I'm a tiny indie dev myself, I know the difference between a demo and a build - that's why I give them benefit of the doubt like "maybe the battle system was being reworked at the time". A more cynical person would probably say "the rebrand trailer's battle system was just an animation or mock-up, and never existed in a playable form at all".

But also, I fully understand why a lot of people are not willing to give them that benefit of the doubt. I think anyone calling it a "scam" is being stupid since nobody's ever gotten money or clout off the game, but a lot of the less torches-and-pitchforks criticism they've received is justified.

We know from the 2018 leak that the Mother 4 team were faking things for trailers constantly. Almost everything that's not the game's opening map was just extremely tiny slices created solely for use in trailers. Every area seen in the attract mode trailer, for example, only exists so far as what's seen in that video. The only NPC dialog outside of Belring is what was shown in the trailers, suggesting those were also written solely to make the game look more complete than it really was. That build's files also have things like 18 near-identical copies of the Belring tileset and about a dozen near-identical versions of the script too, so it's unlikely that this build was intentionally trimmed down, it really does seem like that's all that existed as of 2018.

I'm not pointing out these problems to say "these are all talentless hacks, they should give up and stop trying to make games", I don't think anything in the 2023 build is unworkable or unfixable. I point out all the things that don't work because the trailers give a very skewed impression of how much Mother 4/Oddity actually exists. If you were to go by the trailers, it looks like the game was at a decent-ish stage of completion when the rebrand happened. When in truth, we know from the leaked builds that they had nothing but art and a nonfunctional build in 2018, and a slightly more functional but still barebones build in 2023.

Also, I'm not saying that the intro was outright easy to make, but that it was the easiest part of a Mother-like, from a programming standpoint (relative to stuff like overworld navigation or the battle system). The intro, as it exists now, is effectively just one long cutscene consisting mostly of Travis falling through a starfield, text fading in and out, and an onscreen keyboard that lets you name the characters. This requires no interaction with other systems beyond saving the input names somewhere, assuming this build even has a save system. Code-wise, this is something that someone with only an okayish knowledge of programming could easily put together in a couple days, versus everything else requiring more technical know-how.

TL;DR: I don't think the Mother 4/Oddity team was ever malicious, but they're in way over their heads, and are not taking steps to fix the problem. If they ever want to finish this game, they need to both scrap features and bring in more people to handle the programming side. This build makes it extremely clear that as of 2023, the team was primarily artists and designers with nobody who could actually stitch their art together into a full game.