Played and finished the Final Fantasy XIII-2 demo today after downloading it. I saw somewhere that it would take around 2.5 hours to finish, and that seems about right. It was okay, not as great as I would have imagined, but still fairly fun. As expected, the gameplay feels similar to XIII but there are some minor additions that make it a bit more interesting.
I was surprised that you can now making the character you're controlling jump at will (instead of auto-jumping). They've added a ton of NPC that you can talk to, way too many in fact (since most of them just spout stuff, sure, they speak something that's in context, but I find it too be boring and not worth the time to talk to everyone if they don't really add to the experience, they don't do anything). However, a few of them do give out 'side quests'.
The battle speed was slow in the demo with no option to speed it up, that made the battles a bit boring here. The 'cinematic action' is a bad idea, since it doesn't add much to the battle, AND it's distracting. It's supposed to spice things up and give you an adrenaline rush with the awesome attacks and moves, but I found myself to be quite bored by them, and frankly, it feels like it doesn't quite fit in. While recruiting a monster effectively means you will have a third party member, I would rather we have just the one third party member that you can use for all six roles. It's a neat idea, but I would have preferred something else. At least you can change party leaders freely now, but the game still ends if they die (even though other members may be alive).
Another addition would be the encounters, they're more like random encounters now, which doesn't feel just quite right when the last two games (XII and XIII) stopped having that. I would rather having the monsters roaming the map just like XIII, and it's way too easy to get pre-emptive strikes now. It feels weird that instead of approaching the enemy, you have to press a button to 'strike' the enemy in order to get a pre-emptive strike.
I really do like the revamp of the Crystarium system, since there are much more choices to develop your characters now. Even in this demo, there is a lot of customization possibilities, and if the map in this demo is any indication, then it would be much more fun to explore (and exploring would take a while).
Lastly, the music was good, and it seems more fast paced which didn't suit how slow the battles were going, but puts you in the mood. They've reused some of the music from XIII which feels a bit lazy. In the end, I enjoyed the demo, not as much as I thought I would, but enough such that it makes me want the game.
