Demon's Bond RIP

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It looks like we are losing Demon's Bond. If you haven't yet played it it looks like you still can for a few more weeks and I'd recommend it, I liked it even better than Hakuouki in some ways.

It had a major problem in being marketed badly. It was sold as a pay-per-route romance game. The thing is it's not very romantic and you need to play all the routes to get the full story. What it does an excellent job of is showing two different parallel civil wars from all opposing sides in a way that you can see everyone's point, and also see that no one really has the full picture. The protagonist has to make political choices about what alliance to make, and none of them are really wrong but only because there's no real good answer.

(You also have to read the routes more or less in order for it to make sense, which is never stated anywhere. And it also had a terrible UI and no autoplay function and they never released the fandisk that had all the romance on it. So look, not perfect. But still great.)

I suppose it could come back as a freemium game, since those seem to make more money, but it's an even worse fit for that because it's so plot-heavy and you really need to read all the routes before you understand what is going on. And there's almost no fanservice, I think there's like one kiss and in most cases I ended up caring more about the warlord that Yukina was serving than the Demon bodyguard she was dating.

But ok I will stop complaining about SLBP finding new and creative ways to wring pearls from me, if this is what it takes for them to be profitable enough to keep going then fine.

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

OH NO I somehow didn't click that that was one of the Shall We Date games D:

[waterscroll]

Yeah :(

[alias_sqbr]

I wonder if Otomate have the rights to make their own PC version, since they seem to be slowly porting their other games. Probably not :(

[waterscroll]

It really would work much better as a PC game.

[scytale]

You make the game sound amazing! D: at it going away.

How long do the routes take to play?

I think if it comes back it may be as a Story Jar game (or whatever their omni-app is called). Since it seems like they're trying to consolidate into one app. But it seems like they already moved a lot of the titles they care about (presumably the more profitable ones?).

[waterscroll]

The routes are I think 13 chapters each. You'll need a guide to get the endings and I recommend getting both the sweet ending and the flashback ending. (The bad ending isn't that interesting in most cases, although it is in the last route.) But you could also just play through it once and then watch the other ending on youtube. There are 5 routes total and I strongly recommend doing them in order. In theory you could read a route in a day if you are a fast reader and have nothing else to do.

Maybe it'll come back on Story Jar, but that seems to be free-to-play, and it would be excruciating to get through Demon's Bond half a chapter at a time. I'd still do it though.