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chuckroA knight is caught in a massive power backlash when he defeats the evil Demonius King, and wakes up 200 years later, when a new demonic empire has destroyed his old kingdom. It’s been a while, but he’s still a knight and killing demons is what he does best.
A KEMCO/EXE-Create game with a lot of the usual trappings. This one is big on vendor trash as the way to upgrade your weapons along various tracks. Thankfully, you can sell extra weapons and vendortrash for “coins” (separate from gold) which you can use to buy more vendortrash. There’s also a random-weapon-providing lottery ticket system (that you can also spend IAP on), and an arena that you can access from anywhere in the game. Upon reflection, this is the closest I’ve seen to a melding of an EXE-Create game with a Hit-Point game, mostly based around the need to hit specific spots repeatedly to grind vendortrash to upgrade your weapons. They do make it very easy to find or buy the items you need, though, so that sets it apart.
Interestingly, though you can get oodles of weapons from the lottery and you can buy then at stores, by the halfway point in the game, you want each of your characters to have a primary weapon that you never remove—you can’t “merge” weapons, so you want to use all of the “cauldron” bonuses and Transmigration Ores on a set of four weapons to concentrate your gains, making sure everyone gets slots for the Material Crystals (essentially materia; it grants stat bonuses and skills/spells, and needs to be equipped on your weapons). I didn’t find attack magic particularly useful at all, because level-based stat bonuses lagged far behind the equipment-based bonuses I could get from enhanced weapons. Buffs/debuffs and healing magic were useful, though.
(Side note: There's a late-game boss who you need to use magic attacks to kill, and a second one in the bonus dungeon. That's pretty much the only time attack magic is better than weapons, though.)
Enemies are visible on the map screen and don’t move, though they have a “threat zone” in the direction that they’re looking, and you engage in battle if they spot you. You can use the search feature to find them and find out what their random drops are, making it easier to collect the vendortrash you need. There are also special “elimination rooms” in dungeons where the monsters don’t give gold, but beating them all gives a special treasure.
For the record, though this game is “ad-supported”, the only ads I saw were on the title screen until about six hours in, when the game alerted me that trial mode was off. Then, annoyingly, I paid the $5 for the ad remover and bonus IAP points, but the ad remover didn’t actually work. I played the rest of the game in airplane mode so all of the ads were just a splash screen of “Buy the ad remover!” I don't recommend doing that, but dangit, I paid the money so I'm not looking at the ads.
Most of the plot events actually revolve around the fourth character to join your party, who clearly has a bucketload of secrets. Your main character being a man out of time is barely touched upon; he and the token girl are both just interested in finding their missing 200-year-old partner/mentor. And the fuzzy thing doesn’t talk, it just punches things and purrs a lot. The final dungeon feels like they ran out of time, as they do a time-skip and a fifth character joins your party after the penultimate dungeon, but then you do a 30-floor tower with stops for infodumps / plot revelations. I have to wonder if their original plan was for something more complex, but they ended up rushing in a copy-paste dungeon instead. (There's no post-game either, just the 20-floor bonus dungeon that unlocks two-thirds through the game.)
They also only throw in references to fairies at the end of the game, and never mention elements. I'm going to guess that there's a translation issue, because “Demon Materials” would have made perfect sense as the title.
Overall: Interesting systems and attempts to be creative, the balance is wonky but never gets too hard, and the plot is generally not bad. (Stupid sexist cooking subplot aside.) The need to grind vendortrash is rarely a good choice, but they mitigate a lot of the worst parts of it. Respectable, middle-tier game.
A KEMCO/EXE-Create game with a lot of the usual trappings. This one is big on vendor trash as the way to upgrade your weapons along various tracks. Thankfully, you can sell extra weapons and vendortrash for “coins” (separate from gold) which you can use to buy more vendortrash. There’s also a random-weapon-providing lottery ticket system (that you can also spend IAP on), and an arena that you can access from anywhere in the game. Upon reflection, this is the closest I’ve seen to a melding of an EXE-Create game with a Hit-Point game, mostly based around the need to hit specific spots repeatedly to grind vendortrash to upgrade your weapons. They do make it very easy to find or buy the items you need, though, so that sets it apart.
Interestingly, though you can get oodles of weapons from the lottery and you can buy then at stores, by the halfway point in the game, you want each of your characters to have a primary weapon that you never remove—you can’t “merge” weapons, so you want to use all of the “cauldron” bonuses and Transmigration Ores on a set of four weapons to concentrate your gains, making sure everyone gets slots for the Material Crystals (essentially materia; it grants stat bonuses and skills/spells, and needs to be equipped on your weapons). I didn’t find attack magic particularly useful at all, because level-based stat bonuses lagged far behind the equipment-based bonuses I could get from enhanced weapons. Buffs/debuffs and healing magic were useful, though.
(Side note: There's a late-game boss who you need to use magic attacks to kill, and a second one in the bonus dungeon. That's pretty much the only time attack magic is better than weapons, though.)
Enemies are visible on the map screen and don’t move, though they have a “threat zone” in the direction that they’re looking, and you engage in battle if they spot you. You can use the search feature to find them and find out what their random drops are, making it easier to collect the vendortrash you need. There are also special “elimination rooms” in dungeons where the monsters don’t give gold, but beating them all gives a special treasure.
For the record, though this game is “ad-supported”, the only ads I saw were on the title screen until about six hours in, when the game alerted me that trial mode was off. Then, annoyingly, I paid the $5 for the ad remover and bonus IAP points, but the ad remover didn’t actually work. I played the rest of the game in airplane mode so all of the ads were just a splash screen of “Buy the ad remover!” I don't recommend doing that, but dangit, I paid the money so I'm not looking at the ads.
Most of the plot events actually revolve around the fourth character to join your party, who clearly has a bucketload of secrets. Your main character being a man out of time is barely touched upon; he and the token girl are both just interested in finding their missing 200-year-old partner/mentor. And the fuzzy thing doesn’t talk, it just punches things and purrs a lot. The final dungeon feels like they ran out of time, as they do a time-skip and a fifth character joins your party after the penultimate dungeon, but then you do a 30-floor tower with stops for infodumps / plot revelations. I have to wonder if their original plan was for something more complex, but they ended up rushing in a copy-paste dungeon instead. (There's no post-game either, just the 20-floor bonus dungeon that unlocks two-thirds through the game.)
They also only throw in references to fairies at the end of the game, and never mention elements. I'm going to guess that there's a translation issue, because “Demon Materials” would have made perfect sense as the title.
Overall: Interesting systems and attempts to be creative, the balance is wonky but never gets too hard, and the plot is generally not bad. (Stupid sexist cooking subplot aside.) The need to grind vendortrash is rarely a good choice, but they mitigate a lot of the worst parts of it. Respectable, middle-tier game.
