When I first about developer Experience’s game Students of the Round for the Xbox 360, I was hoping that it would make its way over to Western territories, but alas, it wasn’t to be. Thankfully NISA saw fit to pick up its successor for the Vita, Demon Gaze. The game is styled in the dungeon crawling gameplay of the RPG heyday, and this game is still very rooted in that mold, although it does try a few thing to stand out, which might have mixed feelings for player’s sensitivities and sensibilities.

The game is not a sequel to Students of the Round, but it does take place in the same world, but about 1000 years later. You start the game in a basement of some kind, in a cell. After getting out and escaping from an enraged demon, you capture its soul and gain the ability to use them in battle as your servants. There is more to the story, but it’s pretty straightforward and paper-thin. Your job is to capture them using this technique of yours, and thereby free the world of demons. There is more to it than that, but that would be spoiling. During your forays in the various dungeons, you will use the nearby inn as your apartment of sorts. There are shopping facilities and the mortician, which will enhance your equipment or revive fallen party members. While there are equipment shops, buying equipment is pointless as well as expensive. The main source of equipment gathering will be done by either buying or earning gems which are used in summoning circles spread throughout the dungeons. These circles will then trigger a battle that upon completion will give you random items based on the types of gems used for the summoning. The dungeons also task you with finding and subjugating all the summon circles before taking on the boss, but not before fighting the boss as a test run of sorts. Some dungeons are very elaborate and will take a while to complete.

Combat plays out in a traditional turned based manner in line with other dungeon crawlers. Attack, defend, skill, item usage, and running are at your disposal. The various demons you gain also have passive abilities that buff your stats, or you can use a portion of your Demon Gauge to use one of their abilities. But if the gauge drops to 0, the demon will become enraged and become more powerful, but they will also attack your party. You later do get the ability to activate their rage mode without them going berserk though. But the catch to using demons at all is that their actions are run on an AI that can’t be manually controlled. Usually they will be helpful, but sometimes they will do stupid things like healing party members that don’t need it, or attacking an enemy with a weak spell. The challenge level of the game is high, but players that feel a bit overwhelmed can have the mortician change the difficulty to something easier: The lower the difficulty, the higher the rent; the higher the difficulty, the better item drop rate. The game also isn’t very grind heavy as long as you don’t run from every battle and keep up with equipment updating or upgrading. The game also has various help guides and tutorials to read in your room. You can even equip furniture to increase your stats. One thing that makes the game more versatile is the ability to find artefacts that can give classes abilities of other classes. This lets players potentially make some killer combinations for builds that lack certain classes, or if they just want to break the game a bit. The game also takes a page from Demon’s Souls where player’s can use Magic Chalk to write Gazer Memos, which can either be messages that can help or troll players, or for people to just make jokes. You have to connect online before entering each map though. Thankfully this doesn’t take long.

The graphics in the game are just serviceable simple 3D first person dungeon crawling maps, but the game features well done 2D artwork to the characters and monsters that you will be fighting. The game does have a rather perverted bent to it though, but thankfully these moments are few, and they mainly happen in the beginning parts of the game. They might be enough to turn some sensitive players off though. The music is also well done, and it gives off a very old-school feel, with some Vocaloid thrown in for flair. The story is serviceable, but it could have used some more character development, and maybe some of the dungeons could have used the various demons passive abilities on the fields more or at least some more dungeon related side quests. The game is a beefy 40-60 hour adventure, but maybe at least a couple extra quests could have been thrown in. The game is a fun little dungeon crawling JRPG that will satisfy fans of the genre. A solid recommend.

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