I have heard nothing but rave reviews about this and I don't really get why people like it so much? Having different attacks when you mash buttons vs holding buttons doesn't feel good to me, it seems you can't cancel combos by blocking, and dodging is often useless because of the extreme tracking on some attacks (I once saw a fireball swerve 90 degrees in air to hit me after I dodged), so it's not clear how the game wants you to play? I haven't played the base game in a while though, so maybe it's just that I've gotten really rusty at this combat system.

I also feel like you have a lot of options right from the jump, but I didn't see any clear synergies, so I wasn't sure what abilities I should chain together. However, it also didn't seem to matter on normal difficulty because Art of War is both a buff and a powerful attack with great tracking that doesn't cost any mp, so I mostly just ended up spamming that.