-The first thing I noticed was how great it looked and how smoothly it ran on PS3. Now I'm going to buy it on PC so I wasn't worried about that, but it's a massive improvement over the near-slideshow that LoS1 was on PS3. But I was also surprised by how great the graphics were, the first game mostly relied on its amazing art styles but was not too much of a looker beyond that. This game seems to be mixing both and I was impressed by small things like the lighting the torches gave off.
Agree, when Dracul walks out of the door to where he faces the Golden Armor, you could see the soldier climbing, carrying their torches in the distance, moving into the castle, it looks great.
-I keep forgetting who does Gabriel's voice acting but he's really stepped his game up for this one. Between the demo and the trailers so far he's shown a lot of range that emo-Gabriel didn't have in the 1st game.
That'd be Robert Carlyle, he plays Rumpelstiltskin in a TV show called Once Upon A Time, and let me tell you, he is amazing.
-Combat felt the same but it's hard to judge from a tutorial demo. What I didn't like was how enemies don't seem to react to your hits at all and will hit you through them. The problem with this is with the ice sword the particles and flash get in your way and you can't see when an enemy is starting to attack you.
This one of the good/bad things about LoS enemies, even mid combat they are able to strike you back, I was doing this crazy move with the Chaos Claws on two enemies, I thought I was stunning them, but no, someone waved his soldier at me hitting me.
And as your said, both area attacks for Chaos Claws and Void Sword have particles and whatnot around that you can't really see what the enemy is going to do, though I have to say they look really cool, especially the Chaos Claws 360 hit move.
-There was actual platforming in the demo! I was stunned by this. I mean a lot of it is still automatically handled, this isn't Mario all of a sudden, but there were still timing parts to the platforming that were made trickier by trying to dodge that boss' projectiles at the same time you had to judge the jump between opposite moving platforms. That seemed quite a lot for a tutorial in a game like this, but I was pleasantly surprised.
I was surprised when I died lol, people complained alot about LoS.1 platforming which I didn't find troublesome at all, but here it was better, more involving, liked the whole timing sequences.
Overall it really made me excited for the game. I was already really looking forward to it since I loved LoS but this demo put it above everything except South Park for me next year. It's pretty funny I'm looking forward to 2 current gen games more than any next gen game next year.
This is my most anticipated title ever, cause it do things I always wanted, February can't get soon enough.
How have you guys been able to download the demo on PSN? I bought MoF but the LoS2 demo doesn't show up in the download list, it's frustrating. Maybe I should mention that I bought it with a German account.
There was a problem with the European version, my friend wasn't able to download the demo either, but according to Dave Cox they fixed it, and indeed they did cause my friend was able to download the demo later on, maybe try this
https://twitter.com/CastlevaniaLOS/status/396956819102638081
https://twitter.com/ocelotshino/status/396958073169776640
