NIS America has launched their sequel for Demon Gaze, titled Demon Gaze II. The first was only made available on the PS VITA, however the second game is on both PS VITA and PS4 systems, but at what cost?

For those players who still own a PS VITA and enjoyed the first game might be the only people looking forward to the sequel, as I never played the first and I really didn’t think too fondly of Demon Gaze II. In my opinion the story was hard to follow, I’d even say it was all over the place, one moment you’re talking to someone and then your talking to someone else about something not connected. When it comes to the battles, they’re no better. They’re odd and had me believing this must be the version of the game where everyone had a few too many drinks and thought this game made sense when in fact it was the opposite.

I dislike games that can’t stay on the straight and narrow with their stories and gameplay, and these were the two things I had problems with when playing this game.

Not everything was bad, and it isn’t like the game is hard to play. First you’ll create your own character, things you’ll choose include voices, skills and your name. Temper choice is also something else between good, bad or neutral. There are five character to choose from each having a couple of colour choices. The gameplay for Demon Gaze II is mostly walking around and talking to people, it’s repetitive from the beginning. Whilst walking around you don’t ever see your hands even though it’s a first person perspective unlike other first person games. Now, walking around doesn’t feel like walking should, you feel more as if your gliding around.

Conversations are heard in English, and shown on screen as text, the weird thing about the text on screen, it doesn’t move along automatically, instead you’ll be forever pressing X to continue the conversations.

Sorry to be so negative but here was something else that made playing that much more of a pain, the controls. Movement was awkward the left stick was for looking around as well as moving forwards, while the right stick also did movement but with added movement of gliding left or right. When moving around this was a cause of confusing where I felt I knew I didn’t need to constantly make the same mistake but the game in itself was making me do it.

Playing on my PS4 Pro the game was quite poor looking, there were no real benefits that I could tell, and it’s no exaggeration that the visuals were the worse I’ve seen in awhile on the PS4. What makes the visuals so bad is the missing textures, the only thing that appears to look good are the cartoon animated characters that are seen in conversations and as well as animated buildings, but everything else is crappy looking. All backgrounds are still images that do absolutely nothing.

Demon Gaze II isn’t classed as a visual novel, but I’ve played plenty of those sorts of games and well I consider this title to be placed into that genre in some aspects. But even that works against the game, so many conversations are more prolonged than they needed to be. Audio in game is alright, conversations are in English and nothing was ever lost in translation but the gameplay was what got me missing what I needed to know to be able to follow what was going on. Conversations sometimes give you multiple choices to answer with.

Would I recommend Demon Gaze II? Sadly not, not unless you were a gamer who played the first and enjoyed it, but as I haven’t played the first I’d only be assuming there both the same sort of game and that nothing has changed since the first. It just had too many faults that made me want nothing more than to stop playing it.

Written by: MKAU Gaming