Finished the demo and I agree with almost everything
@LucasSomething said about the game. As I've said multiple times in this thread, I appreciate the effort put into improving the game after 5 years, but there are still issues to be had.
An issue with the gameplay would be the fact that the
healing items heal based on percentage as opposed to a flat health rate. While this is fine for the latter end of content, but for now, the bulk of the healing items you get during the course of the demo heal 1-3 HP which are just fucking useless. It's better use of your resources to just thug an encounter out and then just walk to one of the multiple healing fountains that are littered around the map.
As LucasSomething mentioned, the battle system is leagues above the shitty battle system in the original, where fights either took 10 minutes because attacks barely did any fucking damage, or 2 seconds because you just used the Alex LP exploit (I did not know about this during my playthrough in 2019). I'm still not the biggest fan of the new battle system (mainly because they didn't give us enough tools to play with for MOST of the demo, just one card for each party member until the boss). I get what they're doing with the Karta system, where you can sacrifice stats in order to give your party a boost or a heal like with Sami's or to do some AOE damage like Alex's but until I see more of it (if I decide to play the game when it releases proper) I'll just say it's underdeveloped and could use some worth.
I fucking hate the bleed mechanic.
The bleed mechanic is simply unfun and unsatisfying to play with. 90% of encounters end up with the enemy just bleeding out randomly while nothing is happening with you saying "oh shit it died?". You also don't do any TRUE damage until you break all of the enemy's Kartas. It's like in Octopath Traveler but if you couldn't do any damage until the enemy breaks, it's just not very fun. If they just kept the Karta system (which I think is okay) but got rid of the bleed system and made it so you don't have to lose your Kartas in order to take true damage, the battle system would be immediately better. I think it's clumsily added but I will take it every single day over the original battle system. I will give them kudos for making the robot boss at the end have a robot vampire, its a neat detail.
I won't really go into the story stuff because I'm waiting until the game finishes proper to tear this story a new ass. It's pretentious, which is something everyone has known about the plot of YIIK for half a decade. I like the presentation but the Jocasta scenes were fucking cringe because the models don't lend themselves to being sexy whatsoever. I was dying during the ass shot they tried to do for her. The models look uncanny and butt ugly 99% of the time and while you could argue that "that's the point"; I feel like there needs to be a separation between the weird shit the game has right now and some form of normalcy to make the weird shit pop out more, but I'm getting real nitpicky now. The models and cutscenes also just feel unfinished, with some scenes having animated lip syncing and others being just stills with really no reason to distinguish between the two. I know it's a demo, but after half a decade, I'd hope they'd at least have figured something out by now. Overall, the presentation is still a major step up from the original game, but that isn't saying much.
The UI is way better now, the spacing isn't complete shit and menuing is way better from the little I had to do in the demo.
(why is that guy filming us???)
