i did download the FF7 Remake demo last night, even though I do have it on preorder (I hope my fears mentioned above aren't true). Haven't gotten to play it yet though.
Played through the demo last night. It's pretty short, it's basically just a rendition of the first mission in the game. They did an excellent job recreating all the scenes down to the dialogue and the character movements/images. There was a lot of added dialogue too, of course.
I'll say this, the combat is pretty fast paced and flashy. If you play on the Normal Mode it's a turnless Action game where you can dodge and block attacks on the fly and slash to your heart's content without waiting. You build ATB through attacking and I think blocking, which you use to cast spells and use abilities.
The trash fights are fun and fast paced, but the boss fights?
Grueling. I got to the final boss of the demo and he was kicking my ass! I was stockpiling potions all through the first dungeon and I damn near wiped them ALL out on that last fight. I even had to use an Ether to regain MP, which I HATE doing because I'm a cheap bastard and like to stockpile them for rainy days (Typically never to be used). The fight was waaaay more involved than it was in the original game, with multiple phases and altering strategies. It was fun, but it felt like the difficulty was a bit high...especially for a first boss. At least there's a challenge, and you can always turn down difficulty. There may even be a Turn Based mode, I didn't read through the difficulty settings carefully, so for those that like the old school combat that could be an alternative. All in all I think it took between 12-15 minutes to do the fight, and there weren't any real breaks in the action.
If I had to be critical of one thing in the game it's the party AI. Since the default difficulty is more Action based, you're in control of just one character at a time (Although you can switch which character you're using at will, and you can also issue commands to party members at any given time). It's great that the other party members can do their own thing while you control one guy, but the AI ain't that smart in my experience so far. For instance, as mentioned you need to build ATB for abilities and spells by attacking. If a certain party member is carrying Cure and you need a heal, the AI may have spent all their ATB doing other actions and you won't be able to heal yourself when you need to which is...problematic. The AI doesn't seem to want to heal you by itself, although maybe there's a setting to change that. To go along with that, if you're fighting a machine and it's weakness is Thunder (Like the last boss), the AI seems to spend much of their ATB using normal attacks rather than saving ATB for Thunder casts. Every time I tried to switch to Barrett to cast Thunder he had no ATB to use it....annoying. So, hopefully there's a place to configure party AI. I spent most of the time controlling Cloud, while Barrett was carrying the Cure and Thunder Materia, both of which were the most useful...and I could only seem to use them by switching to Barrett to prevent the AI from burning his ATB for attack abilities. I probably could have swapped the Materia to Cloud instead...but you can't change character's load outs mid battle which is how the original game was anyway. If I knew how stupid the AI was going to be I would have put the important Materia on Cloud before the big fight.
I've already uninstalled the demo, but I think I'm going to redownload it and check out the other difficulty modes to see what I like more. I'm also going to check to see if there's a way to configure that AI in the settings. I prefer a challenge, but there's something soothing and nostalgic about the old school turn based action. I'm a sucker for JRPGs in that respect, grew up on Dragon Warrior and the original Final Fantasy games.
