DemiKids: Light Version

"A very horrible Shin Megami Tensei game"

DemiKids is a spin-off of Atlus' popular series Shin Megami Tensei(SMT) A.K.A "MegaTen" which are games about recruiting Demons and having them fight for you. Well, DemiKids is no different but it tries to take the "Pokemon approach" by making it more "kiddie"... Which it fails miserably at.

<Story>
In DemiKids: Light Version you take control of a school boy named Jin who was "bestowed" the powers of a DemiKid. He even gets a "Demiloc" which stores/summons demons(aka Pokeball). Well anyway, the whole story is about some evil guy who is trying to take over the world of "Valhalla". As Jin, with the help of your fellow "Guide Demon", you must recruit other demons to help fight for you and stop this evil guy. Now, this game tries to be very story centric but is very horrible at it. None of the characters have any personality whatsoever! If there wasn't a portrait and name tag on the text boxes you wouldn't even be able to tell who is talking... seriously. The whole story is bland and uninspiring thanks to that and you will not even care for any of the characters.

<Graphics>
The sprites and areas are really bland, there is hardly any colour or anything amazing to look at. The opponent demon battle pictures are really cute however, too bad that was the only thing I enjoyed out of the game.

<Sound>
The music in this game... is just bleeps and bloops mainly. You only hear the same about 3-4 bland songs in the whole game over and over. The sound-effects are just as annoying. I had to keep the sound off most of the time, it gave me a headache.

<Game Play>
You basically walk around waiting for an encounter. The battles are fought in 1st person view. You have a menu and can choose to use any of your attacks, be it melee or magic/skill. I find this game way too hard though. The enemy demons can mop the floor with you even if they're "weak". The other thing is that you cannot level up your demons by fighting. The only way to make your demons stronger is by fusing, thus creating a different one, OR paying loads of money just to train them. I found this stupid because I could not keep the demons I liked because they where too weak later in the game and it made fighting pointless besides for recruiting. Training your demons was a pain because you had to pay a lot of money AND go out and fight for a while for that demon to be trained, kind of defeats the purpose. Your "Guide Demon" can't even be leveled or trained, you need to find a relic to fuse him with... so, for several hours of the game you will have a dead weight in your party. The whole game is just very tedious to play.

<Conclusion>
I seriously do not recommend this game even if you are a SMT fan. If you have played SMT:Nocturne and was looking forward to more SMT games this is NOT one to play. If you like Pokemon, don't play this either. Pokemon is way more fun than this. You will be seriously disappointed if you play this game and wonder why you even bothered.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 08/28/06