[WARNING: there will be heavy spoilers in relation to the demo content]
Platinum Demo: Final Fantasy XV is a demo for Final Fantasy XV, although it depicts events that are not actually part of the main game. Rather, it is set as a short prequel of sorts and is designed as more of a tech demo and to get players hyped up for the game's release. Platinum Demo follows a young Noctis through his dream world. He is asleep and needs to wake up, he is guided by Carbuncle, a summon from the Final Fantasy series. There's not much more to the story apart from that we know that there are some people who doesn't want Noctis to wake up.
Noctis will end up travelling through various environments. He'll travel through a forest, he'll be shrunk down to explore a lounge room with toys and books lying around. Then you'll get to check out a city with old-fashioned designed buildings and architecture, and finally, you'll end up at the citadel seen in early trailers of the game. It's actually a wide variety of areas and the graphics are fantastic. While not as amazing or mindblowing as Square Enix has done in the past, it is still really good.
The advantage of completing Platinum Demo is that you'll be able to obtain the Carbuncle summon in the main game. This will be the only way to obtain Carbuncle. The combat system is simple. You hold the Circle button to attack, Square to defend, R3 to lock onto an enemy, the directional buttons to swap weapons and tap Square to dodge roll. Mapping the lock-on to R3 is an odd choice as you need to pause in your onslaught in order to use it. What's cool is that you can swap weapons in mid combo, such as swapping from the weaker but faster sword to the powerful but slower hammer once you have staggered the enemy.
The enemies are dream-like liquid blue creatures, demon shaped and wolf shaped. The enemies are very easy and they respawn infinitely, although Noctis himself cannot die. As this is a demo, there is actually little incentive to defeat enemies since you don't experience or level up. Weapons including a toy hammer, a toy sword and magic. Magic ranges from fireworks to thunder and fire. Magic is represented by bottles that you can throw, and they are exhaustible. An interesting conclusion is the final boss battle against Iron Giant. Noctis turns into his grown up self and additional combat abilities are introduced such as warping and his multiple magic swords.
You are able to summon up a more powerful Iron Giant afterwards which makes for an intense and engaging battle. Platinum Demo is very short. Unlike Episode Duscae, there is not as much content and your first playthrough will take around 20 to 40 minutes, and it depends on how much time you spend on exploring the relatively empty environments. Scattered throughout the environments are Dream Shards that look like floating yellow crystals. These unlock plates on the ground that when stepped upon, will have various effects such as changing the weather, speed time up (there is a day/night cycle), turn Noctis into something else like a car or monster, or obtain items to use.
Surprisingly, even in this demo, there are some secrets such as two unlockable weapons, two weapon upgrades and several magic spells. Overall, Platinum Demo is a surprising approach to a game demo. It's nice that Square Enix spent the resources to create something that supplements the game, instead of just taking a portion of the main game. This means that you don't ruin any part of Final Fantasy XV by playing this demo. To be fair, the content in Platinum Demo is fairly bland but it does suitably hype you up for the main game to arrive and be released.
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