#11 - Demon King Chronicle

11 Jun, 2025

This post will contain extremely light spoilers for Demon King Chronicle.

So I'll come clean and say that I didn't want to write this because I already played Demon King Chronicle a couple years ago, and think it's fantastic, and I already did that same thing with Nocturne Rebirth where I gassed it up (probably too much, but I do love it) after a replay. I sort of like posting about something totally brand new to me a little bit more, but... well, Demon King Chronicle is really good and a replay kept highlighting more and more little things I like about it.

Demon King Chronicle is an RPGMaker game from 2007 that later saw an English release in 2013 via Playism. Katatema is the doujin circle behind it. If that name doesn't ring any bells... well, remember Irisu Syndrome? .. You d-don't? Oh... okay...

Anyway, Katatema's behind a number of other titles. Irisu Syndrome is a fairly unique puzzle game--that's all I can say without giving it away--that also has an English translation available. They're also behind two extremely fun SHMUPs with puzzle elements available on Steam, Murasaki and Murasaki Tsurugi. If you had the misfortune of following me over on bsky while I was posting about it incessantly for a week or so, I'm sorry¹. They have some other games under their belt too on various platforms, so feel free to look them up.

Demon King Chronicle starts with a simple premise. You play as a girl named Camil, and an unidentified speaker asks that you give this story an ending, and asks that you carry on their Will to the end. And so, you arrive at a small cave network called the Nest, meet with a reasonable enough woman named Laylaria who offers you a vacant room, and after killing the bugs currently living inside, the game leaves to your own devices.

You start with no money. You have no items. You have no equipment. Immediately outside the Nest is a single rat which represents a serious threat to you. You can retreat back to the Nest to heal up and save, but for the start of the game, life is painful. There's no maps of any kind--the game world isn't that big in a sense, but when you're weak, the point A to point B traversal can be a bit stressful since there's no way to get half-way through an area and decide to somehow teleport out. There are fast travel methods, but they're shortcuts you have to unlock and they don't take you everywhere. Maps are full of on-screen symbol encounters that are oftentimes not easy to dodge, so even if you know how to get around, it's rarely a free journey.

A couple friends of mine have jokingly called Demon King Chronicle a survival horror game. I'd agree with that. It's a game where you slowly get stronger by making little trips into areas, maybe finding new good equipment from enemies, or just getting some experience and stuff to sell, or leveling up your current gear. Sometimes you overextend and die, and are forced to sigh a little as you reload your last save. Sometimes you may find a few more glass fragments that, back at the Nest, you can merge into an empty bottle that you can fill with more healing water, representing a permanent increase in your healing supplies. Camil doesn't know healing magic, and any enemy drops that do heal you tend to not really be any good for actual healing, and are usually better sold or equipped.

Incidentally, those same glass fragments that get merged into bottles? You're probably so desperate for gear early on you'll equip them just for the tiny bit of +ATK they give, which goes up even more if you level them up by fighting with them equipped. You see, there's a funny quirk with Demon King Chronicle. You have a weapon slot, an armor slot, and 3 all-purpose slots. What goes in the all-purpose slots? Well...

... everything. Every drop from enemies even if the drop itself is the concept of an emotion, or a piece of rat meat. Even other weapons and armor. And in fact, weapons/armor generally give different stats in your all-purpose slots compared to the weapon/armor slots. Some are quite good, and frequently, an "old" weapon or piece of armor you've ranked up by winning enough fights with it can still have a pretty long shelf life just by tossing it into an all-purpose slot. By the end of the game, it's not too far-fetched for your other main party member to be sporting multiple sets of armor in his all-purpose slots. I mentioned ranking your gear up--enemies are in infinite supply, so you can grind on easy fights if you feel like it, so you don't have to worry about "wasting" fights on equipment that won't be used. Of course, picking out good pieces of gear sooner means you'll need to worry about that less, but sometimes you just don't have the good things yet.

Demon King Chronicle's combat system does a lot to help the game shine. There's plenty of fighting to go along with the neat equipment system, and generally, most times you get to a new area it'll be a bit of an uphill struggle since enemies don't mess around. The game isn't knives out all the time, you will eventually get strong enough even if the start of an area feels miserable, but sometimes it can be rough.

