Final Fantasy XIII demo impressions -- it's pretty alright

In battle you only control one character, unlike the older Final Fantasy games. Your other party members are all computer controlled.

When your turn to attack comes up, then you can pick up to 3 different moves to use at once. Each attack/spell has a number beside it (1, 2, or 3) which corresponds to the number of moves that attack/spell uses up in a turn. I'm not sure what each of the spells actually are, as they are all in Japanese so ya.

Unless I'm being an idiot (as usual) and missing something, I didn't see the main characters health anywhere on screen, so I just kept using the heal spell (I think it was heal anyway) at random times in the battle. But that's easy to forget to do so that's why I died about an hour into the demo, and I don't think you could save.

Another thing that I noticed is that there is no subscreen while in the overworld. Start just pauses your game, and I tried all the other buttons - but to no avail, I could find no item equip screen :/



Final Fantasy XIII also has really good music. The battle theme is really great, and sounds nice to the ears. Ya, that's all I can remember about the music :\

The story was all just a big blur. Really all I remember is a black guy with a (ginormously cute) baby Chocobo, enemies that look like the Helghan from Killzone 2, some boys that look like girls, and a lot of Japanese. But I'm sure it will be awesome in the final version.

I don't think that I would recommend importing it just for the demo unless you are a big collector of Square-Enix type things. It's definitely cool to see Advent Children in high def though. I'm sure that Sony will eventually release the demo on the PSN, so you could probably just wait till you can download it for free, or else just wait a year and a half for it to come out in North America.

[edit: OH! I forgot to talk about the graphics! Ya, they are probably some of the nicest graphics I have seen so far on the PlayStation 3. Lightning's (the protagonist) hair looks so realistic it's not even funny. The battle scenes have some really cool effects and flairs like cool camera angles and pretty magic spells. If you want to show off the power of your current-gen systems to your friends, you really have to show them this game.]

Yup.