June 11th, 2007 by Dynamo
Unrewarding
When a game focuses completely on destroying huge numbers of foes, you would expect the combat system to be fun, rich and challenging. In truth, it is quite disappointing. There isn't a lot of depth to it and it rarely rewards skillful play. Demons simply present little challenge to Inugami. The combo system can be picked up in a matter of minutes as it doesn't require much more than pressing Square four times followed by Triangle, with Circle thrown in now and again.
However, to the games credit, it is still quite enjoyable to dash across the enormous battlefields and picking off hundreds of enemies. Thankfully Demon Chaos includes Greater Demons which are much stronger than the demons that come at you in such great quantities. In fact, it is possibly only against a Greater Demon that Inugami may be in danger of dying, an event which very rarely occurs throughout any of the missions. One only wishes that there was depth in the system and that the Greater Demons were more common.
Blood Crystals
In most missions your main task is to destroy demons while helping out a human army simultaneously. The battlefields on which missions are played are usually enormous in size and while it may take a fair while for Inugami to traverse the levels, it takes the armies following Inugami noticeably longer. Large portions of the missions may revolve around Inugami waiting around while the soldiers crawl to his location, or Inugami constantly keeping the soldiers out of danger from being engaged in unnecessary battle which may thin out their numbers considerably. While that may sound repetitive, it is actually quite entertaining especially since most missions are short, lasting from five minutes to about half an hour.
Another one of your objectives is to destroy any Blood Crystals that you encounter. Blood Crystals are huge, crimson crystalline objects from which demons spawn. There are usually many crystals located in each mission, and while destroying them will decrease the amount of demons spawning, there are only a few which you must destroy to complete the mission.
Cleaning up after dead demons
As far as collectibles go, this game is lacking somewhat. There are 99 weapons which can be attained by killing demons, winning missions or breaking the crates locating around the battlefields. The weapons are quite varied and can affect the gameplay drastically by making Inugami move faster, attack more powerful, etc. You will soon find out that many weapons are worthless as using them causes Inugami's speed to be reduced to a crawl. So out of the 99 weapons you will perhaps use only a handful as you play through the Story.
Slain demons drop items that replenish Inugami's Soul Flames (health) and Spirit but they may also drop items that perform other tasks. One such is allowing Inugami to go into a frenzy wreaking havoc on a ton of enemies.
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