[COLUMN] Now This Is How You Do a Proper Demo | by Marty Sliva (Patreon)

I’m nearly four hours into the opening slice of the upcoming Dragon Quest VII Reimagined, and it’s dawned on me that Square Enix has really perfected the art of the demo in recent years. Now, I’m not talking about a tiny vertical slice demo that sells you on a game, like the kind we see thousands of whenever Steam Next Fest rolls around. No, I’m talking about those beefy kinds of demos that let you kick off the grand adventure of an RPG, play a not-insubstantial amount of hours, and then carry that progress over into the full game should you decide to go all in.

And that’s exactly what’s happened with me and Dragon Quest VII Reimagined on the Switch 2. This is my first time through the iconic entry in the iconic series, as I completely missed it in both its original PlayStation incarnation, as well as in its more recent 3DS remake. But right away, I’m smitten with Reimagined, and that’s in no small part thanks to the gorgeous diorama-esque nature that the world and its characters are portrayed in. 

Coming across like a mix between the Link’s Awakening remake and Mistwalker’s Fantasian, every single moment of DQ VII looks as if you’re peeking into a world made up entirely of miniatures. This tactile sensation, combined with some fantastic voice performances and expressive facial expressions that really highlight the character designs by Akira Toriyama, breathe life into every single early moment of this adventure. 

I’m immediately taken with these characters and their desire to experience life outside the confines of the tiny island that makes up the entirety of their existence. And when that wanderlust finally leads them head out into the unknown, I’m strapped in for every twist along the ride. It’s impressive that despite only fighting one single battle in the first 90 minutes of gameplay, I was still completely hooked thanks to the strong world building and charming core cast.

With the first four hours of the game under my belt, and apparently another few to go before the demo wraps up and I’ll have to wait for the game’s full February 5th release, it got me thinking that this is the perfect way to showcase a meaty RPG, and allow it time to sink its teeth into folks. For a lot of game demos, that aforementioned brief vertical slice showcasing a tight look at the gameplay loop is enough. Hell, that’s what a majority of demos that we cover during our Steam Next Fest videos are made up of, and that’s how I was almost immediately sold on recent gems like Neon White, Ball x Pit, Motion Rec, and Skate Story. 

But when it comes to a sprawling RPG that can easily creep upwards into 50, 75, or 100+ hours in length, it’s hard to distill that magic into a brief 15 minutes that really highlight the flow of that adventure.

There’s a reason that “it gets good after 15 hours” has become a recurring joke when describing certain games, specifically some JRPGs. Yeah, it’s often used as a bit of hyperbole, but there’s absolutely some truth behind that statement.

It takes time to lay down the table setting of a world, introduce a cast of characters, fold in the various dynamics of combat and exploration, and get you acclimated to the core gameplay loop. In order to fully appreciate what you’ll be doing, you kinda need to experience the peacefulness of a town, the excitement of exploring the world, the dangers of delving into a dungeon, the thrill of defeating a boss and gaining whatever spoils, and then repeating the whole process over again.

And there are countless classics that take quite a long time to really ramp up and enter that fantastic RPG flow. Any of the modern Persona games spend the opening few hours getting you acclimated to life at your new school and in your new living situation. It’s not uncommon to hit the four or five hour mark before you have a party of at least three and are ready to start kicking the tires on the first major dungeon, and even then, it can feel like you’re still in the midst of a tutorial.

Not every RPG can immediately grab you in the first few minutes like Chrono Trigger’s outstanding opening. It often takes a few hours for one to really work its magic on us, and Square Enix knows this. That’s why they’ve adopted the excellent practice of sending out demos like this DQ VII one for a lot of their larger games. The kind of demos that let you start the game, play the first solid act, and then carry that progress over into a full version should you choose to purchase it. Because no one wants to immediately have to replay the opening chunk of a game that they just spend several hours jamming through.

In recent memory, Square has released these kinds of demos for Octopath Traveler 2, Harvestella, Dragon Quest XI, Triangle Strategy, Final Fantasy VII Remake, and Final Fantasy XVI. They also had an early demo for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, but that one was a bit interesting. It had the entire chunk of an early Nibelheim flashback sequence, but that wasn’t the exact beginning of the final version of the game. Instead, if you had your completed save file for the demo, the game would allow you to skip that section once you got there in the full release, as Cloud began to tell the party his story at the inn in Kalm.

Side note, have you heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV? With an expanded free trial which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 for free with no restrictions on playtime.

Sorry. Not quite sure what got into me there.

And thankfully, Square isn’t the only one who’s adopted this keen method of advertising. In recent years, we’ve seen similar beefy demos where progress carries over for the likes of Pikmin 4, Metaphor: ReFantazio, Unicorn Overlord, Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, Ghost Trick, and The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, just to name a few.

So what’s one thing these games all have in common, aside from being tangential weeb shit (complimentary)? Well, these kinds of demos pretty much only happen with good games that the developers and publishers are confident in, and if you look at the above list of games, you’ll notice that they’re all, in fact, good games. You don’t see MindsEye out here flaunting its first few hours for free, and that’s because one taste of that opening would turn most folks off the medium of video games entirely. 

I’ve been a life-long lover of video game demos – seriously, late-’90s PS1 Pizza Hut demo discs were a canon moment in my gaming life. And though the days of that kind of exploratory excitement have long since sailed, I’m glad to see that some publishers out there like Square Enix still understand that sometimes taking a game for a quick spin around the block isn’t quite enough. Sometimes we need to drive off the lot, head out of the city, and start making our way towards the horizon, the wind rushing through our hair as we venture out towards some strange, exciting new world.