Revelations: The Demon Slayer

"A Revelation Before You Buy Revelations"

If you follow my reviews, you'll notice that I almost exclusively play the underdog games. Frankly, all the popular games are overrated. Looking at the reviews here, I'd say this game was rated too graciously

I bought this game some time back, about the time I finally bought a gameboy pocket. In fact, THIS was the reason I bought a pocket (and later rejoiced when I got a gbc) since the battle graphics are nearly indistinguishable on the old gameboy. On anything besides GBA or GBC, you'll be lucky to see anything.

A Pokemon or Final Fantasy clone?!

I was shocked to see this compared to the pseudo RPG and the most overrated RPG out there. Trust me, this is NOTHING like either. There's more story than Pokemon but it's far more shallow than Final Fantasy.

The story-line more or less follows a linear path. Roaming won't let you get anywhere in advance since there's always a Catch 22 that blocks your exploration.

The storyline is weak at best. It follows the done to death battle of good against evil, in the most Black and White way imaginable. Most of the monster/invention names were stolen straight from the Bible. Of course, there's nothing holy about this game except the plot!

The monster graphics are pretty horrible and the sound can get repetitive. Even if those little aspects and the plot were improved, the programmers couldn't mask one of the absolute WORST battle systems. THEY GIVE YOU THE OPTION TO SKIP GIVING INDIVIDUAL COMMANDS DURING BATTLE! This is a godsend considering that you have a large team that you have to select options for. The attacks are vanilla and the magics you can learn are horrid.

The level system used lets you select what stat to give the stat points to. This level of customization is fairly pointless considering that half the stats will have you scratching your head. You can't have more than 40 in any stat (unless you pump the stat up with an item after it's reached 40), but I've yet to find a maximum level and my characters are Lv128 apiece (HP increase each time and MP increases until it reaches a standard 255)

The human characters (which you must keep on the team) are downright puny compared to many of the monsters. They must be kept at the back of the group at all times to survive in the hard areas. This problem is depressing at best.

Each character can carry a limited amount of items. When the armor and weapons are added to this count, you have a very limited amount of items that you can hold at any given time. You'd expect this to cause serious problems, wouldn't? Too bad that almost all of the items are useless!

Secrets? It's got a few

The game doesn't really get good until you beat it. Then you get access to all sorts of extra monsters. Before then, there are just a few side-quests that mostly deal about ''piecing'' monsters together (Get it? =P).

The level system and secret monsters give it a fair amount of replay value, although it'll continue to be dull at best. Make no mistake, this game is more interesting than the monstrously dull cult classic, Dragon Warrior Monsters, but it's still not worth buying... And I mean it! Heck, even renting it seems a mistake!

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 12/27/02, Updated 12/27/02