“From the hate-scorched sky, with righteous anger in our hearts, we draw forth the sword that smites Evil! Thou art the innocent blade! DEMONBANE!”
Do you like mecha? Do you like horror? Do you LOVE Lovecraft? Well, hang on to your grimoires cuz Nitro+ and JAST are here to give you the greatest lovecraftian story put into letters this side of Brian Lumley. Or so the saying goes if you are to believe the marketing.
Describing the setting of Deus Machina Demonbane is a bit difficult. It is a mish-mash of different genres that are cobbled together, with very mixed results. The city of Arkham, where most of the action takes place, is a mixture of modern, with gothic, as well as industrial elements, plus a healthy dose of art deco, which is run by a plutocracy headed by the Hadou corporation. Things are looking prety grim for Arkahm, as the city is constantly under attack by a terrorist organization called The Black Lodge, who use dark magic in order to achieve their mysterious goals.
Enter Daijuji Kurou, an out of luck detective who just so happens to find himself in the midst of all, when one day he rescues a strange girl by the name of Al Azif from the clutches of the Black Lodge. He now finds himself in a life and death situation against a powerful foe whose ultimate goal is annihilation of the world with the help of dark gods of old.
Now, I know what you're thinking. This setup seems pretty cool right? We should have a competent and badass character who, although reluctant, is willing to use his vast knowledge and life experience in order to put an end to the evil machinations of the Black Lodge. Well, not exactly. See, you'd think that with a protagonist like this that you'll get to see lots of investigation and subterfuge, something that one can usually see during a game of the Call of Cthulhu RPG for instance, but unfortunately you would be wrong!
Part of the main problem with this novel is that it's all over the place. It really doesn't have a very strong sense of identity. You would think, for instance, that with a detective protagonist there would be a lot of investigating to do but nope. No such thing. Also if you though that Kurou is a hardboiled protagonist, think again. He's mostly just a bumbling fool that you wouldn't even trust to tie his own shoe laces, let alone save the world. He is a typical shonen protagonist: an idiot with a heart of gold that just never knows when to give up. He IS a hero though, and he does go to great lengths to protect his friends and beat the bad guys, but I just wish he were a bit different from most shonen protagonists.
I mentioned before the lack of general choerence and this flaw permeates every single aspect of the novel. On the one hand it has very brutal and horrifying moments, but then at the same time it plays like a sort of saturday morning super sentai show, complete with corny poses and phrases. I honestly don't know who the target audience for his novel even is. On the one hand it's too brutal for a younger audience, not to mention the H-scenes, but on the other hand at times it is so puerille that I was just sitting there shaking my head at the inanity of it all.
Look, I know this novel literally has the words "deus" and "machina" in the title, but the amount of asspulls this novel throws at you puts most shonen anime to shame. There is little to no tension in any action scene because you just know that the heroes will win by some miraculous power that the hero suddenly has awakened. It feels like very cheap writing. I mean I already KNOW that the heroes are going to win, but come on! At least make the stakes a bit higher. There are only a handful of scenes where I genuinely thought that something bad was going to happen to a character, but these moments are few and far between. And for a VN about mechas the fights are surprisingly lackluster.
Speaking of characters, I've already covered the MC, and quite frankly there's just not much more to say about him, so I'm going to cover the waifus next, since I know many of you are here for them and I wouldn't want to keep you waiting.
First of all we have Al Azif herself. Look, I know she looks like she's 12, but she's actually 1200 cuz she's actually a magical grimoire, the Necronomicon itself! Al Azif is best girl hands down, and the reason most people will read this novel for. She's a tsundere heavy on the tsun, so of course her and Kurou are going to be getting along all fine and dandy. She is knowledgeble and competent, and generally someone you can really depend on, even though she sometimes shows a childish side to her, especially when other girls are showing affection to Kurou. Her route is also probably considered to be the canonical one since it has the most epic ending and ties in most of the plot points. Very cool design, very cool character, easily the best thing about the entire novel.
Next up we have the heiress to the Hadou corporation, namely Ruri. She inherited a giant mecha from her grandfather, called Demonbane, the bane of, well, demons I guess. As one might expect Kurou and her also get up tangled together and he winds up being Demonbane's pilot, much to the chagrin of Ruri. She is also a tsundere like Al, but unlike Al she is a whiny princess who constantly gets angry when things don't go her way. I really hated her for the most part of the novel. She does come around during her own route, but overall she's my least favorite heroine, and I'm probably not the only one in that position.
Finally we have Leica, a busty nun who leads an church/orphanage and who also acts a bit like an onee-san towards Kurou. There is also a veil of mystery surrounding her true identity, but I won't say anything more so as not to spoil the story. It's pretty obvious though. Other than her hair style which makes her look like a chicken, I don't have anything bad to say about her. She makes a good contrast to the other two girls by being a very caring and affectionate person. Her route is also quite epic and almost as good as Al's.
The novel has a gigantic cast of characters so I won't spend any more time talking about them individually, but I'll just mention a few words about the main antagonist, Master Therion, the leader of the Black Lodge. I've read opinions online where people seem to really like this character, but personally I didn't find him all that interesting. He's just one of these typical pretty boy antagonists with a mysterious background a la Sephiroth. He's not a bad character necessarily, but I found some of the other villains more entertaining.
