I know right! It melds together so many ideas wonderfully executed. It's a breath of fresh air. When I'm not playing this game, I'm thinking about it lol. Been a while since a game has had me so invested.
The cool thing about what you've said is that the game does a great job of allowing you to tune the characters towards your play style. For people that are amazing at parrying and dodging, they can buff other attributed to deal maximum damage and speed. For those who can't, they can put more into defense and vitality. You can turn characters into party buff machines and AOE forces of nature and everything in between.
It must be said, hitting a big string on parries, and then doing full team counter attack to kill a big enemy or boss feels INCREDIBLE! I've felt like a badass so many times so far in this game. Getting to an enemy or area where you very clearly shouldn't be at yet, and brute force killing some enemies from skill alone feels so damn good.
I'm very impressed so far. Only nagging things are that the environment traversal and platforming is definitely a bit janky, and it has some typical traversing stuttering issues with this engine (no shader comp issues from what I've played though which is great!). Also, on PC anyway, Lyall's ClairObscurFIX is a must. The developers are working on improving/fixing Ultrawide support, but this mod fixes UW support completely. Fixes the FOV, fixes CGI movies being pillar boxed, and unlocks the 30fps cutscene FPS.
Hopefully the devs continue to polish the game up, because regardless of the issues, this is definitely on track to be my GOTY.