Long post is long.

I just finished it, my initial impressions are this. The battle system itself is awesome apart from a few flaws that really detract from it, the main one being that I absolutely HATE the targeting system. While battling you are forced to wildly swing the camera around all over the place while you hold R1 or mash it until you are targeting the enemy that you want. In the demo at least it didn't seem like L2 and R2 were mapped to anything so would it have been so difficult to have R1 lock on to someone permanently and then use those two buttons to cycle through enemies a la Kingdom Hearts or Type-0? This gripe was alleviated somewhat when I raised the camera sensitivity, because by default it is soooo slooooow, and when enemies are flying all over the place it was super frustrating trying to keep track of the same one. This also screwed with the warping system because one of the ways you regain health is to warp to higher ground, but half the time I could not for the life of me lock on to the higher ground I wanted to warp to. I would try to target it and just end up locking on to behemoths ass or some random enemy, very frustrating.

Anyway, that is the bad, luckily there is a lot more good. The combat system itself is very fun and has a lot more depth to it than i thought it would. Considering that you're really only holding down one button a lot of the time there is a lot of room for experimenting and I don't think I'd even tried out all the weapon combinations by the time the demo finished. I look forward to there hopefully being more weapons and abilities in the main game to experiment with. The AI seems decent for the most part, you're not constantly having to revive them or anything and they do a decent job of coming to your aid when you're in a low health state (although in the later game I found they were taking ages to revive me for whatever reason. I think as the enemies get stronger and there are more of them your party are too preoccupied to heal your or something). It did seem like I was doing basically all of the damage in the party though, and my character is supposedly a lower level, hopefully the main game will come with some kind of AI setting that lets you select how each party member behaves.

Visuals were decent. They definitely seemed better when I was watching the trailers for the game, but it's very obvious this demo isn't optimized so hopefully they get that sorted out by the time the full version is released. The framerate gets bogged down pretty hard sometimes, and despite the scenery being breathtaking in design I feel like the graphics don't really do it justice. Pretty sure all of these things will be fixed though. Those are all real nitpicks though, the battle animations look amazing and if you're not looking too far into the distance the game looks pretty stunning. There is a moment where you have to track behemoth through some mist though and the foggy effect really hurt my eyes to look at, that may just be me though.

The music was amazing, which shouldn't come as any surprise, and I played with the English voice acting and that was also awesome I thought. It's very stereotypical, but the flow of conversation is great, nothing they say is too cheesy, and it definitely works to show you the bond between the characters. That said, Cindy's voice was irritating, and saying things like "Y'all come back now, y'hear?" didn't help matters.

I think that's about everything, I'll probably post more after I play more, I want to see if the camera gets any easier to work with as you play more, and I only gave the entire map a quick once over, so I don't feel like I've truly explored a lot of it.

TL;DR Fun demo, looking forward to the full game. They really need to fix the targeting system.