The story has serious potential IMO. Where it's seemingly tripping up is the simplistic world-building (small world map, three countries each with 1 resource, lack of historical depth, etc.), but that might be causing people to overlook what's there: the abundance of side stories giving constant perspective from a variety of political actors.
The former issue might jar some people expecting TO/FFT, with their wealth of such macro world-building, but it also might not hinder what this game is going for, which seems to be centered around the story branching from these voting sessions. In short, it seems like it could be taking an Octopath-like approach: eschewing the world-building's macro depth for micro depth. But we'll see.
Having played one path (handing the prince over), and started the second, this is no small divergence: completely different events follow, with different battles (which are way tougher than the intro battle), and different recruits. In fact, it makes me really curious the scale of this game, and how it's going to handle all these divergences. This first one occurs at about the point that Tactics Ogre's first one occurred at Balmamusa (this demo is picking up at Chapter VI, and the choice is Chapter VII), so I wonder how many there'll be.
If the game can continue building on the various perspectives and side stories, it could be really special. But then, I really enjoyed Octopath's storytelling as well, for the most part. :P
All that aside, while one may or may not think the writing is up to the snuff of its inspirations (to me it's clearly drawing from GoT more than anything, down to the same verbiage and paralleling events), the actual gameplay -- the combat -- already handily beats the depth offered by FFT/TO. There's so many more options to manipulate the field of battle, and the ability to explore maps before battle is a really cool feature that felt lacking in the aforementioned games.
