Demon’s Revenge announced

Whitney White writes in to announce Demon’s Revenge, a jRPG currently in development by herself, Tyrell White, Ricky Gunawan, Michael Correa, and a programmer who prefers to go by the moniker “derula.”

The premise:

Demon’s Revenge is about a young woman name Sen. She has gone through hell her whole life, having accidentally killed her brother and being disowned by her parents. She is finally done with it, the way she’s living, the past that she’s had to live with, the guilt and loneliness. She vows to be the demon that everyone thinks she is and tries to set out on a rampage, but realizes it’s just not her. She gets help from a ridder (a person who gets rid of demons), and they both end up on the run. Sen for being a demon and the ridder for helping her.

Demon’s Revenge has an early demo out. Some thoughts: This game has some pretty solid original sprite work for the battles. It eschews RPG Maker’s default environmental tiles as well, though I personally find the replacements too busy and difficult to read.

The developers choose to conceal the amount of damage that your attacks do in combat, which I find quite interesting. It forces you to pay very close attention to cause and effect during battles. I found myself keeping mental notes about how many attacks it took to take out different enemies, depending on the sort of attack used.

There is still some balancing left to do, however. For instance: it takes two low-tier magic point restoration items to recoup the points lost by casting even a single spell, meaning that it usually makes little sense to do anything other than select a normal attack in battle.

The narrative needs some work as well. On the antagonist front, Sinara is a sadistic caricature who would work much better rewritten as an anti-villain. Meanwhile, Jagen’s heel-face-turn comes much too early and much too easily. For my money, it’d be much more effective to spend a chapter or two with him as he rises up through the ranks of the ridders before giving him a crisis of conscience over the whole affair.

Speaking of money: the developers are looking for funding to help them with improving and finishing the game. If you like, you can pitch in here. Either way, Demon’s Revenge is still early in development, so there is time for the developers to fix its problems and capitalize on its strong points.