Game Review | Demon Gaze 2

As a guy coming from 2014’s Demon Gaze, I was excited to play its sequel. I didn’t have much hope for Demon Gaze 1 as it was kinda of a game I bought on impulse and pretty much thought I was going to leave on the backlog of shame forever. But after playing for a couple of hours I was hooked. I find myself liking the dungeon crawling and the challenge that Demon Gaze provided. Well, I say challenge but there is a good amount of BS going on with Demon Gaze 1’s combat system.

I have memories of me struggling not because I was under leveled but because enemies would be some crazy shit. Monsters can kidnap a party member taking them away for a few turns completely screwing over you party’s dynamic. They can use attacks that screws up the formation of your party. Putting magic nukes and healers on the front lines to get utterly destroyed. Some attacks can even KO your party members leaving them knocked out for a turn. Monsters can call for more monsters that can potentially cause a near endless amount of enemies being thrown at you, and they can defend against your attacks at times without even guarding.

They can also change their formations by going to the back of the line outside of your melee fighters reach. They’re smart with that too. Enemy healers will stay in the back healing the rest of their party in the front while you try to cause damage while they get healed, and then end up calling for more monsters to help.

Yea I ran into some pretty hopeless situations in Demon Gaze 1, and that’s all on top of enemies causing confusion, paralyze, poison and other status ailments with their normal attacks. Furthermore this was all thrown at you pretty early in the game, and of course some of the monsters and demons are just flat-out stronger than you, and will shit on you… Literally.

So why would I go back to Demon Gaze after all of that? Why would I put myself through all that trouble again?

…Because I’m a glutton for punishment that’s why.

 

In Demon Gaze 2 you are the Demon Gazer, a person with the power to capture demons and use them to fight alongside you in battle. You join the ranks of a rag-tag group of revolutionaries who want to overthrow the main bad guy Magnastar who is using the city and sacrificing innocence to achieve his personal goals.

I would say it’s a standard setup. Nothing really stands out about Demon Gaze 2’s story except for the fact that they’re using a sort of radio podcast to inform the people of the city of Magnastar’s evil deeds.

Some of the important plot points are rather predictable. None of it is executed in a manner that would make it seem like more than what it is, or even entertaining. As a matter of fact this game has the audacity to throw the same plot twist theme at you that was in the first game like it’s fresh and new. Seriously, you have to be completely oblivious to not realize ‘that one person’ helping is not who they seem.

With a rather subpar and predictable story one would hope that the Characters would come to save the day… Nope. They’re not anything nothing special or even fun to watch. They all fall under the usual tropes, and usually I wouldn’t mind a trope if it’s done in an entertaining manner.

Demon Gaze 2 story isn’t really worth writing about. It kinda takes a backseat to the gameplay and dungeon, but it’s there.

The soundtrack is good and even better if you like vocaloid music. The Vocaloid IA lends it’s voice to the music and it’s nice to hear.

The voice acting is also up to par, and each voice actor delivers their lines with just the right amount of feeling so you can clearly see they care about what is being said. No voices stand out as good or bad, It’s just fine. Plus if you want that Japanese experience this game does have dual audio. Hell, you can even change the in-game text to Japanese for all you extremist out there.

In the dungeons this game is rather okay looking. I didn’t expect much from the in-game graphics coming from Demon Gaze 1, so nothing here really surprises me. You’ll be walking around in maze like dungeons from a first person perspective for a most of your time spent in this game and they all have their own unique theme. Ranging from a midnight city to deep underwater area with pirate skeletons and mermaids to a demon infested castle. Ultimately, they look okay, but it’s clear they didn’t really try to improve much in this department from its predecessor.

As far as the artwork goes it fairs a lot better. I like the game’s general look and style with it’s character designs. In battle you have 2D artwork for enemies and it looks superb with a little movement animation. This animation helped make the artwork almost come to life, and I was always interested to see what new enemies would pop up, and how they would look with each new dungeon I visited.

The gameplay is where Demon Gaze 2 shines and frustrates depending on how you look at it.

As you can see this game is a rather traditional turned based dungeon crawling RPG. You’ll be going through each dungeon to find Demon Circles to activate and then fight the boss at the end of the dungeon. Before getting to the boss however you’ll have to do a puzzle. This I suppose was meant to break up the simple tasks of just activating Demon Circles

The game let’s you go at it with party of 5 characters including your character, the Demon Gazer, and 4 other demons you capture using the power of the Demon Gaze. As soon as the game starts you have option to choose between Good, Neutral, or Evil aliment. Depending on which you choose will affect what skills you learn and the demons you capture. Good will let you build towards healing and defensive skills. Neutral will give you a decent amount of Attacking skills and healing skills, while Evil will eventually give you the best offensive skills and magic attacks in the game.

