http://www.gametrailers.com/player/usermovies/314383.html?playlist=featured
This is from some sort of Japanese demo of the game. From watching it, I can safely say that this is probably going to be a below average game but not too bad of a simple RPG. The battle system looks decent, if a bit uninspired and squenix actually had the courtesy to give the player the ability to see monsters on the field before they fight them, which is good in comparison to other FF games with turned based battle systems(other than twelve, but that one was an awful mess of a game). I am not too crazy about the story as not too many things are original about it. For example, the evil soldiers and futuristic city reminds me of FFVII and FFX(hell, you are even running down a street like you did in the beginning of FFX) while the giant towering golem...thing at the 24 minute mark of the video reminds me of the Giant of Babel from Final Fantasy IV. I am not going to hype one bit for this game, all I can hope is that squenix makes a better game than FFXII.

Wait I thought general consensus was that twelve was one of the better ones?
Especially because it got rid of the shitty turnbased system.
Maybe I'm just hearing things wrong but I enjoyed it more than say, ff4 which I couldn't really play past the antlion.

EDIT: watched the video now. Jumping looked dumb. Battles are basically the same as twelves but they go to separate screen and appear to have a lot more menus!? animation looked stiff. The battle music sounded like music maybe suited for a trailer or the little preview movie that happens if you dont press start on the main screen for 30 seconds.
Oh well, it happens.

EDIT: watched the video now. Jumping looked dumb. Battles are basically the same as twelves but they go to separate screen and appear to have a lot more menus!? animation looked stiff. The battle music sounded like music maybe suited for a trailer or the little preview movie that happens if you dont press start on the main screen for 30 seconds.
Oh well, it happens.

Actually, battles seem to take place in the same field, there's just that quick transition to position the characters on the field. You can only control one character in the demo but apparently the demo is a build from 2008 and the finished version is going to be different but how different, I have no clue. FF13 gets rid of magic points and such and uses time as battle currency for different attacks, magic and so on. You can execute a bunch of smaller attacks or wait until the bar is full enough to execute a bigger one, or then you can just execute one or two commands and not wait until the bar fills till the end. The point is to chain attacks with your party members for bigger bonuses and more damage. I think the battle system seems really cool and fast-paced, I just hope that you can actually control your other characters (at least to some extent) and it's not just some bullshit Square made up.

I watched the videos on IGN and a bit of gameplay video on youtube and I think it looks good. The in-game graphics seem to be better than I thought they would be and the cutscenes don't seem nearly as stiff and unrealistic as in almost all RPG's. I'm a bit disappointed by the battle transition though since I thought the battle would have started right when you run into an enemy but at least the battle transitions are really fast. The music definitely didn't impress me though and I doubt the soundtrack is going to be any special. The whole demo was really linear like FF10 and I really hope the whole game won't be like that. It doesn't have to be as open-ended as FF12 (by jrpg standards) but I want some amount of exploring.

But overall I think FF13 seems promising, probably the only RPG I have really looked forward to since Suikoden 5 or something. I don't have an opinion about the game's story yet though since there's so little we know. I do dig the mix of scifi and fantasy though. And the main characters (assuming they are Lightning and Snow) seem much better than Tidus, Vaan or Zidane so that's a plus.

Gametrailers videos often have comments which rival youtube. The community is retarded but most gaming communities are.

fuck yea IM so hyped for this game FUCK YEA im orderin the demo from japan O_O

You know regardless of how bad this seems based on the demo I'm not so sure if that means the final product will be bad at all. I mean does anyone remember how much the FFXII demo that came with DQVIII sucked? Yet the final game is one of my most favorite FF games (well gameplay-wise). Not to mention there really hasn't been IMO a bad main series FF (I enjoyed the hell out of FFX at its time but not so much now and I'm not counting the sequels) so I have faith in this game so far. Come to think about it the FFVIII demo that came with Brave Fencer Musashi was pretty bad too (mainly because FFVIII has alot of "unique" features and the only explaination the demo had were static text screens which I doubt anybody read) so I s'pose you could say Square Enix just isn't that good with demos (although the Einhander demo was awesome as hell and if it wasn't for it I probably would have never even considered getting it).

Anyway this demo is coming to the US via the blue-ray version of Advent Children right? Is there any other way to get it cause I really want to play this myself but I have no desire to buy AC.

Wait I thought general consensus was that twelve was one of the better ones?
Especially because it got rid of the shitty turnbased system.
Maybe I'm just hearing things wrong but I enjoyed it more than say, ff4 which I couldn't really play past the antlion.

The critical reception was good, I just personally didn't like it. The battle system still felt turned based, just now you can run around and some of the elements just felt unfinished. For example, your "quickening" which is a super powerful attack is basically the game's limit breaks, but they take pretty much all of your MP because square didn't add a separate bar for it like in other FF games. It makes many save the quickening for the boss fights, which is in turn a smart idea but it makes some of the actual cool bosses too easy since you do like 999999 damage with one quickening shot(well maybe not THAT much). I will say that the graphics were nice and even though graphics don't make a game, this is really a work of art. The story was another thing that bought this game down, its not that the localization was bad(far from it, I thought it was better than most FF games) but its just the story is just so...boring. The main character, Vaan shouldn't even be the main character as he mostly seems like he is just there for the ride and nothing else while all the other characters seem more involved.