Square Enix just set a new bar for video game demos with its latest RPG

digitaltrends.com:

The video game demo is starting to come back into fashion.

Companies like Sony and Nintendo are offering demos for some of their biggest games of the year, like Stellar Blade and Princess Peach Showtime!, respectively. Not all demos are made equally, though. It can be difficult to get the feel of an entire game across in a demo featuring a small part of the experience; the brevity of Nintendo’s recent demos has been especially frustrating. That’s why Square Enix’s approach to releasing a demo for SaGa: Emerald Beyond sticks out to me so much.

SaGa: Emerald Beyond is the latest entry in a long-running RPG series that’s never quite reached the mainstream heights of its siblings, Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. It’s a big RPG with many different playable characters, gameplay systems, and worlds to visit. It’d be hard to distill all that into just one demo, so Square Enix didn’t do that. It made three demos instead.

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Three is better than one

When first booting up Emerald Beyond at launch, players will have to choose one of six main characters to begin their adventure with. From there, they’ll set off on an adventure through a series of interconnected worlds, molding the story with their choices, partaking in timeline-based RPG battles, and accruing new party members along the way. There’s freedom in choosing which of Emerald Beyond’s 17 worlds to go to, as well as which objectives to pursue once you’re in a given overworld. This is a game that Square Enix wants people to play through multiple times, as Emerald Beyond is supposed to offer a very different experience each playthrough.

You can see from that high-level pitch alone how all that variance would be hard to capture in a demo. SaGa franchise localization director Neil Broadley admitted as much on X ahead earlier this month. “How do you get across the key points of what makes SaGa unique without simply saying, ‘Here’s the whole game, have fun?’ It’s hard to get