I played my first game as Mammon with three friends & two AI. I was dead last for half the game, bumbling around unsure of how to maneuver the disparate parts into a longer strategy until I finally got a prestige engine churning with max rank Charisma and rank 4 Prophecy. Methodically, I maneuvered the Gilded of Mammon to bully Beelzebub and earn small prestige victories, as I continuously levied demands against the stupid AI -- as we all did -- and I prepared my ritual table.

Belial and Andromalius were making political maneuvers all game; so I popped a midgame Elocution earning me 6-30 prestige a round as my rival archfiends desperately tried to crush each other, then I popped Burnt Offerings, the max level Charisma ritual, to milk my subjects for 9-11 prestige every turn. Over the following half of the game I swung from last place with an overwhelming prestige in the 300s as Mammon's economy engine finally earned me massive notoriety in hell.

The Archangel himself then descended from heaven up high and systemically erased all of my legions, including my Gilded of Mammon, who had made themselves tremendously powerful over a long series of small victories. Any attempts of war neutered, I sat on my economy and farmed prestige.

Belial, previously vying as the conclave favorite, realized favor was slipping from him and plotted against the crown. He summoned massive super legions and swarmed Pandemonium, Hell's capitol, eliminating all prestige victories and excommunication himself, but if he retained control of Pandemonium for 5 turns, he'd win the game.

At the same time, in a bizarre stroke of fate, the stupid AIs triggered events sealing the gates of hell and preventing us from collecting tribute, stifling our economy, and soon followed by another event which closed our ritual tables; Belial weaponized this with his max rank deceit to loot our stores while tribute was shut down, stifling his opponents' economies even further to maintain the upkeep on his massive infernal hordes, and took advantage of the disabled rituals to make himself virtually untouchable.

I anchored down and maxed out my Prophecy so I could wait for the moment to unseat Belial the Usurper and waited for my quaking opponents to band together and slay him. Andromolius recruited a moving Fortress and forged a dimensional cube to warp the Fortress right next door to Belial's stronghold one turn before his Usurper victory, and, in the penultimate turn, I used Demonic Interference -- the max rank prophecy ritual -- to exile his artifacts, terminate his rituals, and destroy his ritual table. With his ritual table destroyed, he had no means to protect himself from Astaroth, who levied powerful Destruction rituals at Belial's stronghold, nor Andromolius, who had a fortress ready to blow him into oblivion.

In his final breath, Belial teleported his massive hellish beasts across hell, destroying Andromalius' and Astaroth's strongholds in the very same turn his stronghold was conquered; all three of them were crushed in one pivotal turn, leaving me the only surviving Archfiend -- excluding the idiot AIs.

Belial weighed destroying me by conquering my stronghold the turn after usurping Pandemonium, but instead decided to warp his legions to protect his bases, leaving him too far away to get to me in that one turn my other rivals were systemically murdered. Three turns before his impending victory, I activated an event restricting all legion movements to 1 canton per turn, creating the conditions where Belial now felt unstoppable and teleported his beasts within striking distance of Andromalius and Astaroth, then yet unaware Andromalius had that dimensional cube.

With Belial, Andromalius, and Astaroth all ended in one fell swoop, my Gilded of Mammon returned reborn. I, the infernal Mammom, swat aside the meaningless Murmur and Beelzebub -- the idiots -- and was legally elected by the Conclave the rightful ruler of hell, standing atop the corpses of my opponents and a veritable horde of wealth.

With countless moving parts and a few strokes of luck wherein if one thing had happened a turn sooner or later it might have been a dramatically different conclusion, it was maybe the most satisfied I ever felt winning a multiplayer game.

all 3 of my opponents eliminating themselves in one turn was godly. 10/10 experience

Demons Roots is an incredible statement that a powerful ending can redeem any kind of garbage, tropey, degenerate writing to cement itself as one of the greatest video game stories of all time.

Most JRPGs have a dreadsome mid-game lull or, even worse, blow their load early and the final quarter turns into a slog. Demons Roots is in many ways a stunning counterexample, not the least of which because the game absolutely betrayed my early expectations. There is no praise strong enough to emphasize how good the pacing is here. I loved the first couple dozen hours, I really did, but political intrigue withstanding, it was evident to me this story was riding its tropes and nonsensical eroge twists into the ground. Dumb party members will reveal everything to an antagonist because anime bullshit; the script waylays you with tomfoolery like "hot guys really think they can get away with anything." Early Demons Roots is riddled with Jappojank and the tropey characters that propel it along.

