This game is pretty heavily boosted by the great aesthetic and style, cool character designs, and absolutely 10/10 Meguro ost.
The gameplay is pretty jank. About half of raidou's moveset is useless due to the massive amount of endlag after his moves that basically guarantee you being vulnerable and talking a blow to the face after you use them. The gun move in particular is only useful for hitting the frail element of a demon you plan to capture. Any other time its a complete waste of an action, as raidou plants himself like a tree to the ground for about 3 months to fire off 3 glacially slow shots after just a single press of the button.
Raidou feels very sluggish to control overall.
It takes a bit but once you get into the flow of the game it goes pretty smoothly for a while until I'd say about the end of chapter 8, when the bosses health bars get an obnoxious boost. The boss rematches in the final dungeon have an absurd amount of health that takes so long to whittle down it drained away any enjoyment I was having.
To top this off the encounter rate is absurdly high, and there are encounters EVERYWHERE. There is NO place you can walk in that is free of encounters in this game. You can be walking through a bustling city street surrounded by people or through a mansion filled with maids and still be getting assailed by demons and fighting for your life.
The magnetite system is barely a factor. Despite the latter half of the game requiring extreme amounts of recalling and resummoning your demons to make them avoid large screen covering boss attacks, I at no point ever even used more than half of my magnetite bar. According to some people I've talked to, the magnetite system is only balanced for the games hard "King" difficulty, but this is only unlocked after beating the game once and I did not play on that mode, nor do I have any interest in replaying this. So I will never know.
The story is pretty interesting and does some cool things.
The sequel is much better as a game.
The gameplay is pretty jank. About half of raidou's moveset is useless due to the massive amount of endlag after his moves that basically guarantee you being vulnerable and talking a blow to the face after you use them. The gun move in particular is only useful for hitting the frail element of a demon you plan to capture. Any other time its a complete waste of an action, as raidou plants himself like a tree to the ground for about 3 months to fire off 3 glacially slow shots after just a single press of the button.
Raidou feels very sluggish to control overall.
It takes a bit but once you get into the flow of the game it goes pretty smoothly for a while until I'd say about the end of chapter 8, when the bosses health bars get an obnoxious boost. The boss rematches in the final dungeon have an absurd amount of health that takes so long to whittle down it drained away any enjoyment I was having.
To top this off the encounter rate is absurdly high, and there are encounters EVERYWHERE. There is NO place you can walk in that is free of encounters in this game. You can be walking through a bustling city street surrounded by people or through a mansion filled with maids and still be getting assailed by demons and fighting for your life.
The magnetite system is barely a factor. Despite the latter half of the game requiring extreme amounts of recalling and resummoning your demons to make them avoid large screen covering boss attacks, I at no point ever even used more than half of my magnetite bar. According to some people I've talked to, the magnetite system is only balanced for the games hard "King" difficulty, but this is only unlocked after beating the game once and I did not play on that mode, nor do I have any interest in replaying this. So I will never know.
The story is pretty interesting and does some cool things.
The sequel is much better as a game.