VN Reading Club- Deus Machina, Demonbane (February)

[Kaguya]

Arkham city is a bustling hub of commerce and industry, however Arkham is also a center of eldrich lore: home to Miskatonic University, an institution of higher learning with one of the most complete libraries of arcane literature in the world. In the span of two generations the town was built up to the status of prestige it now commands, an expansion helmed by the Hadou Group, an industrial complex and family dynasty currently run by the young Hadou Ruri. She pursues the peace and prosperity of Arkham diligently, against the forces of darkness threatening to plunge the city, and the world, back into a second dark age. Among the most sinister threats to Arkham City is the evil Black Lodge syndicate. Led by the charismatic Master Therion, his nihilistic outlook shapes the group's destructive goals: with a circle of powerful sorcerers at his command, the potential for sowing chaos in the city is unmatched.

Former Miskatonic University Magic Academy student Daijuuji Kurou knows little of grimoires, but what he does know terrifies him - enough that he left his university life behind, and now practices a failing detective business in the shelter of an orphanage in a quiet corner of Arkham. But just when he thought his Academy past was buried, it catches up with him and pulls him back into the dark shadows of the occult: Hadou Ruri herself appears at his door with an offer he can't refuse. The only way to combat the Black Lodge's growing magical power is to find, and retrieve, a grimoire with the power to activate the mightiest Machina of all: Demonbane. The quest to find this forbidden tome will change Kurou's destiny... forever.

Robots, the Other, otaku humor and tons of chuuni magic battles. This was actually one of my very first VNs, which I played about 8 years ago. Hyped to re-read it. This month's winner is the Innocent Blade, the Smiter of Evil.

As Kosaki put it- Go go Demonbane! Let's get Master Therion to rip the very threads of space and time!

 

[FruitsPunchSamurai]

Good ol' demonbane. Probably one of my favorite Nitro+ Vns. 

Also Master Therion best girl 

To those that are reading it, have fun! 

[kyrt]

Should be interesting to re-read hell I even changed my avatar for this month. I've already read the game so I will probably skip re-reading all of it (maybe I can get one route in) simply due to this being a ridiculously busy month for me but I will try to participate in the discussions as they occur if nothing else.

[ChaosRaven]

Master Therion 1000 votes?!? What the Fu... 

Played this years ago. One of the Nitroplus VN's I actually liked, although the battles in the second half were a bit too much for me.

Tiberius is still one of the most frightening villains I've ever seen. The incarnation of pure evil in it's most sadistic and ruthless from. This guy gave me regular nightmares when I read the VN.

 

[Vorathiel]

Wait, VN with actuall villain? I was just wondering yesterday about existence of that at all... Okey, that persuade me. After Cyber Slayer I'm gonna put ef back on shelf, and read this with you all.

[Kosakyun]

Man. Master Therion's so powerful that he already rigged the poll.

Even democracy can't alter the universal truth of Therion being best girl!

Excited for this month's visual novel. It's a good read, at least from what I remember. I really need to finish Leila's route.

Edit:

Spoiler

Doctor West is still as stupid as ever and I love it.

 

[Kaguya]

23 hours ago, KosakiFag said:

Man. Master Therion's so powerful that he already rigged the poll.

Even democracy can't alter the universal truth of Therion being best girl!

Excited for this month's visual novel. It's a good read, at least from what I remember. I really need to finish Leila's route.

Edit:

  Hide contents

Doctor West is still as stupid as ever and I love it.

 

My giant robot is the strongest ever!

So, I'll be re-reading Al's route and maybe Ruri if I can bother enough. Good luck with Leila, from what I remember she has the worst one.

[Minoru]

There it is... Demonbane. I thought as much.

I'll try to keep up with you guys, gotta finish the KoiChoco routes first, though. I hope I'll manage to do it in time.

[Vorathiel]

So, I started. Opening scene and intruduction to setting was really great, but after that we have a punch to the face with badly rendered backgrounds... But oh well, hopefully I get acustomed to that.

But what hit me almost right fro mhe start the most is music. Is not your typical 'VN' type of melodies, is rather something jRPG'ish. Don't know how to explain that, but after playing this VN for 2 hours, right now I'm not longing to play it more. Right now my heart is crying for a replay of Final Fantasy 8, or 9. Or Maybe 10 for a first time. That's how hardly this music is similiar in 'vibe' to works of master Nobuo Uematsu. It's not nearly as good, but I recept this vibe as similiar.

[Kosakyun]

Comments:

Spoiler

I have to say, as much as I liked Demonbane in the past, a lot of things about it now feels kinda silly. It feels very similar to most shounen shows, from Kurou's background story to how he got convinced that he should fight against the Other that threatens to destroy everything, or the absolute Evil. He's the Hero of Justice, born to protect the women and children of the church. Literally. 

