Hearken to this, my fellow retro gaming sickos: Nintendo is finally catering to our very unusual tastes with the latest updates to the Nintendo Switch Online retro game library. This time, we've gotten a pair of N64 games that I'd wager you've either never heard of or entirely forgotten up until this moment.
Square Enix just set a new bar for video game demos with its latest RPG
10.04.2024 - 13:36 / digitaltrends.com / Tomas Franzese / Nintendo
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.
Related- For classic RPGs, what’s old is new in 2022
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 across the full scope of this game in a demo,” he tweeted. Broadley credits Emerald Beyond’s lead project manager with coming up with the idea to release three separate demos for the game.
On April 4, Square Enix released a SaGa: Emerald Beyond demo on PC, PS5, and Nintendo Switch, but they weren’t all the same demo. Each has a different playable protagonist: Steam’s demo follows songstress Diva No. 5, the PS5 demo stars Miyako Immpersial University student Tsunanori Mido, and the Nintendo Switch one is focused on the white witch Ameya Aisling. Each of these demos follows the characters’ unique story introduction and gives players multiple choices on the first world they want to visit after that. All these characters play differently, too;
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