I played it through! The last time I played this game was when it ended right when the world was nuked, was cool to see that the story is going interesting places. Please take my feedback and suggestions with a grain of salt, since my only experience with SRPGs is cheesing some Advance Wars games and Shining Force 2.
A couple of the improvement suggestions I wanted to mention seem to have already been addressed in your comment below, but I'll still rattle them off:
- Fullscreen option in the settings (I only saw your comment about F4 after beating the game, but those settings are where I searched for it, so I think if that's possible it would be a neat addition there).
- I didn't get a confirm-to-quit prompt when I accidentally pressed Escape on the save menu, seems to not be there?
- There didn't seem to be an option to save before the first social event selection after mission 1, but there was before the social events for mission 2. I think savescummers like me would love to have that for all the social event selections (even if the consequences wouldn't stick if we reset)
- When Kraven took the Yeti's keycard, Urassik says he needs to have the keycard on himself, I took that to mean that you need to use the trade function with Kraven, but that was not the case since the keycard seems to have already been on Urassik.
- You keep key items during New Game+, e.g. the bomb key and the yeti keycard (I mean not really a big deal for a demo but I guess I'd bring it up)
- Opening chests is done by wait, other actions are done by info, could that be unified? Standing on the bomb also seemed unnatural to me while playing, I missed that you could stand on it the first try and wasted a round (although looking back I think I could have also undone the move).
- If you have fast mode on for enemy movement, it will autoscroll through the final text on the prologue mission if your allies kill the final enemy.
I really love the mythology of your game, I feel it is a very strong part of what hooked me. The Diyu, Lord Yama, underworld lore is super interesting and I am glad that the game took that direction after the HIVE nukes. I also greatly enjoy the new unit characters you can spend free time with. I played through the game three times in a row to get all the social events, I liked them so much. My favorite is Smith, the most American man alive. In the same vein, I think the talk feature is a great addition for alternate gameplay routes, like talking to the Yeti to disarm the situation, I enjoyed doing that on my first run (much to Lei's dismay). Although I also tried to talk the dummy terrorist into please disabling the bomb, which he most pleasedly refused. I think you get a lot of interesting choices and gameplay experiences out of that feature, you also can't just use it blindly, that's why I like a lot how it was used in this game.
At first I felt Kraven and Urassik were the main pullers due to their movement range, but on my New Game+ playthroughs I only realized how useful the sniper is. I like how all the characters have their strengths and weaknesses and I can see how you could design more missions to take advantage of each one. Those are really good. Their personalities were wonderful too, the aforementioned most American man Smith, the sniper getting philosophical over movies, the scientist and the soulful machine talking about the science behind it all, I enjoyed spending time with them a lot.
All the branching definitely adds to the replayability factor, just on this base demo with two main missions, I got what felt like three different routes on my three playthroughs, with social events and other choices.
Also music-wise I want to note that the combat training BGM is a bop.
So yeah, all in all I had a lot of fun with this demo of the game as well, I love the story/mythology/characters and I love where you took it from the last demo! Keep it up!