Yep, as soon as we learned that Final Fantasy XV had a new demo inbound, I rushed to the Playstation Store to download it (the demo weighs in at around 3.2GB). As you can imagine, I was pretty excited to try it!
The first thing that stunned me is how gorgeous the graphics are, and how the soundtrack is shaping up to be also superb. The frame rate (FPS) was locked at 30, but I noticed that it dropped a few times under that, and some early segments of the demo were a little choppy.
In this demo, we are following a little furry creature called Carbuncle (pictured above), which is one of the summons (eidolons?) we got to know a few Final Fantasy games ago. We explore one of young Noctis’s dreams, and we get to fight a few enemies to show off the updates to the battle system from the previous Final Fantasy XV demo that shipped with FF Type-0. We had to collect a lot of orange gems, but it was unclear what they were for, which left me with an impression of being a little incomplete.
I liked the new improvements to the battle system, but I thought it was a little stiff. For example, when Noctis was equipped with his big sword, launching an attack took some time, and was sadly not cancelable. You can block with the Square button, but while action-RPGs allows you to block at any instant regardless of the current action, in this case, the swing animation had to finish before blocking was available which was an annoyance due to the time it took to complete. And honestly, I’m not sure if I was blocking attacks at all since the character didn’t move to a defensive stance.
After a few zones and enemies, we were greeted by a boss that felt unfair at first since he’s way more powerful than Noctis. Luckily, Carbuncle was there to help Noctis once he ran out of HPs.
I completed the demo in around 35 minutes, so do not hesitate to get a taste for yourself since it’s pretty short and enjoyable.
Did anyone try this demo yet? Did you like it?
