Carrying some not-so-precious cargo.

I went into this DS game without much of an idea of what it was about. The Square-Enix representative had to talk me through the short demo area they had setup. The portion that I got to play was explained as a typical boss battle, but not representative of the gameplay as a whole. I controlled a blue slime, and my objective was to protect my giant tank while trying to destroy the enemy's giant tank. My tank consisted of 2-3 screens that I could move about freely.

Basically what I did was take projectiles (bullets, arrows, shields, my poor comrades) and throw them into one of the cannons. One of the cannons shot straight across, and the other lobbed the projectiles upward, in a launching fashion. Depending on what you launched and what your enemy lanched, the effects could vary. For instance, if you launched a shield to meet a weapon, the damage is canceled. This portion of the battle lasted until all the hitpoints were depleted from the tank, at which point the tank was breached. Then the enemy (I was not doing so well) came into my tank and just started destroying stuff. The demo (and my tank) ended shortly thereafter.

Face off.

The controls were intuitive; I held down a button to stretch the slime, and it rocketed across the screen. Anything in its path was flipped up in the air, and I had to catch it. I could stack up to three items, and then throw them either into the cannons or against the enemies. The graphics were cartoonish, but not in a detracting manner. All the action took place on the bottom screen with the top serving as a status indicator for the battle (ie, if you throw a bullet into the cannon on the bottom screen, you'll see it shoot across the top screen). It was fairly easy to get the hang of, and this short demo of a boss battle was fast, fun, and quite frantic.