I personally choose EVIL because I’m the JRPG gawd and shit will get bodied in my presence. If something get in my way it’s getting slaughtered. I take no prisoners. EVERYTHING DIES!

Each demon you capture specializes in a certain combat area. You have regular melee fighters who can go on the front line and attack. Magic users who of course use magic to attack enemies, and paladin who can tank attacks well. It’s your job to choose the best party that gels together to get through the dungeons and boss battles. Even with all of that this game still doesn’t exactly feel that balanced. I found myself sticking to two staple party members through the entire game, and I highly doubt anyone playing the game on normal difficulty or higher can go without using a Paladin to tank attacks, along with one of the magic users to cast holy shield to guard against an enemy’s first round of attacks.

Everything stated in the beginning of the review with regards to some of the crazy stuff going on in Demon Gaze 1 applies here.

This game has some moments of complete and utter BS. If you get ambushed there’s a good chance an enemy party will destroy you in the blink of an eye. Enemies can sometimes attack many times in a turn and it’s sometimes hard to predict what causes it. I debuffed the enemy’s speed and found a somewhat difference frequency in enemy attacks, but often it was crazy when a boss would just spam attacks at multiple party members killing them instantly.

The key to winning in Demon Gaze 2 is to keep your gear upgraded and making sure you upgrade your Demon’s stats.

There are Demon Circles to utilize in dungeons to find much better equipment. If you place a weapon gem or armor gem in these circles you will fight a random enemy, and after battling it, it will reward you equipment with the gem you inserted. There are special gems that can get stronger enemies to appear or increase the amount of equipment you get from these Circles.

You can also have the precious Artifact gems which will give you Artifact equipment that will allow you to use useful and powerful skills on any character. The game doesn’t give you many Artifact gems so you have to be really careful when you use them. It’s best to couple the gems that increase the number of equipment you get from Demon Circles so you have shot at getting really good ones. It’s pretty much best to save scum if you’re going to use Artifact gems. Properly equipping the right ones on even one character can completely change the dynamic of your party for the better. I suggest trying to get Slash 1 and Slash 2 to deal with enemy mobs much easier. Later down the line Astro Force to have your front line attackers hit from the backline.

To upgrade your equipment you need to breakdown your excuses and useless equipment so you can gain Ether from that weapon type or armor you breakdown. You can then use that Ether to upgrade any weapon or arm ten times to increase it’s stats.

In order to upgrade demons you need to perform maintenance. This pretty much involves playing a slight mini games where you have to find a sweet spot on the Demon’s body to make their affection lvl go up.

Upgrading your equipment and demons will keep your chances at winning high, but there are a certain amount of variables that can throw you for a loop; however, I suppose this is part of the fun in Demon Gaze 2. Trying to use your party to get through the challenging boss fights this game has is fun, and I liked it for that.

There are some translation errors with certain skills and the DLC has issues which might result in you not being able to load your latest saved game. Unfortunately, Demon Gaze 2 does suffer from a much more noticeable glitch on the PS4 version. At the time of uploading this video there is this glitch that pretty much allowed me to have infinite money. This glitch is not done in a subtle way, such as going out of my way to trigger the glitch. After battles you receive money like in any RPG but here what’s given is an absurd amount to a point where you just never have to worry about getting money. This glitch is NOT found in the Vita version of the game, so it is not part purposely part of the game’s design.

You might be saying to yourself, if you have no choice but to have infinite money why didn’t you just all have complete full stock of items to run through the game easily? Yea I probably could have done that but then I might as be playing the game easiest difficulty, and to me that’s just no fun at all.

Final Verdict

I ultimately thought Demon Gaze 2 was pretty much an expansion of Demon Gaze 1. There is no need to play Demon Gaze 1 as this game’s story stands by itself. There are characters from the first game that appear in here, but it’s not like you absolutely needed to know them in the first game to appreciate them here. I do miss the character customization for all your party members from Demon Gaze 1. In this game you can change the look of your character and demons, but the options are so limited they might as well just not included the option at all. It really does feel half-baked. If you really want to take a shot at Demon Gaze 2 just know it’s no cakewalk. This is a rather tough game that doesn’t hold your hand and will get slaughter your party at times almost to a point where you will put the game down on the backlog forever; however, if you want the game has 4 difficulty options so you can just to play it however you prefer.

This review was written by a friend of the site who goes by the name ShadowEliteHD. Shadow is a YouTuber who has both passion for, and knowledge of JRPG games, so we enlisted his expertise to cover Demon Gaze 2. If you’d like to keep up with him we recommend checking his YouTube channels: ShadowEliteHD The JRPG GAWD

The copy of Demon Gaze 2 used for this review was provided to us by its publisher, NIS America.