Sometimes, though, developers go the extra mile and build a vertical slice to demonstrate their game. This is a lot of work – even re-using assets from the game, you’re looking at many hours of scripting and scenario design – but the payoff speaks for itself. Bravely Default’s demo is essentially its own mini-RPG, with three dungeons to conquer, five bosses to fight, and a whole bunch of enjoyable grinding to do in the interim. It has condensed versions of the streetpass and job mechanics from the main game that allow you to familiarize yourself and get to the fun quickly. The demo may take all of its assets from the main game, but it uses them to craft an experience entirely distinct from it. In doing so, it gets straight to the essence of what makes the full game fun. What’s more, if you master the demo, you get rewards to help you out in the early game, as well as a head start on streetpasses.
The other type of item is accessory and each one grants a different skill. The feather, for example, does a quick roll that stuns an enemy, while the soul cube lets out a powerful arcane jet of energy blasting through everything in its path. A bundle of wheat summons an attack-llama, there are healing pendants, berzerk mushrooms, magic shields and plenty more to turn up. These let you create a personalized loadout of three skills, defining character class by what you choose to carry. The more powerful accessories are powered by souls, which are released and automatically gathered as you take out monsters, but it doesn’t take many to fill the bar. The skills are there to be used rather than hoarded.
Each level grants a purple gem/swirly-thing and these are used to buy equipment abilities. Once committed there’s no taking the gems back until trashing the item, at which point they’re refunded in full. Level one is one gem, two is usually two gems, etc, but there are also rare powerful abilities that get more expensive. I held on to the Harp Bow longer than practical thanks to it not only shooting five arrows per shot but also having a chance of an arrow dividing into another five on hit, despite how expensive it was to power up. That kind of crowd control is worth saving up for, after all, but there’s always going to be more loot later that will finally make swapping out an irresistible prospect.
On the plus side, once you’re in the Minecraft world the sense of scale is truly fantastic. Everything seems bigger somehow, more immediate and solid. A pit in a cave that would be little more than a hazard to plop a staircase onto is all of a sudden an ominous presence waiting to see you fall into its depths. Hills are more imposing, cliffs shoot dangerously into the sky and canyons are massive rifts in the earth, and the oceans go down forever. Even the standard block has a sense of mass, with its one meter cube transformed into a substantial chunk of scenery. Another side effect of the new sense of scale is that combat has become a little easier because the strike distance is so obvious. The move to VR has done a great job of freshening up an experience I’ve been done with for several years now, which is an impressive feat. While I’m still not completely sold on the viewing solution, it’s something that works for now until a better idea is implemented.
Over the past few weeks I’ve spent a frankly irresponsible amount of time on my 3DS, a great deal of it with A Link Between Worlds . But when I wasn’t busy rescuing princesses from other princesses (or, uh, doing actual work for the site) I was delving into Bravely Default . Not just the full game, but the demo. Most of us have, at one point or another, obsessively played a demo for a game that had us hyped, but what may surprise you is that I’ve sunk over 10 hours into a single playthrough of this one. Any way you slice it, that’s a lot of content for free software. Well, I say “any way,” but it comes pre-sliced, vertically.
It takes a while to build up a full arsenal, especially due to how many gems are required to level up equipment skills, but once you’ve got a foothold the game opens up into a fun combat romp. Minecraft Dungeons is designed with younger players in mind, so on standard difficulty it’s too easy for any kind of seasoned player, but after a few levels you can crank it up to the hardest and eventually get a decent challenge that can actually run the risk of killing you. Enemies attack in large numbers, whether they be familiar Minecraft creatures like zombies, spiders and skeleton-archers or newer threats such as the corrupted Illagers (like villagers but ill) or zombie-summoning sorcerers. Combat is initially a simple matter of holding down the attack button and letting the combo animation play out, broken up occasionally by needing to shoot archers that don’t want to hang out in melee range. The final levels do a nice job of putting all your abilities to the test, though, requiring regular use of magic, support pets, keeping an eye out for traps in the environment and giving the bow a good workout.
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