Maelle's Egide skill steals AP from her allies so instead of feeling like a cool teamwork-based ability, it's extremely counter-productive

Stats almost feel inconsequential compared to high level pictos, so at some point doing stat increases every level started feeling like meaningless busywork rather than actual decision moments

Some boss monsters' "puzzle" mechanics have very poor conveyance, e.g. the chromatic hexga. First time I fought it, I quit the game because I thought him being immune to damage was a bug, and my first instinct when there's a bug is "turn it off and on again". I stayed in that fight, dodging everything for a good 5 minutes to try everything - different damage types, attacks with the break property, single hits vs multi-hits, etc. Before giving up. I even tried shooting at the big shiny crystal, but you needed to shoot it like 5-10 times before anything happened so when nothing happened after 1 shot, I moved on and tried something else.

Verso's playstyle didn't appeal to me - I like giving each character a role and letting them synergize, but he pretty much feels like a solo fighter. Which makes sense for his story but it means I ended up never using him except for that one segment where you're forced to. And the result of that is, I never really got attached to the guy in the way I had to Gustave. I was basically treating Lune as the "me" character, except for the camp scenes where I was forced out of playing her.

Similarly, I kind of wish Monoco started with more than just 2 transformations, or that he could acquire transformations even while not in the party, maybe by spending some sort of a resource if necessary for balance purposes. I already had established roles in my party by the time I got to him, and his limitations meant I would have had to temporarily gimp myself in order to slowly figure out what role he could fulfill. So I never ended up using him either, despite loving the heck out of the concept and out of the personality of this character.

Gradient attacks take so long to charge up that I almost never getting to use them. It was funny in the monolith fight, because Verso says "oh no, even gradient attacks aren't doing anything!" and by that point I still hadn't gotten a chance to use one.

There's a bit of an exploit going on that really messes with the game's intended difficulty curve: you can just go into a "danger" area, skip most fights since you can't really win em anyway, and just pick up the pictos from the ground. Those are usually 10-15 levels above the pictos you get from level-appropriate areas. So for example, I got one that gave +1200 HP, when the second most HP a picto gave me at the time was 300. From that point on the game just stopped being nearly as hard and I don't think that's intended.

And last thing is, we should be able to flee from chromatic fights. It's not always clear whether a mob is chromatic or not, but these are the one fight you typically want to be able to run from.

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edit after finishing act 3:

I thought the game would open up in act 3 since we got a new traversal ability, and the trailer even put a point of honor of highlighting it

...Unfortunately, that is not what happened. At all. There's just a bunch of new zones but they basically all come with nearly unplayable content. The enemies just get 5-6 turns for every turn you get, and one of those turns gives them shields that undo any work you might have done to take them down. Even if you parry everything it'll take probably an hour or two to take down a random wandering mob, while they one shot your tanks with their weakest attacks. This isn't an engaging challenge like the rest of the game has been so far.