Demon Gaze II Reviews
Demon Gaze II is like a penitent student that carefully notes all the mistakes its predecessor made and avoids them altogether. It’s still got a lot of the typical issues that jRPGs face, but it’s done a great job of cutting past those shortcomings and delivering a tight, focused action RPG
As an entry to dungeon crawling, Demon Gaze II certainly does improve upon its predecessors accessibility. It’s more polished and is clearly more direct in approaching its goal. While broadening the appeal for fans of Japanese RPGs, this new focus has come at a cost. It feels a little generic.
I love Japanese games, but Demon Gaze II fails to deliver in almost every area. By the time the credits rolled around, I was relieved rather than satisfied. There is some good content in here, but you can only take so much of it before you're just done.
As far as sequels go, Demon Gaze II hits the mark as it manages to improve on almost every aspect of the original game. The Dungeon Crawler genre is not the easiest type of game to get into, but Demon Gaze II deserves some credit for not only being a well-polished title for veterans of the genre, but also being pretty approachable for newcomers as well.
I had never played a Demon Gaze game before and totally didn’t know what to expect when I put the game on; I didn’t even know that it’s essentially a 2D dungeon crawling JRPG focused around strategy fighting and turn based combat! I’ve come out of the game pleasantly surprised and it will definitely be something I’ll play to the end, mainly when I’ve got nothing else to play.
I’m not sure about any of you reading this, but I was a huge fan of the first Demon Gaze, even playing through the bonus dungeon that was more than a little bit of a pain in the arse. Especially Luna’s cell. Demon Gaze II is a weird type of sequel, where the events of the first game are followed but not needed to be really known about until the epilogue, although knowing the first game will definitely make some of the recurring characters a lot more hilarious. Like the first Demon Gaze, Demon Gaze II follows the dungeon crawling experience its predecessor left, making a lot of changes and improvements, almost all of which I was glad to see.
Overall, if the game wasn’t so talkative when going from dungeon to dungeon and if the character designs were a bit better, I’d honestly have a better time. More so if the game didn’t make me feel like I was only going from story beat to story beat to story beat every time I beat a dungeon it would have made it a bit more enjoyable. This isn’t to say that the game is even remotely bad however as the dungeon crawling itself is a ton of fun here. While I do wish I could see the turn order in battles, it’s really no big deal. The fact that what moves my teammates will learn and when they’ll learn them is a pretty big plus in my eyes.