So there's not just one, but two demos up on the 3DS eShop, and the first one released kept me enthralled for a month, with only one song. I never manage to beat its third difficulty level, but I tried and tried, because the game has a puzzle-game like addictive quality to it. The three songs available across the two demos are Final Fantasy VI's Decisive Battle (this is the super hard one I referenced), Final Fantasy VIII's The Man with the Machine Gun and Final Fantasy XIII's Sunleth theme.
The battle ones are classic 2Dish 3D with a party of four Final Fantasy characters on the right and monsters that appear on the left. The better you do at the rhythm game the more damage you do to the monsters and the more and stronger ones come out to fight. While you can't access it in the demo, in the full version you can equip gear, level up your characters, give them skills and magic to use during battle and so on. I'm not sure how the skills get activated, but there's a definite difference in difficulty between level 49 characters who can use Protect to reduce damage and Curaga to replenish your health bar, which depletes when you get notes wrong, and level 28 characters who can't do as much.
As you may have seen in videos, four lines are arranged parallel to your four party members, and notes slide from the left to right, and you must time your tap so that the note covers the circle right in front of your character. You are of course ranked from perfect to bad along five ranks depending on how accurate you are. Successfully hitting perfects means that your party members get critical hits on the monsters. After the end of level, where you see your points, how many notes you correctly chained in a row, ranks and such, there's also a critical gauge that shows you did in getting perfects in each section of the song. It fills up a little more each time you more percentage of the song correct and perfect until you 100% it, and then presumably you get some sort of bonus, though its not in the demo. So for those who like it, there's even grinding in this rhythm game! @_@
There are three types of notes. One where you just tap (anywhere on the touch screen is okay), ones where you must hold down for a certain amount of time and then let go and ones where you must slash in the direction the arrow is pointing. During the level there are special silver notes, that if you do well enough on, will call a summoned monster to come fight for you, depending on the summoned monster you will complete a note chart specific to it and if successful, release a powerful summon attack that usually kills the enemy in one hit.
The Sunleth song is a field song, and this differs in that one character walks right to left across 2D representation of a Final Fantasy dungeon or field. Which character is walking depends, if you take too much damage from misses, it will switch to the next party member. In addition to direction slashs and simple taps, the notes where you have to hold down the stylus on the touch screen go up and down like a waveform and you must the stylus in time to hit the corresponding mini-notes on the wave's line. Also the special notes seem to call some sort of field help or travel method, in the demo I got a yellow, red or black chocobo to make you go faster for a special note sequence to earn extra points. If you do well enough moogles appear and give you treasure chests, though what's in them is not covered in the extent of the demo.
The demo was filled with options, there is a skippable tutorial from the start with a practice sequence, that if you missed you can replay from a menu. You can turn off the sound effects when tapping a note so you can hear the music in a more raw form. In each Final Fantasy title, there seem to be three tunes, one field tune like Sunleth, one battle tune and one event scene tune, the third of which was not covered in the demo, so its unclear what its differences are to the other two modes. You can choose between three difficult levels on each tune and let me tell you Ulimate on Final Fantasy VI's Decisive Battle is difficult to the level of impossible for me in the demo and the normal difficulty level took me 20 tries to complete. The Man with the Machine Gun is a little easier as I can get halfway through the song in ultimate, whereas Decisive Battle kills me on the first 16th of the song. Sunleth was the easiest, I passed the Ultimate level the third or fourth time I tried it. On every difficulty level of every song you can watch a demo of a perfect play or a do a practice run where you can't win or earn points, but you can't lose either.
The presentation is magnificent. It goes without saying the songs are there in their full glory, but the music used in the menu, tutorials and so on is also full of nods to the series' history. The graphics are astounding, for someone like me who has always loved 2D more than 3D, this game beats Resident Evil Revelations as the best looking game on the platform. It's true its polygonal 2D with sprite characters, or 2.5D, the 3D is such at a high level you can't distinguish it from traditional 2D too much. When I first saw the city backdrop from FFVI and Esthar from FFVIII in this style, I couldn't believe how awesome it looked. Its a real treat to see the old titles bumped up to this level and the new titles bumped down to the old 2D super-deformed style. Chibi Lightning and Tidus are adorable. Before you start a level the four of them appear with upclose silhouettes similar to the menu screen portraits of old games and each say a quick phrase that gets linked together into a goofy statement like, for instance, "We shall not give up! (Bartz) For the light! (Light Warrior) And our friends! (Zidane) Whom we abandon? (Squall)"
When the original demo appeared, it produced a massive tidal wave of good press and impressions for the game, so they produced the second demo and now me and others have even more good things to say. If this game is as good as the demo suggests it might be, we're looking at way more than a throwaway rhythm game and possibly the best rhythm game of 2012, and maybe even one of the best ever. It's a must buy for me now.
( Idea sounds fab though! Won't make it outside of Japan... 
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