Demon Gaze Review

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Reviewed on PlayStation Vita
→ April 22, 2014Demon Gaze, by all accounts, should be a forgettable Vita game. This lengthy dungeon crawler’s partially voiced dialogue, ugly 3D environments, and uninspired musical score don’t exactly make for a good first impression. But dropping Demon Gaze before seeing all its tricks would be a mistake. Even with poor graphics and what feels like an endless stream of generic, comically buxom anime heroines, the latest RPG from developers Kadokawa Games and Experience Inc. has enough rewarding gameplay hooks and Eastern charm to remain entertaining throughout its 30- to 40-hour runtime.
Actually making it to the story’s conclusion isn’t an easy task, though. Demon Gaze is a dungeon-crawler RPG that hearkens back to a classic like Wizardry, borrowing both its basic turn-based mechanics and old-school difficulty. The action takes place in a series of increasingly perilous dungeons, where you’re asked to carefully navigate your custom-made characters through robust locations in a first-person view. Instead of having free 360-degree movement, you’re forced to travel through grid-based locations that provide plenty of branching paths and unique item pickups. Looking through the eyes of your selected character isn’t exactly ideal, as it’d be nice to actually see the party that I’ve constructed through hours of play, but it’s still a nice change of pace from the more common third-person view seen in modern RPGs.
Unlike Dungeon Master or Legend of Grimrock, the enemies in Demon Gaze’s dungeons don’t close in on your location after each step. Battles stem from both random and static encounters, so there’s really no need to meticulously plan out your movement. Avoiding the planned skirmishes placed on a given map is an option, but you can only run for so long before finding a scuffle. And really, you’ll need all the battle experience you can get to feel prepared for the late-game challenges.
Even if you consider yourself an expert in turn-based combat, the battles in Demon Gaze aren’t a walk in the park. You’ll plan out basic attacks, powerful spells, and quick defensive maneuvers as you stare down a sea of striking hand-drawn enemies, but recruiting new party members and boosting their stats isn’t enough to douse the consistent threat of a complete party wipe. Up to five characters of different classes, races, and stock appearances can join you on each dungeon run, and you’ll need an effecitve combination of their combat proficinencies in your group. The defensive skills of a Paladin greatly vary from the hard-hitting, violent techniques tied to a Samurai. A single attack from one of the eight bosses can knock out one or two of your characters before you get a chance to launch any offense, and while the often-brutal difficulty can feel unfair, the perilous nature of the moment-to-moment action makes the taste of victory much sweeter.
Choose wisely.

Unlike most classic dungeon crawlers, Demon Gaze takes the time to include plenty of story justifications for your loot-fueled trips into fiend-invested locations. You take the role of a Demon Gazer – a rare breed of warrior that can capture the souls of demons and use them as powerful allies. Each new demon comes with a suite of unique active and passive facilities, giving you new strategies to test in battle. Some demonic characters can deal crushing elemental strikes in combat, while others reveal secret locations on the map. Summoning a demon to assist you in combat isn’t a strategy you should lean too heavily on, though – a "demon gauge" that slowly diminishes over the course of battle forces you to plan your allies’ use accordingly, since you lose all control of the character once the meter hits zero. The demons add a unique flavor to both combat and exploration, but even their welcomed offensive production isn’t enough to cool a dungeon’s fiery edge.
The overarching goal is to capture the eight demon souls and protect the inn where you and just about everyone else in the realm resides, but gathering mushrooms, sharing a hot bath with a greedy elf, and cleaning bed sheets are all available subsidiary activities. That heap of side quests isn’t always entertaining, but comical dialogue and monetary rewards make them worth your time.
Talking the talk

Money, at times, is even more valuable than a single demon soul, as the owner of the inn asks for rent each and every time you return from a dungeon. This forces you to carefully plan individual trips that you’d otherwise rush into during your average RPG, making every dungeon dive a unique and critical venture.
Since each trip is valuable, it’s crucial to gain new levels and discover fresh loot as often as possible. Demon Gaze forces you to grind out a few levels before tackling some of the more fearsome bosses, but the rewarding progression system removes most tedium from the process. Characters become demonstratively more effective in battle after simply equipping a new axe or dumping a few points into a particular stat, so while you’ll likely run into dozens of random battles before conquering a dungeon, the results of your hard work are much more visible than in the average RPG. It’s a simple, but effective.
Fighting like it's 1989.




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