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A pirate idle gacha game with a refreshing story and waifu heroes | Full Review - Demian Saga

2K View2023-04-18

Demian Saga is a pirate-themed gacha game with charming visuals and filled with lots of waifu characters to collect.

🟩Pros

+A refreshing narrative take

+Pleasing visuals and character design (waifu)

+A variety of activities to participate in

🟥Cons

-Highly limiting time currency

-A bit grindy even early on

A refreshing narrative take

The opening cinematic sets the tone for both the atmosphere and gameplay of the game, showcasing the amazing art style featuring the chibi-looking characters, pleasing visuals, and action packed gameplay. The pirate adventure story is told in small bits at a time, via Visual Novel-style dialogues (The characters are now non-chibi here), and has one of the more interesting stories I have played so far on recent gacha games.

The basic premise is basically about the state of the world after an event called the “Fractured Night”, where five nations across space and time were suddenly transported — as a whole — on one single world, as well as bringing monstrous beings called Kaos to this new world. These five nations of Everwood, Poseia, Gigantria, Elysion, and Akeroth couldn’t be more different with each other in terms of culture, technology, and magical abilities.

Soon after, tons of artifacts called ooparts (out of place artifacts) have suddenly started to appear as well, bringing forth a new age of piracy that still continues up to the present day. The most coveted artifact of all — the legendary “Demian” — is rumored to be in the Primeval Highlands, a dangerous place filled with Kaos, and this is where the story starts, where I was immediately placed in Aisha’s shoes at the advent of her journey, just having recruited his first crew member.

Gameplay Analysis

The gameplay of Demian Saga mainly centers on advancing through the story chapters little by little, using the various heroes at your disposal, collecting and managing them throughout the entirety of the experience. These waifu heroes are mostly obtained through a gacha system — with varying levels of rarity — and they are upgradable as well. Nothing we haven’t seen before, and these mechanics are mostly standard issue as far as the genre goes.

Nothing we haven’t seen before

Demian Saga features run-of-the-mill free-to-play live service elements: daily challenges, quests, login bonuses, and various in-game currency sinks all with the ultimate goal of leveling up the characters or getting better ones. The gacha system is kind of standard, spending diamonds and tickets to draw heroes, including a pity rate designed to guarantee a quality drop after 30 tries.

Every chapter is composed of 10 missions including a mid and final boss fight. The missions themselves are just 1-2 minute battles with the occasional story bits and dialogues. Progressing the story is a lot of fun, however even in the first few hours, I was already severely limited by the time currency system which limited my gameplay to around an hour per mission, encouraging players to spend money to progress faster. Although there is a login bonus though that temporarily boosted my time currency and allowed me to play a bit in my initial playthrough.

The battles are played out automatically, requiring no player input, except for optionally opting to manually activate skills and increasing the speed of the battles even more. Even though the game might seem boring without much player engagement, the presentation is visually appealing to the eyes, with the chibi characters battling them out in real time and spewing tons of special effects and abilities resulting in an action-packed display.

Every hero has their own special abilities that can be activated after a cooldown, and some of them can be manually targeted by the player. The main character’s initial ability can inflict heavy damage and put enemies in statis, for example. And more abilities will unlock later on after leveling up the heroes.

A variety of activities to participate in

Outside the main campaign, there are also tons of other side activities that the players can do — free of charge — without exhausting the time currency. From the endless “Tower of Chaos” mechanic with increasingly difficult enemies and offers endless rewards, to the more rogue-lite game mode “Treasure Maps” element where you can collect map fragments to enter new areas to conquer. More game modes will unlock as you play, adding a lot of variety to the otherwise simplistic battle system.

Even in my initial few hours of Demian Saga, I can already feel that the game feels grindy, with the enemy strength spiking relatively quickly even in the first few missions. With the amount of resources needed to level up the characters, it’s definitely going to take time to progress in this game, even if you let it play by itself in idle mode. Since it is a free-to-play game though, there are convenient in-game purchases to help players get by, that is if they’re willing to spend money.

Conclusion:

Overall, while Demian Saga features run-of-the-mill gacha RPG gameplay mechanics, it distinguishes itself with its pirate theme and a surprisingly rich story. If you're a fan of gacha gaming and are looking for something new to try, Demian Saga is worth a try, especially if you will enjoy the adventurous pirate tone.

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