Well, what I really like about it are the action scenes anyway, and how everything builds up for the final showdown between Kurou and Master Therion. Gotta love it when those Deus Machina go and start fighting one another. Now if I can just put more time into reading it...

 

[Fred the Barber]

Got started today, so far two chapters in. Random thoughts, nothing really spoilerish:

- I really like the music. It's a pretty eclectic mix. I especially like that there's a little bit of both regular jazz and free jazz in it - I'm not used to hearing either in a VN soundtrack, and they're both good music and well-placed. The more conventional BGM is also quite good.

- Sprite art looks pretty unusual to me, but I'm gradually getting used to the style. Give me a few more hours and I'll probably be liking it a lot.

- I love the sense of humor, which I really didn't see coming (especially with Kaguya's "dark and gloomy" label for the February poll). Very minor spoilers just to illustrate:

Spoiler

- The repeat gag of Kurou running away with Al in his arms got me. I'm dearly hoping it keeps happening.

- Holy words of summoning = "Fuck it, let's do this!", and something similar a little earlier for the magic words of power, both got a decent chortle.

- Giant robots don't really do much for me, but theme-wise I'm really digging the Lovecraft vibe. I rather like the intertwined themes of indescribable horror and Others; they're rarely used outside Lovecraft and clearly derivative works (and even some stuff that borrows heavily from Lovecraft, like the Steampunk series, doesn't rely on those themes too heavily; Gahkthun, for instance, only really put that theme to use for a single chapter). Anyway, I hardly ever read anything in that vein, so it's a breath of fresh air for me.

- Initial projections show Al best girl, Ruri a close second, with Etheldreda an intriguing dark horse possibility (she's had maybe 20 seconds of stage time and three lines so far). Other characters in general are all kind of meh so far, including Kurou (who I'm frankly viewing more as comic relief than as a proper main character, at this point...).

 

On ‎2‎/‎11‎/‎2016 at 6:54 AM, KosakiFag said:

Comments:

  Hide contents

I have to say, as much as I liked Demonbane in the past, a lot of things about it now feels kinda silly. It feels very similar to most shounen shows, from Kurou's background story to how he got convinced that he should fight against the Other that threatens to destroy everything, or the absolute Evil. He's the Hero of Justice, born to protect the women and children of the church. Literally. 

Well, what I really like about it are the action scenes anyway, and how everything builds up for the final showdown between Kurou and Master Therion. Gotta love it when those Deus Machina go and start fighting one another. Now if I can just put more time into reading it...

 

Spoiler

It's more than a little cheesy, that's for sure, but at least so far it's pretty charming as well, so I'll forgive it.

 

[Kaguya]

Compared to when I first read it, Demonbane does look significantly worse now, yeah. 

Etheldreda is still as good as ever, and I can still enjoy Master Therion, so there's that. Reading through Kurou collecting the pages feels more like a chore than anything now, though. 

[Fred the Barber]

The page-collecting chapters are pretty fun for me, mostly because of character introductions and character development. Finished chapter 5:

Spoiler

OMG why is Elsa not on the best girl candidate list. There is a robot girl who speaks in a monotone and ends her sentences with "robo" - I need to get a write-in ballot for this poll, immediately.

Also, a hypothesis:

Spoiler

Leica being Metatron is going to be the most boring reveal ever, isn't it? I didn't even need all the Chapter 4 hints - just the body type similarity in Chapter 3 and the need for Leica to have some purpose in the grander conflict made it painfully obvious even for someone as dense as I. She's still boring.

This game is the VN equivalent of your friend who always says stupid shit with a sly grin on his face and a wink to show he knows exactly what he's saying. It's dumb, in the best possible way. I'm having a lot of fun reading it.

[Kaguya]

Because I didn't remember she existed, as well as because she's largely uninportant to the plot, as are all the girls who aren't on the list save one exception :/

Doctor West actually is pretty good, but the rest of the comedy doesn't do it for me anymore. We'll see after the fight with Master Therion (and I distinctly remember liking the bad ending, and not because of the futa-rape scene), but right now the VN is a 5 or so to me.

Could claw its way back to 6 or 7 easily enough, though. 

 

[Fred the Barber]

48 minutes ago, Kaguya said:

largely uninportant to the plot

 

This is unsurprising but nonetheless disappointing

[FinalChaos]

So it's a bit late but I around to Demonbane.   

