The Demo is Officially Out

[Wolf Kanno]

WK, I think you and I must have got a different version of the game. When I try playing in the manner you describe without exploiting the ATB or character switching, not making the most of stagger etc. it all goes to trout.

I feel we just play differently and likely have different opinions of when a battle is going south. The only enemies that can actually do serious damage to your team when you're reckless are the Sweepers and the Scorpion Sentinel. Even then, you can still stagger them without using abilities, and magic just makes the fight go quicker. Everything else can be pretty much slaughtered with your basic combos.

Replaying it a third time, I played even more recklessly than before and even made sure I got hit with the Tail Beam attack just to see how dangerous it is. I did uncover a hilarious exploit with the Guard Scorpion though. So here's a few new observations:

• I am really disappointed with Barret's Limit Break, I had to pretty much switch to him for a good while in the boss fight in order to make him a primary target long enough to actually raise his Limit Break. "Fire in the Hole", the name of his Limit, is just a new name for Heavy/Big Shot, nothing else. I shouldn't be surprised, but I did get my hopes up.
• Your MP actually regenerates on its own. Incredibly slowly, but it actually does regenerate if you just stand around for awhile. It will be interesting if the rate of regeneration is attached to your Spirit/Mind stats.
• Dodge Roll/Evade is only really useful against moves with limited range or have no tracking. It doesn't have invincibility frames, so don't think you can Souls/KH/CC your way through an attack with it. It is not as useful against machine gun fire from basic security guards unless you roll to the side from a straight on attack or roll by an obstacle that will interrupt the line of fire. This is made most obvious with the the fights with the Shock Troopers as all of their attacks have tracking and they will either hit you while you roll, or if you were able to roll away in time, they will simply follow you and then perform their attack when they get in range.
• Your party A.I. definitely falls into KH levels of stupidity. Their attack patterns are obviously set to only going after whatever is closest, they won't use magic even when its obviously the only option such as leaving Cloud to fight a Sentry Ray, and I don't think they even really use abilities much either. I switched to Barret in the boss fight and was drawing away its 99 Missile Attack away from Cloud in hopes the A.I. would deal with the Barrier section, and Cloud just kept being dumb and doing frontal assaults that kept getting interrupted by the barrier, so he wasn't even targeting the barrier device. Switching to Cloud made Barret run over to the boss, putting both characters in range of its missile barrage blast zone. Likewise, neither of them are terribly aggressive in fights, usually waiting between combos for a few seconds longer than I feel is necessary. Like KH's basic setup, its obvious the A.I. is designed to make you do all of the work. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but I'm going to be curious if the main game is going to give the player a means to do some limited A.I. control over party members or if the main game is going to have more competent and aggressive A.I.
• In the Guard Scorpions second phase, after you deal with both its barriers if you don't knock it into its final phase, almost all of its attacks are reactionary and only counter physical attacks by the player controlled character. I trout you not, the boss will just stand their passively as Barret fires off a few meager shots from his gun, and Cloud can just stand a distance away and use Fire magic and the boss will never retaliate and it will not do any attacks. In fact it seems like the majority of the enemy A.I. is designed to target the player controlled character unless you move out of its aggro range and then it might go after another party member. This seems to ring true with other phases, as the boss will only limit itself to one of its weaker group hitting attacks while most of its powerful close range strikes are used for countering aggressive close range fighting.
• The Tail Beam does hurt a lot, probably the most single damage (about 630hp) I saw anything do in the demo, but you can actually survive it easily at full health. Granted, I think it could potentially multi-hit you if you're unlucky to be knocked into its path after the initial hit, but I haven't seen this yet. The Scorpion Sentinels true dangerous attack is its six hit Scorpion Strike attack it will do if you're silly enough to linger too long behind it. This is probably the only attack that can outright kill a character in the demo, and that's only if you somehow were unlucky enough to get hit by most of the strikes, which doesn't seem likely considering you get a reasonable amount of invincibility frames when you're knocked off your feet, but it may still be possible. Granted, this move is telegraphed and doesn't have much tracking when it starts, so its easy to avoid.
• I'm not sure if I simply never noticed this the previous times, if this was just a weird RNG thing, or if I may have done something in the demo differently enough to have it appear; but I found a strange key item called the Moogle Medal while escaping the reactor with Jessie. Not sure what it does, part of me is wondering if this might be something that can be transferred to the main game for a perk, or if this is just a useless item in the main game that will do diddly squat for finding it in the demo.
• After listening to it some more, I really dislike the Remakes version of "Fight On" not only does it fail to really stand out to the rest of the orchestrated OST, but it really doesn't invoke much of that adrenaline rush of the original. It loses a lot of its hard rock vibe by going full orchestra. I actually didn't even realize it played during the boss fight until I noticed it while exploiting the boss A.I. for free hits.
• To end this on a more positive note, I feel the smartest move in the demo was having the Thunder and Cure Materia on Barret instead of Cloud. The reason being that it will either force you to switch to Barret in fights more often, or in my case since I'm an aggressive ass, force me to use the Command Menu to issue orders to Barret to actually use his magic materia. This is why I'm not as bothered by the party A.I. kind of being ho-hum cause its forcing you to control everyone and dictating orders which means you have more control than usual in these styles of games. Maybe not FFXII good, but at least I feel more confidant about my success and failure being my fault over say... FFXIII's botched A.I. where you may learn too late how easy it is for the enemy to send them into a negative A.I. loop that makes them useless in fights. If I have a concern, its just how overwhelming this might all be when you finally get a third party member thrown into the mix. I fear this may lead into some Star Ocean level shenanigans where you'll either never use certain characters because the A.I. is not good enough with them, or more likely that you'll have to accept having certain characters always playing sub par because its more useful to be using the other character. I mainly thinking about how Aerith is going to play, because I can see her being the type of character where you're going to get the most mileage out of her by controlling her directly, but that means leaving Cloud to the A.I. and as the demo has shown me, he's a little thick and not aggressive enough considering he's a powerful wrecking ball of a fighter. This may end up being similar to the Claude/Dias dilemma in SO2 or Abel/Maria problem in SO3. This might not be a problem if there is some means of programming the A.I. in the final version which I fully expect.