From there, it pretty much broke into a battle royal. Bariel is huge, and with a single swipe he can completely obliterate any of the wooden shacks that line the massive arena where Nero breaks into his fight. Though it certainly looks cool, it also releases green souls for refills to keep the battle going, since a single strike is enough to whittle off quite a bit of Nero's life. And so the battle went, with us taking tons of pot shots at the demon to slowly chip away at his health for a while, then waiting to dodge-roll away from a sword strike and move in for much more powerful melee attacks. It was here that we made use of Nero's ability to "rev up" his sword, the handle of which resembles a motorcycle throttle (yes, really). We could power up the sword while still sheathed by three levels and then unleash a far more powerful (and fiery) attack as needed.

The key was to avoid Bariel's attacks for long enough to weaken him a bit. All it really did was extinguish the flames surrounding the monster, but that was enough to give the Devil Arm it's opening. In a hyper-exaggerated version of the Buster move, Nero grabbed Bariel by his effing head, soared into the air and then slammed the demon's face into the ground a few times. Yes, it kicked ass to watch. Unfortunately, for all of the but kicking we were doing, learning the boss' attacks, we died just before finishing him off, and in a fun little twist, we had to start the whole demo over again to fight the boss unless we snagged a Capcom rep to warp us there. Unfortunately, we never got the time, as there was quite a bit of stuff at the event to play. Ah well, it leaves us something to do when the demo for the game (which will probably be what we played at the event) hits the PlayStation Network soon.

A few notes on how the game looked. As noted before, there is some selective motion blurring, which looks quite cool indeed (it was particularly noticeable during the Bariel fight), but there were plenty more little touches. The water in the game looked gorgeous and the massive explosion Bariel let loose was like a beefed up version of billowy, soupy ones seen in Lost Planet (read: they looked amazing). That said, the framerate was mostly 60fps with a few hitches here and there, and we were a little saddened to see textures that looked almost PS2-resolution (the instrument panel that Nero shot, for instance). The game is, of course, still early, and it's possible the setup we had TV-wise just wasn't calibrated properly (it certainly looked cleaner during the big-screen presentation before the hands-on sessions, which is sort of backwards of what you'd think, so who knows).

We also had wireless headphones on, too, so there was no way to hear how good the 5.1 surround was, not to mention a bit of very slight lag that was quite annoying (and really only noticeable) during the cutscenes with Bariel, because it looks like the game sports some fantastastic lip-synching for the monster, but we'll have to play it at the office to know for sure. All told, the game is pretty, but not so filled to the brim with eye candy that you can't imagine it running on anything but the PlayStation 3, though we should note that the characters (and enemies) themselves look absolutely stunning, textures and all.

We'll have updated impressions as soon as we can get our hands on a preview build of the game. Check back soon for those deets, but for now, hopefully some new media (click the screenshot/video links at the top of the page) will tide you over for a while.