I had the happy end of Al's route left so I finished it and now I'm starting Ruri's route.
This time around the charm certainly feels a bit lesser than the first time around. Even the first time around I felt bored of the page-collection by time we neared it's end.     

I liked the good end more than the happy end cause it felt like they pulled an Deux ex Machina  to make it happily-ever-after.
And I also have a question regarding the good end

Spoiler

 

In the part where it's revealed that Al was the grimoire that had traumatized Kurou, she had said to him that 'the time hasn't come yet' which would indicate that she knew about the whole time loop but during the whole vn she clearly didn't know about that. Wonder that works out.

Knowing the ending, I can't help but spot many inconsistencies like this ..........  well putting in time loops and paradoxes does generally result in a mess.

 

Master Therion is as awesome as ever though.   

[Fred the Barber]

I just finished Al's route as well. I got the good ending initially, but grabbed a guide to go back for the other two (though it was really unnecessary):

Spoiler

Bad ending:

This is probably my favorite "bad ending" I've yet seen in any VN (though I would've rather the futa rape scene had not been there at all). I'm always skeptical when people say a bad ending is worth reading (even more so after finishing G-Senjou, where I was told that as a general principle they were getter than the good ends, but only Shiratori's was any good, and they all paled in comparison to the good ends), but this one genuinely was good; certainly better than the happy ending, maybe even on par with the good ending. It took the horror and madness thing and delivered on it better than any previous scene in the VN - the choice was a nice touch.

Happy ending:

I didn't mind the way it turned out, but I didn't like the way it got there - having Al send Kurou away didn't feel right at all. Worth watching to show off just how much more of a badass Kurou had become - casually beating the stuffing out of West's latest "All For the Sake Of the Big Afro" (or whatever) robot without even Al's help.

Good ending:

Actually, yeah, this was my favorite, over the bad ending. The conclusion for Master Therion and Etheldreda was very satisfying, and I really enjoyed Nero/Ennea's role in this ending. That Al and Kurou becoming the only good gods in the universes, and that they basically went around kicking Nya's tail over and over again in various spacetimes, felt like a pretty solid ending.

How I'm feeling about the VN overall right now:

- I still think it's hilarious, when it's trying. The game's sense of humor is usually rather dumb, but in a charming way, and I'm a sucker for dumb-but-charming.

- I still really enjoy the horror/madness/Lovecraftian stuff. I'm pretty sure I'll have had a pretty good fix of it by the time I'm done with this game, and won't want any more of that for a few months, but for now I'm really getting into it.

- The music is really quite good; definitely more hit than miss. Favorite track, easily (it has a kind of Hiroki Kikuta vibe about it, maybe?):

Spoiler

 

 

 

- After getting used to it, the sprite art no longer looks weird to me, but the art in general still does seem a bit below my usual quality expectations. But to be fair, the game is kind of old, and art ages worse than everything else.

- The fight scenes are too damn long. While I am totally fine with and generally really enjoy stories whose primary motivator is physical conflict, I get bored fast when I have to watch the violence play out, when that happens the way this VN delivers it (although it's following the pretty standard formula seen in every infinite shounen series... which I find equally annoying in that context). Basically, I hate spending 30 minutes watching the protagonist get his butt kicked so we can then watch him pull out his ace and win in the last 5 seconds of the fight. Can we at least cut that down to, say, 2 minutes and 5 seconds? That'd really save me a lot of time.

- The plot is pretty disjointed and the pacing ain't great.

All in all, it's definitely fun, but it's not a fantastic VN. I probably won't be going out of my way to recommend it to anyone. But I don't regret reading it, and it certainly has its moments (like the latter half of Al's bad end).

 

Next up I'll be doing Ruri's route. I'm curious to see how the story changes on each route - I really have no clue what to expect. It seemed like a lot of what happened in Al's route was somewhat inevitable, but I can't imagine how that stuff could play out in a route focusing on either of the other two heroines, so I'm expecting something completely different. I guess I'll find out!

[Fred the Barber]

Finished Ruri's route's Good Ending and Happy Ending (will go back for the Bad Ending tomorrow, I guess). It was good to have some things straightened out, and the Happy Ending was sweet, but as I kind of expected after I finished Al's route, there was nothing really surprising here. Oh well.

Debating whether to even do Leica's route at this point... I expect very few surprises there, mostly just filling in a couple gaps. But I'll probably do it just so I can feel justified in marking this one as "Finished" on VNDB.

[FinalChaos]

So I was gonna do Ruri's route but then thought that if I keep Leica's as last I would probably stall it again so I went with Leica first.

So far it isn't bad but then again it falls short of Al's route. As Leica's backstory it is pretty to guess what it's like and so far it seems to be pretty much what I had guessed. The most interesting part till now would be the Tyrant's scenes. Don't know how it goes in Ruri's route but I did enjoy seeing a new side of Nero.  

