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I appreciate addressing that, but I feel hugely compelled to highlight that teaching the game and getting the player to the skill you want them to have should be something far more prioritized than it is being right now, honestly even more so now knowing that there was an NPC that explained this and they were not the first one to be put back after the hub was remade. It is sincerely a very alarming mistake that this demo, which would be the first time of so many people playing this game through SAGE, seems to put this off almost entirely. At the very least I very strongly want to suggest a more thorough tutorial process, as someone that has seen fun games die by their onboarding. Ideally working more advanced aspects naturally through the experience past just the one single tutorial song is a good place to start.

Explaining on the itch page is good and all, but that doesn't replace explaining it within the game. A player shouldn't be expected to learn something from outside the game in order to know how to play it, that is not acceptable.
Along with that, this description of "remixing the suggested line" is actually STILL really vague and it doesn't get across well what that translates to in gameplay. What is "remixing" a line? That could mean a lot of things, and it's not an obvious conclusion for it to mean "make up notes that don't appear in the song", especially when the game trying to do that tends to sound bad unless you're already really good at making it sound good, and the game has already explicitly told you to play the notes that appear on the screen.

It's very strange they would remove that NPC, and it's really concerning to see them commit to doing that considering that while yes, having an NPC just describe textually what a mechanic is not good game design, just removing ALL explanations of the mechanic without replacing them is infinitely worse. I wish I could assume they will just put it back but I cannot imagine a reason for them to remove it to begin with.

I know there must be a lot of comments and feedback to consider, but I feel it is EXTREMELY urgent to get across, as someone that really really really REALLY likes and appreciates this project, that the introduction to this game for a new player is GOD AWFUL.

The fact there's no mention of Remixing and how Expression works, so one third of the scoring system that is entirely just not mentioned to the player is completely unacceptable. It is a CORE MECHANIC, you can't describe the game as "press the buttons in time" and have them find out there's a whole third of the game they're doing wrong. Even a person that plays rhythm games is completely hopeless to actually understand why they get a D rank on the very first stage after hitting every note correctly if they happen not to know about freestyling in Parappa. It's an entirely broken onboarding, they CAN'T figure it out.

That's before even mentioning that completely honestly, the first song is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT for the very first moment of gameplay a player gets. This is not a skill issue, think SINCERELY of a player that has never player a game like this, and now think of what the first song of this game is like. There's a good reason Parappa starts with just verses of one button. Playing these sequences is REALLY HARD ACTUALLY. As it stands, this game doesn't seem to have a difficulty curve at all which is REALLY BAD ACTUALLY.

It is tremendously disappointing to see this after waiting this long for a demo.

This looks absolutely phenomenal. I would love to see you make a full game release in the future, just in any way. Let this proof of concept guarantee you that regardless of where you're taking this, whether as a map maker, campaign, or multiplayer game, you're great at the job to get it there. I can't wait to see more in the future.

Not trying to doubt your knowledge, but I want to mention that since you're using Unity, you have the InputSystem package at your disposal which, unless there's something radically unique about the way Daemon x Machine plays that I'm not aware of, should allow you surprisingly easily to create different default input schemes like that one, so even if you don't have it in your plans for this game I suggest looking into it since it's pretty universally useful.

Just throwing it out there since it took me a while myself to find out just how useful and simple it is.

This game understands effective minimal storytelling and uses it to give you one of the most memorable and epic adventures you will ever experience. MUST PLAY. Thank you so much for putting this in the bundle for Ukraine.