Demo Impressions

Here are my thoughts after finishing the World of Final Fantasy (PS4) demo:

+Love the old turn-based combat system........it is the best

+Enemies/mirages are extremely well designed

+Pokemon style gameplay of capturing enemies is extremely fun

+Dungeon map is really well done

+Overall graphics look well designed, except some textures appear to be low resolution and are clearly designed with the PS Vita port in mind and not the PS4

-Chibi art style characters look ridiculous thankfully they included an option to change the way your character looks, but I think this will possibly negatively effect gameplay since certain stacks require you to be in one form vs the other form

-Placing enemies standing on top of your characters head looks freaking ridiculous. I like the stacking system, but why on earth can't the mirage stand next to you instead of standing on top of your head?

-Fixed camera perspective. There appears to be zero control over the camera. How on earth does a developer get away with this in 2016? On a positive note I only had an issue with the camera once when I walked behind a hill obscuring my view and I had to wait for the camera to very slowly pan automatically around the hill until my character was in view again. Pretty minor issue for this demo, but if this is a large scale game with fixed camera perspective I think that is going to be an absolute disaster.

-Not enough enemy types in the demo........I was seeing repeating enemies over and over again prior to making it to the boss in the demo. On a positive note this might not be much of an issue in the main game since a developer said in an interview that there are more than 200 enemies in the game.

-Voice acting is most of the time horrendous and very grating to the ears! I heard a few good voices in the demo, but they were far and few between. Character voices were repeating pretty bad in this demo........I can only imagine how bad this can get 40+ hours in to the main game! I'm calling it now............Jeff is going to say this game is absolute garbage!

Overall I had a ton of fun playing it and really look forward to purchasing & playing through it in the future when the price drops to $30. Based off of everything in the demo and the developers claim that this game lasts for approx 100 hours (which probably means it will be closer to 50 hours in the real world) of gameplay time and more than 200 enemies this has potential to be my favorite final fantasy game in a very very long time.

The voice acting drove me absolutely nuts, holy hell. I lasted about 10 minutes before quitting the demo, really not in the mood for it.

I made the mistake of not turning on classic mode or setting the battle speed to maximum, so battles were a slooooooooooog. I definitely find the actual systems interesting, however. My biggest complaint, aside from the English voice acting (which I hope to rectify with the JP voices), is that the menus take a strangely long amount of time to load. Opening up the menu with triangle takes like a solid second too long to me, and I'm not sure why? I think it's animating or something? Same goes for if I want to open the Mirage Boards, it just doesn't feel snappy and for a game that seems like it will have a good amount of micromanaging that might start to really get on my nerves.

Otherwise, I wish there was some indicator that the enemies were going to restack after I toppled them as trying to Imprism both Ifreeta and the Cockatrice was a pain; I'd tend to get one chance, based on how I had my party setup, to capture one of them before one of the three enemies would restack. I think I healed the enemies three times just so I didn't kill the Cockatrice while triggering its conditions. I also wish you could change the sizes of the humans mid-battle because I found that I would occasionally just get fucked by having Lann be mini and not have the right skills from that Mirage setup to combat the enemies right.

Wow that is very strange I definitely did not run into that issue. In fact, I had the opposite occur. I was really impressed with how snappy everything felt when I was pulling up the menu and navigating through the sub-menu. Are you on the Vita by chance?

The voice acting is miserable. I think I could handle it if they didn't have people pronouncing "kweh" and "kupo" like they're actual words, and then having a character that adds "the" into their sentences at random intervals provide the tutorials.

Oh well, at least there's another turn-based Final Fantasy game on a console. That part seems good.

@demonsoul: If you didn't know, you can unstack the mirages from your head. It's an option that I think is hidden in the "classic" menu. Then the mirages get their own turns during the battles just like your characters. The trade off is that mirages seem to be a lot weaker when it comes to defense and hp and they're more likely to get knocked out.

I liked the combat, the pokemon capture element and the character designs. Chibi isn't really my think but some of the character designs and monster designs looked great and the chibi stuff works for comedy effect when they need it.

I agree on the voice acting. The voices coming out of those classic final fantasy characters in those body types was very odd. And the combat dialogue seemed to repeat itself from round to round, none of it being very good. I saw there's a japanese voice acting option, that might work out better.

@demonsoul: Almost everyhing you just wrote makes me think i will love this game, even the negatives :p

Gonna try it today.

@peritus: Give it a shot you will probably love it. Someone can complain about it all day long but there is NO denying that it is a very charming game......and lots (but not all) old-school Final Fantasy fans will love it to death!

I looooved it. Well, combat speed seemed pretty slow, but I assume you can speed that up? It never even occurred to me to check until I after I stopped playing. Playing a 100+ hour rpg with that default speed (which is probably why it's 100 hours in the first place...) seems like it could be one hell of a chore. Other than that, I had a blast. It's everything I was expecting and more.

No, I'm on PS4. I thought it was some Vita concession that for some reason made it into the PS4 version.

@babychoochoo: Yes there are 2 ways to speed up combat that I'm aware of. Speed up combat in the options and hold R1 during combat to fast forward. You can even fast forward through the enemies turn including during their attack animations which I thought was a smart design choice. The player has the choice to speed up combat or not which is VERY nice and much appreciated!

Couldn't play more than 30 minutes before giving up. I did hate the combat speed so seeing that there is an option to speed it up is nice but it doesn't fix the other things I disliked about it. Voice acting was pretty bad, especially the tutorial narrator which sounded a lot like Dora the Explorer.

"Can you use an ability? THAT'S GREAT!"

I didn't like not having control of the camera when roaming around. It was difficult to see if there were things in an area that I could interact with or their camera rotation seemed to take forever.

This is a game I wish they had given you a bit more exposition about what you are doing in the world instead of just throwing you into a tutorial dungeon. From my understanding the game is supposed to be quite funny but I got no sense of that from this. It's quite possible that the game could be good but the demo left a very sour impression on me.

This game was nowhere on my radar, but something about that demo kinda clicked with me. I haven't played a FF game to completion in a long time (maybe you could count XIV original quest line) but this has me really curious. I thought even the small bit of dialogue was pretty charming and just weird. The battles do move pretty slow, but it wasn't as slow as I was expecting based on people's reactions. I think I just liked how weird it was. I might have to pick this up sometime.