard, and I've had to replay some battles many times to figure them out.  It's a nice level of challenge that's really fun to solve.  The battles are similar to the Active Time battle system from old Final Fantasy games, where you have time meters that slowly charge up, and when it reaches a certain level your character can attack.  You can plan out attacks ahead of time by putting actions and their targets in an ordered list, and you can set up such lists for the entire party if you want (although I tend to prefer micromanaging).  There are different speeds for how fast the time goes, so if you're like me and want to make sure you catch what happens, there's a turtle speed, or if you want to make things quicker you can go up to cheetah.  You can also pause if you want, to make things more detailed, and choosing actions out of your total list of actions pauses the game too.
 
There are enough actions in combat to allow for different strategies, and the enemies are varied and sometimes really rough on you (those cthulhu elephant things give me flashbacks of the mammoths from Phantasy Star I.  Those bastards).  You get equipment that give you special abilities and bonuses, and the selection in the shops tends to be wider than you're able to afford. 
 
The music is really, really high quality.  The art is stylized but wholly professional.  I'm really enjoying playing this.
 
One thing that struck me is that there's not a lot of the things we come to expect from RPGs as far as go-fetch-it side quests and talking to every damned villager.  So far the plot has been very lean and to the point.  I think I'm enjoying it even more for this reason. What I also like is that the characters you pass by in beleaguered towns are drawn well enough that you don't really need to bug them with incessant questions.  It's obvious how they feel, and obvious what their situation is.  The events pretty much explain themselves, which is something more games in general should do.  Show don't tell, and all that.
 
Going to play it more, and will give you more impressions when I beat it.  The game used to cost more than 15 bucks, took a few price drops, and is now free.  From what I've seen so far, if this sounds like your sort of thing it's well worth your time.  And if you're on the fence, I'll say that I'm the kind of person that gets a bit picky with dialogue and characterization, and so far it seems like the creators of this game are too.  There are few false notes, which is better than I can say for a lot of bigger-name products out there.
 
Note: I stuck this on the General Forums because there's apparently no entry for The Spirit Engine 2 here.  I don't think it would help to put it in the first game's forum, but it'd probably make sense to put it in the second game's, should someone take the time to make that.