DEViL::ender

This game is officially my new poster child for why bosses that rely heavily on RNG values are terrible ideas. I used the word "frustrated" a bit too much in other reviews maybe. Not being able to find secret endings, or getting left hanging by the story, or running into a weird glitch, that type of thing frustrated me. But right now I think enraged is the right word. The game wasn't bad, but... ARRRGGGHHH.

STORY:
A collection of tropes walks into an archdemon's cave and says "haven't we been here before?" Ok now I'm just being mean because I'm still mad about said archdemon ;). (The character tropes are intentionally done.) The game stars Aluxes which is a nice changeup for the VX Ace engine, and some of his fellow RTP characters, who are all very cheery, and while nothing new, are at least not boring. They are joined together in a quest to kill the big bad demon for all sorts of different reasons, which you learn a tiny bit about as you explore the lava cave place, and it's all set up in a way we've seen before, but then it transitions to something that, while we may have seen before, many people won't expect. There are a few decent jokes here and there, but with the bad mood I was in I only got one quick laugh, and all in all the story is just plain average. Simplicity can be good in a short game though; some people don't like dealing with a text wall when they just want to run up and smash the demon king again.

GAMEPLAY:
A very refined version of what looks like Yanfly's(?) battle script (too new to properly recognize whose scripts are whose and what's original sometimes, sorry about that) carries a very simple adventure through two dungeons. In one dungeon, you're armed with all sorts of high level equipment and spells, but opposed by enemies that can be soul-crushing if you try to mash through them. In the other, you get a new, simpler experience that's challenging in a different way. The dungeons are nothing to write home about, simple mazelike design, but that's intentional because the journey is supposed to be short and the battle system is supposed to be the gameplay focus. (Also the dungeon in the second half seems to be part of the joke.)

All the battles seem to rely very heavily on status ailments, on both sides. That can be interesting, as you get forced into a sort of triage (tree-ojh, the tactical patient prioritization that medics use, not tri-age) mechanic where you have to prioritize who needs healing and what type of healing they need or else you die. But the battles also seem to be more RNG than condition-switch heavy. That's all well and good. I mean, the software practically encourages it. Right up until somebody special like me, the champion roller of snake eyes and puller of short straws, comes along. You see, the pseudo-main boss has this awesome party sweeping skill called Hellgate. With the debuffs he uses, 2 of them in one turn will pretty much murder your whole team unless you're at full health with everyone. It's not supposed to happen. The odds of it happening may be astronomically low, even. But it happened to me 3 times, and twice that successfully wiped my party, very late into the fight. (The first time I fought him I just lost due to not fully understanding how the fights were supposed to work, but I still spent like 75% of the fight trying to get all the ailments off me.) He also occasionally ignores aggro (a status put into the game, not quite the MMO mechanic) and murderizes your mages, or successfully debuffs/ails your entire party with one of his non-Hellgate sweeping attacks, which can lead to being unable to heal before a damage sweep.

It's not the challenge that bothered me about the battles. I don't mind a challenge. It's the fact that one bad roll, and it was game over. (Update: Ok, that's not true. Actually it was a sequence of multiple consecutive strokes of bad luck.) And that the fights took me so long that it was extremely discouraging to die. Even if a player knew exactly what to do I can see the fight with the big bad taking 10 minutes or so, because if you get unlucky then 2 or 3 of your 5 party members are busy repairing the damage or being dead each turn. One of the sub-bosses also wiped my party in one turn early on, and the boss of the second dungeon had a tendency to successfully undo all the damage I'd done by using his health drain skill (which nearly OHKO'd a party member and recovered like 4 attacks worth of damage in one shot) twice in a row, so it's not like just one fight suffered from my cursed RNG rolls. I may be the unluckiest person on the face of the planet, but at the very least there should have been restrictions on when those skills were available. It didn't seem like they were health or status-dependent.

Again, the triage deal was semi-entertaining and the whole system was refined. But the entire experience was dragged down for me by how little control I felt I had over the fights' outcomes.

GRAPHICS/SOUND/ATMOSPHERE:
The custom drawings stood out, as much raging as I did I still couldn't deny that those were pretty nice. The sound was neither good nor bad, I didn't really notice it that much other than noting the lack of default RTP music. The atmosphere started off cliche but at the end the characters did feel kinda like real people, which worked well enough.

FINAL VERDICT:
3/5. The game stands out with its shunning of default resources and its interesting take on battle strategy, but at the same time I, personally, found no enjoyment in it.

If you can tolerate being smacked in the face with all manner of ailments, or you think status-based combat is awesome, then your experience will probably be better. I might just be fatigued after playing so many short RPGs.