OK, I've finished both the demo and the "Eikonic Challenge."
Interesting that the latter starts with two of the assist items equipped. I took off the one that made dodging way easier, but left on the auto-dog one, since there seemed to be enough going on that I didn't feel the desire to manage my companion's attacks as well. Admittedly, keeping that easy-dodge thing on seems like a really fun way to put the game on easy mode. I can see myself putting that thing on when I want to really coast and feel like a badass.
Anyway, that on-rails fire Eikon fight was... really boring. Pretty to look at, but half the time I couldn't see enough to aim well past all the debris etc., and it really gives you so little to do--just move a cursor and shoot, really, which made it really unengaging, gameplay-wise--that I'd rather the entire thing was just a cutscene. I don't think there's necessarily any problem with a game having, as @therealturk puts it, Xenosaga levels of cutscenes, but if you're going to do that, at least let me eat a snack while I'm watching it instead of making me do "gameplay" so boring that it amounts to "tap X to win."
On that note, the whole "cinematic attack" and "cinematic dodge" thing... man, that's a little on the nose to call them that, don't you think? And I have basically the same criticism of the mechanic that I had for the fire Eikon fight. If you're going to do these elaborate pre-canned animations during boss fights, then fine, I really don't mind it at all. But why give the player something like five full seconds to hit a button rather than just let the characters seamlessly do the thing, without cluttering the screen with a circular meter and the words "Cinematic Attack!"? I mean, last year's God of War Ragnarök had these same sorts of pre-canned animations in the middle of boss fights--e.g., the first fight against Thor--but it didn't feel the need to make you press a button to make you do it or clutter the screen with UI.
In its favor, I'll say that the "Eikonic Challenge" part of the demo did show off the combat to better advantage. I'd complained about the fact that Clive early on only has one special attack on a long cooldown, which didn't feel very good. But this part of the demo gave him three Eikons at once with two attacks each, or six cooldowns to cycle between. Easier to get into a good-feeling flow when you have more cooldown attacks to play with. In general I prefer to not have to cycle between move sets; part of me wishes they just had a Tales-like MP system for this stuff and that you could just pick four attacks to equip onto the face buttons rather than needing to constantly switch, but... eh. It's fine. I'll live.
I'll echo @therealturk's sentiment that the camera is bad. I did do a few things to it: I increased the horizontal sensitivity a notch, and toggled on an option that supposedly kept new lock-on targets on-screen. But the problem is that the game only keeps the target minimally on-screen, up to the very edge, rather than centered on your screen, so that even if you're locked on to something, you still have to adjust it more than you should need to. I also couldn't find a way to cycle targets reliably, I was just tapping L1 and hoping it picked the ones I wanted, e.g. the healers that need to be killed first. Have these devs really not played any of the Souls or Nioh games? Because whatever else you might say about those games, their lock-on cameras mostly get the job done.
I did feel that the story and performances got a little better in the later portions than my initial impression suggested. Some of the early bits seem inexplicably bad. Or maybe it's more that they seem to struggle with making conversations involving larger groups of characters seem natural. When a scene involves only two or three characters, they do better. I guess that's simply easier to do, for obvious reasons.
Overall, eh, it seems fine. I remain uninterested in buying it at full price. Maybe when it drops to half, but even then, I'm not actually sure. I got the FF7 remake as a Christmas present and still haven't felt moved to try it. I'd say I'm slightly more interested in this one, but it's still a fairly tepid interest.
EDIT: I think part of my problem is that I can't help but compare this thing to God of War Ragnarök, especially since I recently finished the latter's NG+ (added to the game in a patch 2.5 months ago), and FFXVI does not do well in that comparison. GoW has better combat, better writing, better performances. There's actually some pretty deep irony in that for me, since I never liked the original GoW (2005) largely because I thought it suffered in comparison to the gameplay of DMC3 (also 2005). And here we are, eighteen years after GoW1, with some devs who had worked on DMC games making FFXVI, and this time it's the new GoW titles that are making it look bad. Whoda thunk it? But yeah, pretty sure that if the newer GoW games didn't exist, I would've been more into this FFXVI demo than I am.
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