Waifu dungeon crawling. This game is packed with content from gaining waifu allies, making connections with them, there's the main campaign which I feel tells a really good and different kind of story than what I'm used to seeing, theres a post-game campaign, and plenty of dungeons to explore and grind through. I'm not a dungeon crawler expert, but for what I experienced I had a good time with it, that story especially. My biggest complaint is level grinding felt like a massive chore. I never really found a true and reliable way to grind for levels so I went with whatever I could come up with which made it feel tedious and kept putting me to sleep

Not as good as the first game in terms of characters, story, and balancing especially when they used preset characters this time. But overall it's still worth playing since this one have a lot more content, better dungeon design, and some new combat features compared to the first game. Though playing the first one before would probably makes you enjoy the postgame content even more.

My review score is for the main story section of the game and not the post-story content. I played through the main story on the next-to-highest difficulty level. I started out with low expectations because I recently played Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls. Wow, Demon Gaze II is much better. In case you don't know what type of game this is: you go into dungeons first-person style and you move one square at a time, with the game automatically mapping dungeon tiles that you pass through. One of the main appeals of games like this is the actual mapping of dungeons (for those of us who used to do this on graph paper in the 80's and early 90's). The story is above-average and gives you a great reason to continue going into the various dungeons. It's well written, isn't full of plot holes, and is relatively interesting. It's light-hearted, but with moments of darkness here and there. It's reminiscent of the typical interesting anime story. It's not at all amazing or masterpiece-worthy, but the last few scenes (of the main story) might make you tear up. The various dungeons also have a good number of events and side-stories to keep your dungeon-crawling interesting. The combat is turn-based and group-based, where you chose commands for your five party members, and then they play out along with the enemy actions. During the main story, I always had enough options available to effectively progress through the fights. And when I died, I just needed to rethink my strategy instead of grinding levels or gear. Surprisingly, I never needed to grind for anything at the next-to-highest difficulty during the main story. Simply mapping the entirety of the dungeons and partaking in extra events was enough to get the gear and levels I needed. Unlike other DRPGs, you can't create your own characters. Instead, you recruit set characters as you progress through the game. The benefit to this is that each character has their own story that you can see by playing a touching minigame, which also unlocks abilities for that character. I should mention that the game has a few perverse elements, primarily some character portraits, enemy portraits, the touching minigame, and a few of the character side stories. There was enough character variety that I had no problems creating the party I wanted and changing it when needed to suit my strategy. Characters not in your party don't level up with you, but they level up relatively quickly after joining. Equipment variety is great. There's plenty of different weapons and armor. There's a basic upgrade system where you can upgrade the attack on weapons or defense on armor. Because of the equipment variety, you'll frequently get different pieces of equipment that are slightly different, but different enough for you to easily choose one over the other for your chosen character build. There's no obvious set of ultimate gear - just about anything works as long as it fits your strategy. The game is long. I took me about 55 hours to get through the main story (mapping the full dungeons along the way), and that's without grinding. It took me another 35 hours to get to the final boss of the post-game dungeon. The only issues I had with the game are: - Magic users are weak until late-game, primarily due to a lack of MP. By the time you get to end-game, you might decide that it's more cost effective to use physical damage dealers, as their skills do more damage than most spells and cost nothing. - The overall ascetic is too cartoony and bright for me. I prefer my DRPGs to be dark in tone, story, and atmosphere. I was able to easily get used to this since the rest of the game is great. - The primary post-game dungeon: It's a huge grind. I was all ready to get the best gear and level my characters until they got their ultimate skills, but I quickly realized that post game dungeon is much harder than the standard game. I changed the difficulty to the lowest setting it would allow (middle setting), but it was still harder than the standard game and required me to grind for gear at a few points. And there's hardly any post-game story. It's basically: go into this dungeon and kill the last boss. It took me 35 hours to get to the last boss, and I estimated it would take 5-10 more hours of grinding to be able to beat the last boss. After grinding for katanas and getting 80 of them that weren't as good as what I already had, I realized that it wasn't any fun and quit. But don't judge this game on it's post-story content. It's a great game that has something for all DRPG fans: Good story, good mechanics, lots of dungeons to explore, and grinding.