Demon Gaze opens with the main character, Oz, waking up in a dark, damp dungeon. Following the typical JRPG trope, Oz doesn’t recall who he is, where he’s from, or what he’s doing. He doesn’t have time to figure this out, as he quickly learns he’s in a dungeon with a demon in it. Given a sword, Oz defeats the demon named Comet and captures her with his Demon Eye. Why does he have a demon eye? Well, Oz turns out to be the “Demon Gazer,” a person who can capture demons withing his eye and use them for his own advantages. Oz emerges from the dungeon to find he’s inside an Inn run by the collecting rent obsessed Fran, who employs Oz to capture demons for her own unknown motives. This inn is seemingly the only safe haven left in this demon and monster laden world, but it seems like only the most ridiculous people where able to find solace there.

The story itself isn’t revolutionary, and it doesn’t really do anything we haven’t seen before, but its personality makes it a little more endearing than most JRPGs seen as of late. Demon Gaze uses its absurd characters in mostly entertaining ways, and it always tries to add a dash of weird Japanese humor to create the most humor filled and awkward situations I’ve encountered in a game in some time. Only in a Japanese game will you find a cat-maid sniffing the panties of the manager of the inn, but Demon Gaze is chalk full of scenarios like that. And for the most part, it works well within its own universe.

The inhabitants you’ll encounter in the inn are the most bizarre characters I’ve ever encountered, but Demon Gaze takes full advantage of their strange nature to paint a colorful cast of characters. Even the nameless red shirt characters come in often enough to be entertaining, and the scenarios presented offer a nice change of pace to the more serious battles you’ll encounter outside of the inn. I legitimately spent one part of the game getting drunk and taking a bath with another character. While the cohesiveness of these events isn’t anywhere to be seen, and sometimes they seem somewhat pointless, but it does provide a strange normality that gives these characters human qualities that make them seem like people with flaws and ambitions.

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Meet Lancelorna, one of the more tame characters in Demon Gaze

Demon Gaze can be divided up into three different parts: one part social sim, where you’ll converse with various personalities within the inn; one part dungeon crawler, where you’ll explore various dungeons where demons lie; and one part turn-based JRPG, where you’ll fight off monsters that want to delay your quest to capture demons. Mostly, all three parts work very well in harmony with each other, and they make a varied experience that doesn’t let itself drag on even when you reach the 30+ hour mark.

In each dungeon you’ll explore, you’ll encounter demon circles where you’ll need to defeat the monster inside to get close to the main demon in the dungeon. After conquering each circle, you’ll fight a final demon at the end, and if you’re successful, you’ll capture up that demon like it was a Pokemon. Each demon you capture offers a great bonus to your party, such as the demon Mars giving an attack bonus and attacking monsters, or the demon Chronos that provides defensive boosts and bolsters a large health bar or its own.

The first few battles in Demon Gaze are a breeze, but don’t let that early deception fool you, because its difficulty ramps up exponentially as your move forward. The difficulty can seem brutal at times, but it isn’t as crushing as a game like Dark Souls. Your natural progression and loot gathering will keep you competitive with your foes, but Demon Gaze relies heavily on tactful decision making. You can try and repeat the same attacks that normally be a decent strategy in most JRPGs, but your enemies will quickly take advantage of your laziness by exposing your carelessness with targeted attacks on you and your allies. This caused me to not just think about the immediate move with one character, but with my next handful of moves, too. Even when I was the most strategic, I would still fail quite often. Sometimes I needed to give the game a break, because it felt like I wasn’t making any headway against some boss battles – especially since their health isn’t shown – the challenge and reward of victory always kept me coming back.

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Battles are fun, but the mostly static screens don’t help to increase the experience

Party class mixing is absolutely essential to success, as you won’t be able to get away with throwing out a full party of bruisers. One of the biggest boosts my party gained was when I was finally able to hire a healer to my party, which is a paramount class to get if you want to even attempt to be dangerous to enemies. You’ll be able to have up to five people in your party, and you can assign where they’ll be positioned in battle. The most common figuration I used was putting my highest health and melee fighters in front to aggro all of the damage, while keeping my mages, healers, and ranged weapon characters in back, due to their general poor health and defensive stats.

Fighting monsters in Demon Gaze is fun, and its gameplay is the integral reason for that, but the surroundings in which you’ll be exploring and fighting in is instantly forgettable and fails to match any of the promise that its gameplay exudes. On the dungeon grid, you’ll find very basic and indistinguishable features that don’t make any environment exciting to be in or any exploration fantastical. With a world filled with larger than life characters that go over the top, it’s a shame that the world doesn’t convey the same scope.

Battles take place with a static screen where the only view of your party is with little profile pictures and their health and mana. You will see your enemies, but they’re just static images of monsters – albeit very interesting monster designs – they at most will only be floating up and down to show movement. It’s a questionable decision that they made to take what seems like fairly substantial visual shortcuts, and it doesn’t pay off in the least. These visual seem like something you’d find in a browser game – not on a handheld where we’ve seem visual greats like Uncharted: Golden Abyss or Killzone: Mercenary.

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Environments are simple and mostly forgettable

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t too impressed when I first sat down with Demon Gaze, but after some lengthy playtime, my thoughts on the game became slightly more positive than negative. The perfect balance of difficulty made the game constantly engaging, and being able to fully customize characters made the party seem much more personal to fight with. There’s no denying that the world that Demon Gaze created is interesting, but the game doesn’t help itself by showing it in such a lackluster, uninteresting way.

Demon Gaze is a great fit on Vita, as the grinding of levels is easy to do on the go. While its difficulty may seem fairly high – and it can be very high – the reward of defeating tough monsters or demons is unmatched in games within the same genre. Presentation aside, Demon Gaze is a game worth your time and money, and is a great dungeon crawler to sink your teeth into.

This review is based on a review copy of the PlayStation Vita game Demon Gaze by Experience Inc.

Your Soul is Mine | Demon Gaze Review
Overall7.5
Positives
  • Getting loot and strengthening your character is especially rewarding
  • Great cast of characters
  • A great challenge...
Negatives
  • ...but it can sometimes feel too punishing
  • Forgettable environments and battle scenes
7.5Overall Score
Reader Rating: (0 Votes)
0.0

About The Author

Josh is a Senior Editor for New Gamer Nation. He'd love to chat with you about games on Twitter.