For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the #PlayStation4 Demo of Fuga: Melodies of Steel 2. This game, from developers CyberConnect2, is already out across all platforms but this demo came out this week on the PSN Store.
The icon for this game is striking and really grabbed my attention. for the most part, this style continues into the game. The main screen was nearly perfect. it said this was a DEMO, it gave us links to buy the game, but it never mentioned how long the demo would be or whether our saves would be carried over into the final game. Thankfully, the PSN store page does have this information. in this video i did the first chapter and this demo has 2 more. so, in all, the first 3 chapters of the game are included in this demo and my save would be carried over to the final game if i were to play it. One further good point about the main page is the option to watch what happened in the first game. unfortunately, there's no speaking, no subtitles, so it is left to our imagination as to what happened. But at the very least i do appreciate the effort put in to including such a recap.
For the most part, i had a good time playing the game. Fuga: Melodies of Steel 2 doesn't have the best tutorial as some parts are taught a little out of sequence or don't quite carry you through all of it, but it is good enough that i didn't feel overwhelmed by what was happening. What i found distracting from the experience was how the story was told. it felt like the story was jumping around time for no particular reason. it detracted from the story telling and was never really explained why it was done this way. If anything, it detracted from an actual time based mechanic introduced later in the demo.
Graphically, it only looked like the PS4 would loose out to the PS5 when it came to the 3D art used with the characters in-game. all the other art, backgrounds, 2D characters, and such, looked crisped and detailed. but in the 3D sections things looked a little soft. it was still clear who everyone was, but it was only distracting because of how much crisper and detailed the rest of the art had been up to that point.
I do think this demo has some bugs. at 3 points in the demo, it freezes on me for tens of seconds up to over a minute. i do have an old PS4 so that could be part of the issue, but when you take into account all the tiny second or less pauses that occur in this demo i can't help but think it's buggy. another possible bug is the lack of Japanese voices even tho i had toggled that option on in the options. it could be it's a style choice and the Japanese voices are only used for battle sounds, but that in itself is weird because in those moments there were no subtitles.
So, with weird story telling and bugs, this demo gives us a mixed view of Fuga: Melodies of Steel 2 as there is a lot to like but clearly there are things to be concerned with.
