Originally posted by Rose4256
(How did I miss this post?) Anyway, how does the language barrier compare to Sakura Taisen, Venus&Braves (did you pick this up yet?), D+Vine, Fushigi Dungeon, or SGGG? I don't want to play through many more games as language-intensive as the last 2. If I miss the story, okay; but when it starts to affect gameplay, eh...

Oh, and could you put a ?/10 value on your review?
Venus & Braves keeps just missing a purchase. I have a list of JPS2 games I want, but sadly the list is longer than what I can afford.

The story doesn't effect gameplay at all. You literally need to know none of it to actually play the game. There's the gameplay instructions that would be helpful to read, but I have that all figured out so I can talk you through anything you might get stuck on if that's an issue. I've even evolved one of my demons now so I'm fairly confident I have the mechanics of the game down.

The biggest problem I thought was the items because there are a lot of them and all the names are in Japanese, but many of the items do more or less the same thing (like one will heal 25 damage, another 30) and once you get a handle of the game you pretty much stop using items except for occasional healing one. Also, the items are sold in specific shops so if you buy an item from a cafe, you know it's a healing item, a weapon shop either an equipable item or one shot attack item, etc. When in a fight, a healing item will target your group while an attack one will target the opposing group so you don't have to worry about accidently shooting yourself or anything.

The equipable items all have a specific element attached to them and number based stats. The only confusion is for the status effect element items, but with a little trial and error you can figure these out since they also have specific numerical values to make them easy to keep straight. For instance, 84 is sleep effect (very useful, btw). Pressing triangle when choosing a special attack in battle will list the corresponding element and number value. Right now I have demons with six or so attacks and I don't mix them up, even if they have the same elements.

So to answer your question finally, the language barrier is actually fairly minor. Oh, a cool thing is if you sped through a story segment before, but later wanted to read it, there's a story section from the main menu that lets you replay any story bit you've seen so far. I sped through most of them myself, but there were a few that were worth the time for me to figure out.

I'd give it 9/10, faulting it only for the somewhat limited animation and the lack of two player. I have all these strategies worked out and while they're fun to unleash on the AI, they'd be even more fun to dish out against a friend who has been raising his own army of demons. There's also a good review of it on gamefaqs, though he's fluent in Japanese so his take on the game is a little different than mine. I think the world which it takes place in is nice, but the gameplay is good enough to stand on it's own. I'm not sure how many hours I've played and it still challanges me. Other 'trainers' attack with the same demons, but their strategies keep getting better and harder to defeat.