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Demon Gaze has made the jump to console for its second entry. While the platform options may have expanded, the Vita roots are still fully evident in this dungeon crawler.
[Review]
Comments
If it helps any, the character art wasn't bad, but in the dungeons the lack of budget was more evident. It ultimately didn't impede my enjoyment of the combat and story, but I don't think the dungeons compare well to something like Etrian.
Now the game has a post-game content (think it's part of an expansion but not sure as I got both), grinding is indeed needed for that and I stopped playing it soon after I finished the game.
Depending on the difficulty, grinding isn't necessary. However, there are HUGE stat differences between levels. The first time I died on a boss I was level 10; I did a bit of grinding, came back at level 12 and was able to manage the battle. I agree that the boss battles maximizing the party's abilities is essential and my only other gripe is that sometimes the regular enemies aren't difficult enough to force the use of abilities and I was figuring that stuff out in the boss battles. I mean, that's at least partially on me, but I appreciate when games get progression just right.
I'd finish by saying that you can totally get through the game w/o grinding with careful use of abilities. However, grinding is pretty painless, so that's a viable route as well.
As far as "ugliness" of the dungeons I don't think we really play these for good looking dungeon graphics, it's really more of an explorer's itch we're all scratching. I personally think the dungeon and sprite graphics of Etrian Odyssey weren't all that fantastic either, certainly on par with Demon Gaze 1. The music of EO1-3 that I've played to completion was good but not at the level of DG.
I wish more companies would do home console versions of games like this. I really can't seem to get enough of Wizardry/Might and Magic style dungeon tiled dungeon crawler games. I can't seem to get in to the Persona games and M&M started to lose me a little at game 7 and really lost me about game 8 or 9 because they deviated from the original stories and lore.
I really liked Wizardry: Tales of the Forsaken Land and Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls. We need more like this. Let's get away from crazy ways of reinventing the wheel and get back to the basics.
I'm currently playing Final Fantasy 20th Anniversary again and have DG2 on my PS4 when I get around to it but I need that old school, stripped down, raw console-ish RPG without a boatload of extra functions. Final Fantasy in recent years has gone off the rails. Phantasy Star is always lurking but rarely shows its face anymore. Dragon Quest series is much closer but other than story very little changes from one to ten. You can spend 50 hours playing the game and 50 more hours grinding abilities. Not really sure who thinks that's a marvelous idea but the older we get the less time we have to sit and grind stuff.
As to the graphics, I think this being on console made it harder to ignore the shortcuts it takes. A lot of things just stick out on the big screen: the arrows instead of staircases, skull and crossbones instead of enemies, and often there isn't background art to give the dungeons a sense of place unlike an EO where everything would have a forest motif and tie in together. Ultimately, the graphics didn't really hurt the score, it was just a shame that those nice little touches were missing.
Music... it isn't so much that I didn't like it, but that it didn't hold up for 60 hours. You know, everyone will have different tastes on that. I'm sure if you liked DG1, you'll be higher than I was on that for DG2.
Do you listen to RPGBacktrack? I think you and I would get along
Honestly, for me, Wizardry 8 was a tough game. I ended up cheating severely due to time constraints and it still took me 40-50 hours to get all the way through. I used some save file downloads to try starting with other factions but ultimately they didn't really change the game too much. My biggest gripe was not being able to move more than four feet without another twenty hour conflict. It caused the game to be far longer than it needed to be. With console commands I pared it down considerably but it still took a very long time. Other than that I really loved the Wizardry world brought to full 3D life.
I've played Etrian Odyssey 1 and 2 to completion and have been on the post game strata six of the third game but I'm trying to find time to finish. Unfortunately it's been some time since I played and now I've fallen out of practice and that will be part of the problem. I picked it up about two months ago for about a half hour and realized I'd forgotten a lot of my typical strategies. The DS is a system I'm a little reluctant to play at home since I have dozens of home console games to go through but work is letting up a little so maybe I'll find time to finish EO3 in the near-ish future.