I've played the demo and enjoyed the battle system and the music, as usual.
I won't comment much on the story shown in the demo. It is already well known how bad it is, and I dare say, whatever was there was worse than in the previous games.
But it's interesting how Toriyama barely didn't evolve as a director. Outside of having a different game direction philosophy (throw as many ideas from the fanbase or from other games into the game as possible), the pace of the demo was just _so_ bad.
Demo spoilers bellow, although they're so vague that I'm not sure if they "spoil" anything. But you've been warned:
The game made a tutorial about how to run away, and adviced us to rush it out and look carefully for the running Snow, in the midst of enemy encounters and other sound effects, and Toriyama thought this was the perfect opportunity to have Hope talking and exposing the narrative? Seriously? Me and my girlfriend were barely able to catch attention on whatever Hope was saying because of everything that was happening around. And then, while Hope was still talking about something, I've approached the chaos and suddenly his monologue was interrupted for a cutscene. Wat? It wasn't even my intention to skip Hope's words.
Seriously, the pace and the exposition time were very poor, and in the last case, felt buggy and clumsy. Toriyama should seriously take a look at games like The Last of Us or Uncharted and see how those games executed the very same thing much better. It's interesting how this same problem happened in FFXIII, and there was no care at all to fix it here neither.
I know Toriyama's hate is already very common, but the man is just a poor director as much as a poor writer. He should be demoted back to cutscene direction and story planning, because that's what he's best at, and have his games script written and directed by other people. LR, much like his other games, are carried by the work of the artists and some of the game designers (mostly the battle directors, and whoever designed and directed the gameplay in Pulse in the original FFXIII).