I'm kinda mixed on this demo so far, leaning towards buying it, but unsure if I want to buy it on PS5 or on PC (testing demo on PC rn). PS5 has the benefit of being in my living room and my wife can experience the story with me, but then mods that could improve some of my pain points become out of my grasp.
I've just got done with the Captain boss fight, which seems to be halfway through the mines dungeon.
The art style is kinda weird to me, the game seems to have taken the idea that chromatic aberration on its own is a valid art style, there are so many color filters on, to the point where I get kinda uncomfortable with it, sometimes you have to trust your game vistas to shine on their own.
The graphics also NEED some sort of anti-aliasing solution, everything shimmers constantly like I'm playing on a Switch and it annoys me greatly. Some of the textures look amazing and some look like downright ass and there are times where they're right next to each other which creates a very jarring effect that would have been much minimized if the texture were either entirely awful or entirely good. It's hard to explain unless you play it yourself imo.
Performance was also downright awful until the Special K patch came out too, somehow the game menus managed to chug on a 7800X3D/4090 combo!
The story has a lot of cool shit in it but it also sometimes just outright pauses to deliver what feels like pointless exposition, it has a lot of timeline back and forth early in the game that could have been smoothed over imo. It also really overuses anime cutscenes, some of these scene transitions can be jarring (and unnecessary too, was the flashback scene between the young protag and the prince really necessary to animate? That could have been an in-engine cutscene!).
The music and voice acting are good, as is the localization. The battle music is honestly extremely good, and the Akademia theme music is definitely gonna be my new mobile ringtone..
Dungeon design is ok so far, it's seems that some areas are designed to be revisited (there's a locked door in the tutorial dungeon that I couldn't find a key for).
The battle system is pure fire tho. Very engaging, and the calculus of figuring out which enemies to target for squad battles and which can be taken out in the field is good. I'm just dipping my toes in the Archetype system and it looks like something that's quite engaging too.
With that said, there's a problem with how much the game loves its (admitted cool-looking) menus and screen transitions, like the post-battle screen with the exp etc having unskippable transition animations, and it's kinda annoying to me when I just want to get back to exploring the dungeons or get on with squad battling a monster.
Despite all of my nitpicks above, I actually really, really like this game because it hits a lot of areas that no other JRPG has, I don't think this is gonna be an unequivocal high 80's low 90's Metacritic release like P5/R or P3R were, this is a flawed package that really shines bright in other areas, and thus it screams cult hit to me.