Watched someone stream it for a while and it's honestly incredibly faithful to the original, even down to the units. Like they've got elementals instead of jinns but they have the same stats and attacks, imps instead of pixies with the same spells, etc. The stats and mechanics all seem to be pasted right over. Which is great as far as I'm concerned, it was a good system.
They took out the generic story vignettes for finding items or getting stat buffs and so forth, which is decline. Yeah, they got repetitive eventually but you could always skip through them and it was charming to see the knight you sent off get stuck working a cursed millstone that made him stronger, or getting wounded because he chased a talking rabbit into it's burrow and got bit by a snake. There were dozens of these little stories with multiple endings each, and they were pretty well written. I guess they wanted to focus on the knight recruitment stories instead.
They added equipment slots to monsters, which is cool, and probably overpowered. I mean, for the cheap monsters even a slight stat boost would be relatively huge, and for the expensive ones, they were already super efficient, so kitting them out with high end gear makes them even more overpowered. I'm okay with this by virtue of the rule of cool though. Hook my archangel up with an enchanted sword of doom and berserker armor.
Visually, the game looks pretty good. Kinda heavy on the fanservice and skimpy outfits, but they've got a lot of cool character and monster designs, and the cell shaded models on the tactical level look great.
Gameplay does seem to be better balanced. Little things like less xp for casting spells and better defenses on enemy lords, worse spells for the angels and new buffs for the melee knights, etc. And the monsters do still get branching upgrade paths. They improved shit without reinventing what already worked.
It was hard to tell from just part of one campaign, but it did seem a lot more anime and extravagant, which is a shame. It's still more subdued than most stuff these days, but the original was closer to dark souls, for lack of a better reference point. This feels more like... Hellsing? Or Warhammer? Nobody has crazy neon hair or weird triple bladed scythe weapons, but the outfits are crazy and the equivalent of the old evil general with a huge crossbow and mundane plate armour is a dude that looks like he's dressed for his coronation ceremony. It does still look good, just feels more played out than seeing clergy dressed in simple robes and warriors in completely functional armour, which has somehow become exotic these days.