Speaking of which, if there is one aspect that this novel does well is that the deliniation between heroes and villains is very distinct. There's no deconstruction bullshit going on here. Kurou and Co. are truly heroic, while the villains are utterly despicable. This stark contrast between them is what gives each group its own identity. It's not that there aren't instances where a villain might have a change of heart and redeem himself, or that none of the villains have any qualities whatsoever, but it doesn't do this nonsense either where "AKSHUALLY the bad guys where the good guys all along, they were just misunderstood!". Over the years I've come to appreciate stories with distinct good vs evil, and Demonbane is one of the best examples in this regard.
Well, I've talked enough about the story and characters, now on to the audio visuals. First of all the visuals are, yet again, just like everything else in this VN, a jumbled mess, and I mean that in two ways. Look, I understand that a VN of this scope and with this many CG's (and there are TONS of them, trust me), you are going to need to hire multiple artists, and each and every one of them is going to have his/her own distinctive artstyle, but I though that this is what the art director's job is! He's supposed to overlook and make sure that everything gels together. But in Demonbane you can have characters that look like they were pulled straight out of a Key VN plastered over a background that looks like it belongs in some dystopian industrial horror anime. It's just jarring.
Another big issue with the art is that a lot of it is very muddled. See, I read Lovecraft. I know that he constantly speaks about eldritch horrors and cyclopean structures and othe indescribable garbage like that, but I honestly don't understand why I have to stare at the screen for a good couple of minutes looking at a CG of what is presumably a giant robot and not be able to make heads and tails of it. The mechas, and especially Demonbane itself, are extremely overdesigned to the point where in most scenes I don't even know if I'm looking at its arm or its leg or its torso or whatever. Heck I can't even tell if the robot is sitting or standing or flying or whatever. This VN has some of the most nauseating CG's I have ever seen in the medium, and not in a good way either. I understand that eldritch horrors are supposed to look weird, but I don't understand why mechas have to be so unfathomable too.
Not every aspect of the art is bad, though. Probably the best bunch are the background ones. Most look AWESOME! Arkham looks really dark and gritty, with its tall art deco skyscrapers bathed in the sunset, and there are some very nice outdoor shots as well, particularly those at sea. If the ships could look so good why couldn't the robots too?
The music on the other hand is amazing, and is easily the best part of the entire VN. There are plenty of good tunes to find here, from noire jazz, to creepy ambiance, to soaring riffs during the action sequences. I mentioned that the fight scenes are pretty bland due to the lack of tension and ass pulls, but when the main theme comes up during some fights even I cannot help but get excited and cheer the heroes on.
With the voice acting things get complicated. See, the JAST release is the PC version which is not exactly complete. It is missing several things such as animated sprites as well as about half the voice lines that the all-ages console version had. There exists a patch that will transform the PC version into the console version, otherwise you are stuck with still sprites and only partial voice-work. It didn't bother me too much, but I just wanted to throw that out in case someone might be interested.
If you do decide to use the patch you will be of course be forced to make due without the H-scenes. The H content here is fairly sparse, as this isn't a nukige, but what is there is pretty hot. There's a good variety of here for everyone to be satisfied, from lovey dovey vanilla all the way to tentacle raep. Another thing to mention here is that although the game is "uncensored", the guys over at Jast did quite a poor job with their redrawing of the genitals. They redrew over the entire gigantic mosaics and now poor Kurou's dick looks twice as large as his leg. Not to mention that sometimes his dick goes invisible with only a coating of sweat or cum or whatever that is to outline it. Very lackluster decensoring on the publisher's part.
This VN was released more than 20 years ago and as one might imagine there will be some issues getting this to run on modern operating systems. I started reading this on Linux, and after fiddling with all sorts of Lutris options and Wine prefixes I did manage to get it to run it stable, however I could not for the life of me manage to get the videos to work. Initially I thought that there were going to be lots of videos since they played a lot at the beginning, but it turned out that they were very frontloaded and afterwards they don't really appear anymore. As such I switched reading this over on my Windows 7 machine where I encountered no issues save for the fact that it would sometimes crash when I used the skip function to get past the already read text. Speaking of which if you use auto-read the program treats every dialogue line as though it had voice acting even if it wasnt' voiced, so it would pause for a longer time than needed. As such I forgoed the auto-read function and just clicked manually. It kinda sucks but that's to be expected with these old VN's.
One final thing I want to bring up before I go to the conclusion is that if this novel does one thing well is fanservice. By that I mean the Lovecraft fans will be well served here. Everything you ever read in Lovecraft stories is here: grimoires, eldritch horrors, black gods, dark magic, R'lyeh, mechas, lolis, you name it! errrmm.. well scratch that. At any rate this is pretty much a Mythos hoe down. If you can name one Cthulhu Mythos element then it is probably present here in one fashion or another, even if it's just mentioned in passing. Even Daijuji Kurou's name is basically the japanification of the name Titus Crow, a protagonist from Brian Lumley's works, one of many Lovecraft copy cats. If you want Cthulhu, you came to the right place! Just tone your expectations down if you're a purist, ok?
So what is the conclusion to all of this. I tried very hard to like this VN, I really did. Even though there are many things to like about it, there are also things that I just simply cannot overlook if I were to remain objective. I think that if you like the mecha and the Cthulhu Mythos you should give this a shot. Just temper down your expectations.
Verdict: with a sad heart I have cannot give this more than 3/5. Good (eh...) but not definitely not essential. Lovecraft enjoyers will probably have fun with this, but everyone else should probably look elsewhere. There are better Nitro+ titles out there.
Total read time: 45 hours and 46 minutes, 100% finished, measured with GOG Galaxy.
