It seems that a demo is indeed coming imminently. As spotted by Wario64 on X/Twitter, a trailer for a Final Fantasy VII Rebirth demo can currently be seen on the Explore tab on the US PSN. This trailer appears on the US PSN for now, but has not appeared in other territories at this time. This trailer appears on the US PSN for now, but has not appeared in other territories at this time.
It would appear the trailer has been published early, as it says “demo available now.” We can probably assume that was meant to air during the State of Play on February 6.
As someone who actually didn’t really enjoy the combat in FF7R, they have done at least one thing in this demo to make it feel a lot better to me: Cloud is faster.
In the first game, Cloud to me felt slow, and it felt like every other moment he was being hit and knocked to the ground. And he took five hundred years to stand back up.
In the demo so far as I’ve played, that’s not the case any more. He does get hit and knocked about, but he recovers a lot faster. And switching modes seems faster. Even his slower mode of attack feels faster. I feel like in the first game I didn’t make him switch his attack modes as often as I probably should because he took so long to switch he’d be open to attack, and when he got attacked he’d just fall down all the time. It remains to be seen how the full game is, but in this demo all of that garbage feels better. And I’m happy about that.