天下制覇

Yes, I would rather play this than Eushully or Alicesoft’s RPGs.

Demonion 2’s trial came out the other day, and since I too dream of running a combination zoo/bordello/orphange for wayward dominatrices, I spent an evening playing it. It’s technically a sequel, I guess. I didn’t play the first one much though. I basically fast forwarded to see what the dungeon stuff was like and all that did was make me annoyed. Apparently it gets really trivial later too. It may as well not be related anyway since it takes place hundreds of years later when everything done in the first game has apparently fallen to ruins. But I guess they need to cash in on that scant brand loyalty.

The story begins with opening up the trial and becoming depressed. Japanese lesson of the day, “とエッチ” means “sex with.” Bonus lesson, 他の means “other.” There are bloody four more beyond that. They’re sure putting a certain kind of foot forward. Which was actually kind of weird because the prologue (which goes through chapter 1) is practically devoid of anything racy at all besides oversized watermelons in bras and goblin loincloths. Apparently it’s the Kamidori approach, slow rolling it before burying you in the fluff. Although I will say from a quick glance through them and for a game about being a demon king with an army of orcs, it’s all surprisingly tame. Occasionally surprising as to which ‘herione’ has a penis, but one expects different things when orcs are involved. They expect orcs to be involved for one.

  

The actual story begins with Risbell, teenage-ish demon diabolica girl in the Hados Kingdom, once home to diabolica, but after a few wars or whatever, humans now kill them for giggles. With a memory of being saved by the Demon King from racism after her parents was killed and she was imminently raped, she’s out to find the last rightful heir and have him lead the diabolica back to glory. She barges in on him, Caym, trying to decide what jpg magical stone image to jerk off to. Caym’s not big on restoring the glory, but his fetish is humiliation (of haughty females), so he goes along with it to do that to the queens of the surrounding kingdoms. Yada yada yada.

I’m really not kidding about him yanking it either. It’s almost like a running gag (sans the humor) how Ris keeps walking in on him trying to masturbate. It also doesn’t make for a very demonic Demon King/Overlord/Whatever The Translation Du Jour For 魔王/maou is. He’s just badly and inconsistently handled all around. Thankfully, Ris is more protagonist than he is through what I’ve played. Still, it doesn’t help having her point out both how lame he is with one breath and then extolling his glory over all with the next. For example, after the first non-tutorial invasion, he strolls into town, gives a speech about how racism is now illegal, and that’s that. Humans and orcs living together happily. Racism over. Yay. Later, they’re talking about the world’s not-fireflies and festivals and yada yada, I can’t be assed to pay attention to how pretty insects are… When it just dumps out of nowhere “But when he thinks of them, he remembers their maggots crawling over the corpse of his sister.” The hell did that come from?  

The game itself takes about 75% from X-Com and 25% from Dungeon Keeper, althoug heavily simplified versions of each and really none of the challenge. You have your own dungeon which you can build things in. More larders means more units, more forges means more traps, more plumbing means less dragon dung stank through the area. Each turn, you can dig out more rooms (entire map is pre-set) and reaching certain areas unlocks additional places to attack (and places to be attacked from). Unlike DK though, it’s completely static and honestly pretty boring. There’s also overall upgrades you can buy, equipment to find/buy that you can stick on units, extra units to grab, etc etc etc.

You’ll spend a lot more time on the invasions, although I doubt many more braincells. Defensive invasions take place in your dungeon, which could be interesting, but there’s really no strategy beyond “put all your units where the enemies come in and then wait until you’ve killed the requisite numbers to win.” Maybe it gets better when there’s more than one place to defend, but I’m willing to bet that just changes it to splitting your units. Offensive invasions have you sending your units to an enemy ‘dungeon’ and hunting down the lord of the land some generic NPC with a little crown icon a room with either stairs or a throne. There’s a time limit, but you can have units squat in a room for a little while and they’ll take it over. Then, you can call units to any room you’ve taken over in a previous invasion. Oh, and enemies don’t respawn either. So… being ‘defeated’ in invasions isn’t exactly the loss one would think. 

   

There are some things that occasionally require dragging yourself out of a coma to do. Only goblins can disarm traps for example. There’s a decent enough variety in units and types early on, but who knows if that continues. I guess it’s sort of costly/limited to revive units too, so at least there’s some manner of reason to not just throw everything willy nilly around. The AI is laughably horrible though. Each room is basically its own universe. Once you pass through a door, you become invisible. And it takes a second or two for the AI to realize a unit has entered a room, so especially for defending invasions, when you have your entire army standing in front of the only door in, enemies start pushing their way through your units, moving them all around as they elbow into each other before the AI finally kicks in and the entire room attacks as one.

  

I guess I’m overall ambivalent. From a translator’s procrastinator’s eye, the gameplay/interface looks like it’d be way more fun to work on than the game actually is to play. Perhaps it gets better or requires a little more thought as things open up, but these kinds of VN games have trained me to expect them to only get more trivial. Or more obviously broken in the case of Softhouse Chara. The writing and characters are maybe just barely on the edge of above average, but my average is also probably skewed after all the blandy mcbland highschoolers I’ve been translating for the last year and a half. I’ll probably play through it at least a little more when it comes out next week, which is already more than I can say for the first game, and I guess if you like really, really easy RTS-lites, it’s worth a look. I don’t know that I’d venture to say much more than that based on this though.