I was able to find this used for cheap, so I figured I'd buy it.
Overall, I'm disappointed at this remake/remaster, but the more and more I play it the more it's growing on me.
It's not because it gets better as I go, it's mainly tied to the nostagia factor, but there are small things they changed from the original game that I like. Truthfully, if they created a redrawn version of the original sprites, I probably would have liked it more, because the 3D is absolutely atrocious.
One thing for certian, this new version kind of shows how broken the original combat design was. I feel it's accentuated because of the 3D.
I hate the music. The choices of instruments is bad, like they picked the most annoying chalkboard scratching instruments for most of the main melodies. Luckily they have an option to change it to the original soundtrack, which I swiftly did.
But I like what they did with the running mechanic. Now you can run for as long as you have stamina % -- it counts down from 100% till you let go of the run button and then it replenishes.
I also like the addition of assigning spells and items to R1 and L1 for quick access during gameplay. This helps elevate some of the pause in the action and gives you access to spells/items that you need to quickly select in a pinch.
Unfortunately assigning these shortcuts is persistent for all characters. It would have been nice to have each character have their own quick selections. Speaking of: switching characters with the D-pad is pretty nice. Better than using the select button style of the SNES where you cycle through the character selection the more you press the button. With this you can hit left for Popoi, and right for Primm.
The story scenes bug me a lot. The pacing is so off on the english dub, too much time between camera cuts and line delivery, and changing the audio to Japanese and reading subtitles is much better. But still a bit weird with the way they animated the camera movements, lots of slow zooms and pans for no real cinematic reasons, and they should have put some facial motion in there, like animated textures for mouth movements or something. Right now they talk with no expression on their faces. It's pretty dated looking, and kinda makes it awkward.
I'm happy the radial menu is still there, but I don't like the art for the icons, and the lack of background darkening while perusing the menu.
The original game had very distinctive iconography, it was easy to understand, and it was clear what you're looking for. It also darkened the background so you had clarity on what you were seeing. In the new game the menu sometimes gets lost because of the background:
The new game doesn't have the text on the icons, but at the bottom of the radial menu instead. It's probably to combat the localization issue, but then again, the original SoM didn't care about localization on the menu items. Ah the good ol' days.
All in all, I feel they made this remake a bit too literal of the original title. It's like they purposefully tried to follow all the constraints of the original game, when they really didn't need to. A bit more animations for the story stuff, more polish to the art ESPECIALLY add some better lighting (everything looks much too flat shaded, making the original look like it has more "depth" than this, and perhaps some simple physics on secondary animations -- cloth/hair, it's all canned right now... this would have gone a long way to making this more of a remaster.