  

[Fred the Barber]

Finished Ruri's Bad Ending and Leica's route, and with that the VN. Ruri's Bad Ending was simply unpleasant - not interesting, like Al's Bad Ending. I kind of expected that given where the ending diverged, but it was still kind of disappointing after how good Al's Bad Ending was.

Thoughts on Leica's route:

Spoiler

Like @FinalChaos, I also enjoyed seeing more of the Tyrant in Leica's route.

One very negative point: from somewhere around 80% through around 90% of the route, the translation went totally off the rails and became terrible. There were suddenly vastly more grammatical errors, more awkward English that looked like a very literal rendering of the Japanese, and actually worst of all, there were a ton of inconsistencies - some phrases that were repeated for emphasis many times, identically, were actually different during this streak. For instance: the "This is a temple cum throne room. ..." passage was mangled badly; the term "sorcerer", which had been used with great consistency elsewhere, was suddenly getting rendered as the much less impactful "magician"; various ability names suddenly changed. All in all a pretty big mess. It frankly looked like they just straight-up didn't edit that whole section.

One thing I really liked about Leica's route was that, while Al's route and Ruri's route didn't diverge much, Leica's actually diverged quite a lot, so it kept things interesting. There weren't any surprising revelations left, pretty much from the moment I finished Al's route, but the significantly different plot here made up for that.

I realized a few days ago the reason I wasn't all that attached to this VN: I frankly don't care for the characters that much. Almost all of them are flat and predictable. The only character I really looked forward to seeing get stage time was Ennea, and

Spoiler

she is so monstrously shafted in literally every route that I can't have a comfortable head canon where she finds even an iota of happiness. Seriously, even Master Therion and Etheldreda got a reasonably happy ending in one of Al's endings (her Happy Ending, probably?), but the writers couldn't be bothered to make things pan out for the Tyrant? Sigh.

 

[FinalChaos]

Finished Leica's route.

It was fine. Ryuuga was kinda interesting but it did feel that he could have been much better though. Leica herself though was pretty shallow as character even till the end of the route.

Spoiler

I was disappointed that there was so less of Master Therion, wasn't as fun without the best grill.
As for the translation being bad, it didn't feel too out of place. Maybe the quality dropped a little but wasn't too bad.

Putting in an branch at the end of route where Nya revives Therion would actually make for a good bad end, wonder why they didn't do it.

Next up is Ruri's which should be done faster as a lot is common with Al's route unlike Leica. 

    

[Kosakyun]

Good Lord. Coming back here in March just to say that I failed to finish it in February.

Laptop charger broke so I wasn't able to finish it.

Farthest I've gone was Chapter 15 in Leica's Route.

Spoiler

Nothing really new here. Nostalgia hits me, yes, but it isn't as amazing as when I read it the first time. I guess this is one of the things that just doesn't cut it when reading it for the second time, huh. Either way, reading it was still fun. Heck, I read it for the battles that happen between Demonbane and the other guys. Shit started happening when the Anticross finally came into the scene. I missed seeing that repulsive Claudius' face. God, I hate that kid. Anyway, I don't regret reading it, yeah. But I don't think it's supposed to be praised like it's the best thing in the world. What it does though is that it makes you more interested in the Mythos, although it might be because I can finally get the different references to it. 

Looking forward to finally finishing Leica's route, after a long time of stalling it. Can't wait to see whatever final battle Kurou will have in this route.

Also can't remember if I get to see more of the Tyrant in other routes, but oh well. I also want to know what grimoire the Nameless One came out of.

 

[Fred the Barber]

The Tyrant gets the most screen time in Al's route and Leica's route - hardly any in Ruri's route.

Spoiler

You know, this game needs a Tyrant route. I would play the shit out of that route.

 

[Kosakyun]

12 hours ago, Fred the Barber said:

The Tyrant gets the most screen time in Al's route and Leica's route - hardly any in Ruri's route.

  Reveal hidden contents

You know, this game needs a Tyrant route. I would play the shit out of that route.

 

Spoiler

Yeah. I kinda remember her being in her non-battle form in one of the routes, though I really wasn't sure if it was in Al's or Ruri's.

I'd play it too, honestly. Really interested in what goes through her mind, and what path Kurou would have to take to liberate the Tyrant from her cruel destiny in the world of Demonbane. How much does it take to be saved from the fate as the C Priestess without dying?

 

[Fred the Barber]

I looked back over my screenshots folder and found a few fond memories worth sharing:

Edit: manually added spoiler tags