No playable FFXIII demo for us :(
 

Or so I hear
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/05/13...o-ffxiii-demo/

Anyone know if I can buy a Japanese one and play the demo on my US PS3?

I need to buy a PS3. Just for this game...

...Sad... :(

I bought PS3 for Blu Ray, the NHL series, and Metal Gear Solid. Most of the other games I usually end up selling on Amazon after I play for a month or two. The console's not that bad, but it could be a lot better.

I ended up buying the Japanese one with the demo from playasia. (Be carefull, because apparently only the first pressing has the demo, so no all Japanese Advent Children Complete copies have the demo...)

Has it arrived yet? If so, is it any good? If not, when do you expect it?

I have gotten it. It is shorter than I expected. I've only played through it once, so I'll leave other impressions untill later.

How was the part that was playable? Did it look good graphically?

The videos on YouTube look very good, even though the quality is awful. I'll edit this post later with some links.

@WW: If it looks good on YouTube, how good does it look on an actual TV?

FFXII looks good on YouTube. You wouldn't expect a step backwards, would you?
Like I said, I'm going to reserve any further comment untill I play through it paying attention to certain things -- possibly tonight, depending on UT2004 server setup and other things.

It's quite obvious that most of the functionality is locked or non-existant in the demo. Only a handful of buttons are used for anything.

The battle interface stays up and lets you interact with it once you've committed to a command set, even though it will discard/ignore anything you do untill it finally resets when the attack animations are done. You only control a single character (though you have varying numbers of people in your party). Not being able to setup the next attack while the current one is in progress seems odd, considering how quickly the time guage fills. It's unclear how the battle UI will scale with more commands. I can only hope that what's in the demo is an early, "working" version because they are hard at work and in the middle of the real thing.

As for combat itself, you get to build combos of moves costing up to 3 points total, except you really only get to build combos costing 3, since if you use any less, you'll be wasting your time guage selecting targets and reacting (see above). Each 1 point command has several variations, which are used in sequence as the same move is encountered in the combo. Comparing attack,fire,attack, and attack,attack,fire, the same moves are done in a different order. Commands are contextual based on enemy status: the effect will be different if the enemy is launched in the air.

As far as graphics go, they certainly didn't waste any polygon they could spare. If you take time to look at stuff, it's noticably low polygon (as I'm sure you can tell from the screenshots), though the post-processing hides this very well away from the edges of the models. Especially since they have this big open level in the demo, I suppose it can't be helped. The skybox was noticably low-rez. Animation is smooth.
Graphically, MGS4 is still the best game I've seen (on any system), but it's very close-quarters and features mostly boxy objects while as I said, the FFXIII demo zone is wide open.

My first impression was that playing FFXIII in HD was comparably good to playing FFXII in SD. Really, the post-processing is a lot better than that; it kind of reminds me of Doom III, if things weren't unreasonably shiny -- they do the dynamic light projection stuff really well. Shadow projection, on the other hand, could use some work ... you'd think they're the same thing, but apparently not.

All of this is pretty meaningless, though, because we don't play FF games for the graphics or because of the battle system (though we certainly expect a smooth, unique battle system), but because of the great stories. I wanted to play the demo to get a taste of that, and I was disappointed because it was really too short to get a good feel of the story.

So if I understand this correctly, you can't set up your next characters attack sequence until the current character is done attacking?

In the demo, only one character is under your control in combat. The issue is that you will gain 1 point of time guage before you can choose Attack or Black magic (which you select makes no difference, anyway since you can combine skills from both in one combo o_0), choose your target, and choose a 1 point action. Choosing two actions will be close to the time to get 2 points of time; you have plenty of time to choose 3. Instead of letting you plan the next attack while the current one is in progress, you have to wait; moreover, the UI sits there and lets you choose attacks and stuff then discards it when the current attack completes.

Can you change the character you control (I'm thinking Party Leader type thing...)? And how do the other characters determine how to attack - is it like the gambit system in FFXII?

No, you control a fixed character. How the other characters determine what to do is unclear.

That seems rather... strange.

Unless Squenix have perfected buddy AI (or dumbed down the enemy AI), I can see big battles becoming very frustrating.

So you have no control over the actions of your other party members? That is odd...