I was something of a latecomer to the RPG party; yes, I was one of those people who discovered RPGs with Final Fantasy VII.

Consequently, I didn’t really grow up with first-person perspective grid-based dungeon crawlers like The Bard’s Tale and the early Dungeons & Dragons games. To the teenage me, an “RPG” was a narrative-heavy game with predefined characters who had limited customisation, and in which battles and boss fights were but punctuation in the overall experience’s storybook rather than the central attraction.

This isn’t to say I didn’t play any first-person dungeon crawlers, of course; just not many of them. And, while I enjoyed some of them — the original Lands of Lore from Westwood Studios being probably the most standout example — I still found the “J” approach to RPGs to be the most compelling and interesting to my specific tastes.

Which is why I was so surprised to find myself enraptured with Kadokawa Games and Experience’s Demon Gaze, a title which recently made it to the West courtesy of localisation specialists NIS America.

Continue reading How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a Dungeon Crawler →