A fascinating car wreck of anime stereotypes
Above: Time spent with NPCs is time spent amazed at how bored you are.
Anime character archetypes are everywhere in the inn that serves as your hub world in Demon Gaze. While Kadokawa does have as much fun as possible with these characters, little in the story stands out as memorable or endearing. It may be hard to steer your attention away from any of the cutscenes, but not for any reason the developer might have hoped for.
NPC interactions all come off as a bizarre, cheap sitcom where characters have the emotional memory span of a goldfish. A Greek chorus of color-swapped mercenaries exist for little reason other than dumb quips and to make the player feel competent by comparison. It’s a mundane comedy set against the overused “amnesiac wunderkind must save the world” story. I’d call it satire, if only it seemed at all smart or intentional.
You’ll feel like a pervert
Above: In no way is this OK.
While called Demon Gaze, Kadokawa’s dungeon-crawler RPG relies on the male gaze more than anything else. The path of the Demon Gazer is beset on all sides by small-framed women in little clothing. One of the NPCs is a flat-chested, pint-sized mortician that often walks around in tissue paper-thin panties slunk an inch lower than where hair should be. An upward camera tilt introduces her like a runway model, and it’s even more uncomfortable than it sounds.
These legal-aged (I’m told) characters that look like little girls come from a trend in Japanese pop culture known as lolicon, or loli. Japanese RPGs have utilized loli characters for decades but never without controversy. And in Demon’s Gaze, it’s rampant. A preteen cat girl sniffs the panties of the youthful-looking inn owner. Many female character model options for your party have younger looking women in sexual poses. “Undies” is a piece of customizable armor. Even if you tolerate this uneasy trend, its regularity here is just unpleasant.
Gameplay devolves into a monotonous routine
Above: See that raven? You’ll be fighting it a hundred times.
Demon Gaze’s embrace of old-fashioned mechanics is a double-edged sword. While exploring the map and maneuvering around lava beds is satisfying at first, it does little to vary your objectives. The pitfalls and traps of each map become second nature once you have gone through them again and again on the same fetch and kill quests. Side missions taken from the inn’s bulletin board are rarely worthwhile; the player picks up better monetary and item rewards elsewhere with arbitrary quest parameters.
Items in shops are too expensive to be worth saving up for; demon portal gems are far cheaper and may offer rewards better suited to your characters. The rent system in the game, a recurring charge each time you return to the inn, has had little done with it beyond making it a MacGuffin tax. You go out to capture demons to pay your rent, so you can go out to capture demons.
Even combat, as charming a system as it is, feels undercooked after only a few hours. Button-mashing through basic attacks takes care of most enemy grunt encounters no matter which map you are on. Enemy strategies rarely vary, and even with demon portals you will find yourself fighting the same batch of foes with mind-numbing regularity. You will hit a genuine patch of challenge with boss encounters, but all that does is give the gameplay flow a lopsided punch to the chops. It’s a slog even with the greatest dungeon crawling handicap we’ve seen in years.
Final thoughts
Above: Midgard head is the worst kind of head.
One good idea does not a good game make. While the latter portions of Demon’s Gaze could throw a wrench into the formula, from what I’ve seen little of value remains here for players beyond some personalized loot drops. The narrative is half uninspired Anime Fantasy 101 and half surreal slice of life sitcom. And that’s when you aren’t made to feel like an accessory to some uncomfortable fascination with underage characters.
Anyone curious on how item-gathering should be in dungeon crawlers from now can demo Demon Gaze. Beyond that, I can only recommend an occasionally satisfying grind for those outside the kind of niches gamer culture just doesn’t talk about anymore.