Early 2023 Demo Impression roundup

Apart from my Game Award no-shows, the 3DS Retrospective and the Three in February roundup, I have not been doing anything even remotely similar to a game review this year, and it’s time that has stopped. Kind of.

While I haven’t beaten my games lately, I have knocked back several demos. I don’t think Quarantine Control is an appropriate forum for demo impressions, and I’m certainly not going to make a single post out of just one demo. So here’s a round up of every demo I’ve played so far this year that I didn’t simply nope out of.

(Besides, my next QC contribution is my first movie review of the year, having finally made it to a theater. It’ll land whichever week I have time to do the writeup.)

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Sea of Stars

Okay, let’s get the hot topic out of the way first. We’ve been watching Sea of Stars for a while now, waaay back in 2020, when the kickstarter got on Damage Control’s radar. While the game itself isn’t expected to launch until the end of this year, we have been blessed with a demo.

Whether you’ve been following since the beginning or you only first found out in February’s Nintendo Direct, I have a feeling the first question on a few people’s minds is, How Chrono Trigger is it?

And the answer is… only kinda. Sea of Stars has very much its own identity. I understand the urge, though. You see your entire party run around with the same sprites as they use in battle. You see the enemies wandering about for you to face or sneak by at your whim. You see combination techniques in combat. I get it.

But what you might be missing from that first impression is just about the entire game.

Field movement has platforming elements that, combined with the mostly three-quarters perspective, emphasize the verticality of areas. You’ll be climbing and jumping around quite a bit, though they’re purely contextual. Perspective can sometimes be awkward, though, as the game world doesn’t fully commit to the perspective, even with elements on the same screen.

The combat is very dynamic despite being turn based. Landing blows on enemies scatters material that can be used to power up attacks. Foes occasionally advertise a list of attack attributes that, if hit by, will waken the attack or interrupt it if all the attributes are completed. This can also make some enemies vulnerable or outright kill them. Many of the special attacks have a command gimmick, not unlike the ones seen in the Mario RPG line. While some techniques have explicit instructions, everything you do will be improved by timing a button press with the animation, even when taking a hit. The game really wants you to use your techniques, but is miserly with maximum MP. But there are ways and means of restoring MP in a fight, so managing those opportunities is key to getting through the more demanding battles.

There’s nowhere near enough game in the demo to determine the quality of the story, so we’re just going to have to wait and see, there.

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Process of Elimination

I seem to have become a sucker for games desperately trying to be the next Zero Escape, or Danganronpa or whatever. Though I rather disliked Yurukill.

Process of Elimination puts you hot on the heels of a serial killer who makes a brazen attempt to eliminate 30+ of the country’s greatest detectives while they are convening at a secret island headquarters to figure out how to catch him. They manage to get more than 20 before you even know what’s going on.

The game is, like the others I’ve already mentioned, primarily a visual novel with dialog choices that aren’t always meaningful. But the meat of the game is its investigative sections, As a rookie detective, you’re not all that great at hunting down clues or anything like that, so you’re put to work organizing the efforts of the remaining detectives. It plays out like a tactical RPG, only instead of clearing the battlefield of enemies, you’re searching a crime scene for evidence. You’ll move the detectives around, have them search for clues, analyze evidence and more, all according to their individual strengths. Well, it’s recommended you play to their strengths, because bad things happen when you race the clock and lose.

There is, as I suppose I should have expected an equally out there subplot about the protagonist’s motivation to become a detective, of which his memory is not entirely reliable. The detectives are off-the-wall eccentric in a way that’s really been overdone these past 5 years or so, and I can see it being off-putting.

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Theatrhythm Final Bar Line

This is the fourth rendition of the Final Fantasy music game (including the arcade version, not including the Dragon Quest spinoff) and probably the last if the subtitle means anything had to mix things up in the jump to consoles.

While having more music and more characters does mean more fun, I haven’t quite gotten used to the changed controls. The original games on 3DS (RIP) involved extensive use of the stylus which consoles just can’t do. It’s made rather painfully clear in the stages where you must use the thumbsticks to move the cursor along with a winding path, as SquareEnix’s solution was to not let you overshoot the target so long as you’re holding the stick vaguely in the direction you need to go. However, the new arrangement also allows for two-player couch co-op.

Once you’ve adjusted (or not, depending on if this is your first time), it’s standard fare for the series. There’s collectables, light party management, and multiple challenges. But there’s also what I think a lot of people aim for: unlocking songs for the music player. Those of you pursuing this noble goal instead of flying the jolly roger or importing CDs to add these music tracks to your player of choice, godspeed and I salute you.

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Bonus: Octopath Traveller II

It plays very much like the first game, but it’s a whole second game.

I don’t know what else to tell you. There’s no way you like one and dislike the other.