And it's all a fucking ruse, because as the game unfolds, the one-dimensional characters reveal little shades of nuance. The script, keenly self-aware, makes fun of itself. And this rich, harrowing political drama about war and racism absolutely explodes with intrigue, betrayal, death, twists, and delicate, deliberate writing that redeems all prior plot conveniences. One guy wrote this is "Game of Thrones if Game of Thrones was good" and there is two things I know: I'm tired of all political dramas being compared to Game of Thrones, and I fucking love Game of Thrones. Yet as I crawled through chapter 4, the similarities between these two stories became uncanny.

At the heart of it is a tragic and heartcrushingly human story about the tolls of war. Humanity is motivated by a shared hatred of some nebulous other; "us" vs "them" mentality; can we accept and learn to cohabitate with this inherently evil "other," demons vs humans, humans vs demons, disparate peoples desperately trying to cohabitate when propaganda, tradition, and their own cultures demand them to hate each other? A single human may forgive, but can an entire culture? This theme carries the game to its final heartbeat, explosive revelation after explosive revelation, culminating in an immensely powerful ending occupying my very first thoughts as I woke up this morning.

By the end of it all, this disparate and distinctly eroge cast of bikini-clad, isekai'd, crossdressing, freeuse mages, equal parts insufferable and adorable, evolved into one of JRPG's most nuanced, poignant casts, and it happened so subtly I hadn't even realized how attached I was to these characters. This is not faint praise. I find most JRPG casts merely "acceptable." The Xenoblade series, Tales, many Final Fantasies... some of them have characters I love, but mostly I find casts as a whole exist to shade the plot. Demons Roots deftly balances both; I would not care for the world's plights were it not for its cast, and I wouldn't care for the cast were it not for the cursed world they inherited.

All of the game's flaws can be summarized neatly by the RPG Maker design limitations. The smut is (mostly) lame. The traditional, turn-based combat is pulled straight from 1994, and even JRPGs from that era have more cinematic presentation than Demons Roots. This is indisputably the lowest budget, most obviously JRPG Maker JRPG I've ever played. There are other indie JRPGs coming out this decade with better production; Astlibra and Chained Echoes immediately spring to mind. I know, I know; I hate people who bitch about graphics as much as anyone else might, but video games are just as much a visual art as they are a musical and written art, and Demons Roots is, visually, absurdly boring. I do love the music, though. This soundtrack bops. It's dynamic and eclectic, rich with chiptunes, orchestral, chamber music, metal, and it all just works.

Exploration is rote; towns exist, but there's not much to them, and the only real reason to explore them is to indulge in flashes of interaction with side characters that might miss integral character shades otherwise. Dungeons are stylistically the same boring isometric dungeons you've seen in any other SNES [inspired] JRPG. The saving grace is that lootable objects are everywhere, with numerous hidden trails; scouring them is the primary means of obtaining new equipment, so exploration is rewarded and almost mandatory if you don't want to grind your ass out of more challenging boss encounters.

The combat design carefully navigates around the genre's common pitfalls: every character is good, some a bit more than others, but they all have their moments; debuffs are consistently useful, including in boss fights, and often mandatory; party members can be swapped in and out without wasting a turn; and encounter design is usually just complex enough you can't X-mash your way to victory. For an RPG Maker game, everything was designed with as much of a modern touch as possible, but there's no getting around the limitations of its system. I'd be overwilling to overlook all of the game's flaws if it had an even somewhat exciting progression system. Earn EXP and level your characters linearly? Literally 1994.

I was prepared to write a frustrated diatribe about all the praise this game is getting from the select few willing to overlook it's an eroge and play it """for the plot"""; at minimum, I was certain everyone praising the shit out of this game just happened to be among the small herd of weirdos that love goofball anime comedy and Jappojank storytelling (fucking shounen lovers), and there's no way Demons Roots would appeal to anyone else. Well, I was wrong. If you, like me, find yourself slightly disillusioned in the early hours thinking you got jebaited by a bunch of trolls voting "Pingu in the City" to MyAnimeList's top anime charts, press on, because literally every hour is better than the last. After spending the early year balls deep in Astlibra, these two games make clear the indie JRPG scene is where the most insane, off-the-wall design is going to happen, and I hope to see these games get more mainstream attention. I'll close this with a final thought:

Deathpolca is the greatest JRPG protagonist of all time.