I'm not usually one for demos. When I'm even remotely interested in an upcoming title I try to avoid as much of the hype and marketing as possible and then just go into it on release day completely blind. However when I caught news of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake demo dropping onto PSN my curiosity got the better of me in a BIG way and I practically ran home from work to download it. Now having played it through I'll share some of my thoughts on it.
The game kicks off with the old opening that everyone whos even has a passing knowledge of the game is familiar with only this time its an absolute trip to see all that 1997 FMV done in all new PS4-O-Vision. Not long after that cutscene ends you're in control of Cloud and are set upon by a couple of dudes to hack at. I was playing with the combat on Normal mode but when you start the demo you are given the option of Normal, Easy and Classic and I will be going back to the demo very soon to try out the classic option but at time of writing I've not tried.
There's not really a lot to do in this demo since its just the bombing mission from the start of the game so the focus is really on getting some hands on experience with the combat. At the start of the demo you have just Cloud to play with. He can hack away at things with this Buster Sword in 2 modes, one for speed and one for damage or he can do an ability or cast a fire spell. As you hack at things you fill up at ATB gauge which lets you use those spells an abilities and you can store up to two. So for example, using the fire spell, a potion or hitting something with Braver uses up one of your meters and then you either have to wait or do some more regular hacking and slashing until you can do it again. The more you hit things the more you fill up a little stagger meter and when that gets full you do extra damage to your opponent and exploiting weaknesses of enemies helps raise that meter even faster. Things get real interesting when you get Barret into your party and you then have to manage a second character. You can freely switch between your two guys and while your inactive guy while wander around the area killing enemies for you, their ATB fills up at a much slower rate than if they are actively fighting under your control. So while, at least for the demo, its perfectly viable to control Cloud pretty much the entire time (outside of a tutorial when Barret first joins), if you really want to maximize damage then you'll want to be switching between your party members to fill up their meter and then take full advantage of a stagger when it happens.
The one thing I didn't like about the demo was the English voice work for the characters. It was hammed up and every time Jesse opened her mouth I got the pangs of cringe through my chest. I'm sure the full game will have selectable voice tracks but the demo version just uses whatever language your system is set to. My Japanese PS4 is set to English so everything was in English which means that if you're living in Japan the game will probably have full English support but its a little concerning for those that want the English text but the Japanese voices as there are no language options in the settings for the demo.
Either way, the more I see about this game the more excited I'm starting to get. I'm still a little skeptical of the whole, being split into multiple games thing but as far as gameplay is concerned its a solid action RPG experience and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the "full" thing.