Demon King Chronicle maps all have on-field symbol encounters. There are no random fights. Enemies generally have a sprite that indicates what type of enemy they are--so one that looks like a big fly is usually X type of enemy, and one that looks like a wolf is Y type of enemy within the same area. Others can be color-coded, with red enemy sprites usually representing tougher ones that won't respawn right away. When you get too close to an enemy, you get an effect similar to Earthbound where other enemies can join in, but you can still move too. You can't change maps to escape at that point though--you're just on a brief timer before the fight starts for real. It's your call whether to move away before other enemies join in, or, since the angle at which an enemy joins the fight is relative to your location, you can try to purposely maneuver to stack the enemies up.

If you look closely at the above screenshot, not only is one scorpion being targeted, but the one below it is flashing white--Camil's attack has just enough range to catch both. Positioning matters a lot!

Besides that, fights go by very fast. It's one of those games where holding/repeatedly hitting the confirm key speeds up animations, and Camil is generally a strong physical attacker who can just hit things in the face so there's not a ton of menu-ing around for skills and such. (Your other party member is quite good with offensive skills, although if you really want you can still build him to physically attack too which can be handy when exploring older areas for anything you missed.)

This might sound like there's a lot of worthless trash fights, but Demon King Chronicle is a game about resource conservation. Enemies hit hard, and many areas are designed to trip you up and force you into fights with multiple enemies, or worse, multiple enemies that come at you from multiple angles so you can't easily wipe them all out in a couple hits. Some of this can be mitigated through foreknowledge, but mistakes can happen.

Some areas even deliberately fake you out. It's only once you start to get sucked into a fight with one enemy that a bunch of previously hidden enemies will begin rocketing towards you, or otherwise previously slow moving enemies will become extremely aggressive the instant they can join in on a fight.

The energy and stamina potions you carry with you are your big lifelines while exploring. As much as I hate to make this kind of comparison--if you must, think of them as estus flasks. You use a potion up, it's gone for now, but at various ponds both at the Nest and at other infrequent rest points throughout the island you can refill them and even adjust the ratio of your HP/SP potions. The SP potions also deal with status ailments including death, so even if you're not using a lot of SP, they're still very useful.

I don't want to go into too many details about it because it's told in a really cool way, so I'll just touch on the storytelling briefly.

Demon King Chronicle is a game that likes to parcel out its story in little bits and pieces. Sometimes it'll give you a little vignette, a little nugget of info you didn't have before, and then it backs off to let you ponder that. Sometimes you find new info from random scraps of paper you find tucked away in the corner of some area of the island. Or maybe you checked in on one of the characters back in their room at the Nest and noticed new journal entries that give you insight on who that person really is, what their story is, and why they might be on the island at all. Maybe you found a new entry in the glossary back in your room at the Nest. Sometimes you might even find the Nest's inhabitants in various places throughout the island, and as a nice benefit to that, for whatever reason, they usually give you an extra glass fragment when you talk to them.

What even is the island? What's really the deal with the Demon King Chronicle? How much of this story is bleeding over into reality in its own ways? ... When you check the mirror in your room back at the Nest, just whose memories are you looking at?

And as much as I hate to say this, if you're the type of person who just really isn't interested in the story (come onnnn! it's good!! trust me!!) you're free to ignore all of that and just play it as a cool JRPG. Just know that I'll be mildly upset at you.

I think one of the big things that ties all this together is that despite combining a really good story uncovered bit by bit and gameplay that often has small loops of making exploratory trips where you'll rarely ever finish an area in one shot without retreating to heal up, save, and head back in--Demon King Chronicle is pretty short!

My replay clocked in just over 10 hours[^2], and that's with me not remembering any of the area layouts or where to find particular items. I did have some outside assistance (a polite shout-out to the individual who told me about something I can only call the rat house skip, which does get you a lovely weapon early on) but it's just a game with really good pacing. Even if you do need to grind, one of the most important things, ranking up equipment, is based on volume of fights and not their quality--though, obviously, fighting "real" enemies gives better EXP and drops that'll sell for more.

That said, that time is not counting some very interesting post-game content. If you do absolutely everything there is, you can still come in under 25 hours easily.

It's good! There's nothing else I can say without starting to give away any more cool details or showing off some of the things you'll find. If it sounds interesting at all, please, please give it a try. It's truly something special if you can stick out the admittedly harsh early game where too many rats equals death. I believe the Playism site no longer has it, but it's available over here on archive.org. Note that if you look at the zip files section, you'll want both the files there--there is a fan patch that fixes some bugs and comes with instructions on how to set it up. I would strongly suggest you use it.