Demon King Box (3DS)

Bargain hunters who routinely browsed the “Games on Sale” section of the 3DS eShop no doubt came to recognize Demon King Box. Frequently discounted and no doubt drawing some additional attention by having a scantily clad succubus front and center as the game icon, this strategy game likely entered many game collections simply because it was cheap and had appealing art. If those players ever got around to playing it though, they might start to see why the game felt it had to resort to such tactics to try and earn sales.

 

Demon King Box unfortunately has a very rough English translation, with almost every other dialogue box featuring some grammatical error or typo and even important menu options can feature big bold misspellings. Many of these are easy to figure out with situations like using the word “hug” when it meant “huge”, but even in the opening text crawl that tries to establish the story the game says “cattle” when it means “castle”. It’s not too hard to overlook small things like forgetting to put spaces between words sometimes, but the poor grammar really begins to hurt the experience as it can be hard to glean what characters even mean, especially since the game does have a comedic angle and its possible some jokes and wordplay were completely lost in translation. The story is thankfully not too important or complex, humans and demons having gone to war long ago until the Demon King was sealed away in a box. His army splinters apart as they return to their dark home and rule over their own little fiefdoms, but part of the Demon King’s essence remains within a blade. Unfortunately his forces lost faith in him, so the weapon ends up in the hands of a pathetic pig man named Poohdark. Once the Demon King Box reoopens though, Poohdark ends up the first conscript as the Demon King moves to recover his power and prepare for an attack on humanity.

 

The game never gets into a full on war against the humans, instead focusing on the Demon King’s efforts to rebuild his forces. While you will be recruiting demons and less moral types, it’s clear the war had bad people on both sides, the player encountering characters like the robot RM who is the last of a group of sentient robots exploited by humans who were tossed away after the conflict. Most of the characters you encounter are played for laughs, running jokes arising like everyone picking on Poohdark or RM frequently marking targets based on how conversations unfold, but it’s hard to get much out of it when the writing hits frequent snags thanks to the slapdash translation efforts. The game overall at least remains lighthearted if a little raunchy at times, but the player’s focus should certainly be on the strategy elements rather than the rough attempts to tell a story.

In Demon King Box, battles take place across a set of three lanes. The player and enemy will send their minions down the lanes, having no control over them once deployed and thus needing to make sure to send them out at the right time to do their work or serve as the right counter. The player can have up to five minion types set for use in a battle, but they all have different resource costs and each one has a different cooldown time that limits how quickly they can be deployed. The resource used to summon your minions gradually regenerates on its own but you will get a surge of it any time a minion kills an enemy troop, meaning you aren’t just going to spend all your time waiting for a number to slowly tick up. A battle thus consists mostly of watching the lanes for what the opposing side places in them, sending out soldiers to defend that lane, and finding little strategies that might increase the efficacy of your units.

 

For example, the archer unit is able to attack from a distance but is easily killed in close range conflict, so sending them out after you send out a warrior unit like Devil Pig or a Candy Slime helps them do their work safely. If the enemy forces are crowded together, you can send out an explosive Robot Bomb unit to deal heavy damage to them all at once, and some units are faster so you can send something like a speedy Cat Rogue to intercept the enemy’s bomb to blow it up before it reaches your own pack of minions. In a better game, the different capabilities of the many unit types you acquire over the course of the adventure could find plenty of strategic use, but being limited to only five unit types makes it hard to justify integrating any situational troops unless you come across a level that is practically designed to be countered by them. Instead, Demon King Box focuses pretty heavily on finding a batch of broadly effective minions and employing the same basic strategies pretty consistently. This is because despite being a strategy game, a lot of your success will depend less on the tactics you employ and how much food you’ve fed your troops.

 

When enemy units are defeated in battle, they have a chance of dropping some food, each different meal type providing a set amount of experience points. Between battles you can feed your units to make them more capable, elements like their speed, strength, health, and more all increasing provided you are able to feed them enough to reach the next level. While food can be used to instead create a few strong units as well, it’s easy enough to set aside the necessary ingredients for the minion research and then have your troops pound down the latest culinary haul, pumping up their power and making them drastically more capable once they’ve grown enough. Sometimes the only difference between a battle being impossible to win and it being practically a breeze will come down to the level of a certain unit type. The game contains a few massive units that fill two lanes as they slowly march, these great roadblocks perfect for stalling enemy advances but also pretty prone to the food balance issues as even in the postgame levels that nominally are meant to be much more difficult, having something like the durable Masked Guardian reach max level makes them a cinch to complete.

There are plenty of levels on the main story path that don’t demand much thought beyond the basic battle plan of properly placing characters in the lanes the enemy is filling up and making sure you back-up a fragile unit with the common sense defense. Unfortunately the level up system does make it harder to experiment with new troop types, so even though you get many neat looking minions with fun designs and weird effects, you’ll probably only have one slot you can afford to tinker with and even then it’s likely best to just focus on one decent unit so that you don’t have to feed a new minion up to the point of competency. There are some nifty and potentially useful effects like the Succubus being able to briefly prevent a foe from attacking and the Frost Mage slowing foes down, but it’s not too hard to find a basic effective strategy without needing to lean on intricate synergies or special techniques. There is one system that can at least nudge your team’s composition in a slightly new direction, that being the army leaders you gradually recruit. The leaders all have unique abilities they can use in battle to gain an edge, and with the food system used to upgrade them too, you can start to make some teams that are incredibly powerful. The slime queen Swet Hani has abilities that specifically bolster slime units, a fully upgraded Swet Hani able to make the slime’s ability to split into more units even more dangerous as they gain healing and power boosts. Most leaders have some buffing power like Poohdark increasing the strength of pig man units, but there are leader agnostic team compositions that are very effective and again show that the game is not very good at drawing out new strategies when such compositions aren’t really required for consistent success.

 

The different missions do come in two types: battles where you need to wipe out every enemy and battles where you need to defeat the enemy commander. You can lose a fight if your own commander falls, but the main difference between these really involves what your troops do when they reach the end of a lane. If a commander is there they’ll naturally attack them, but if it’s just about wiping out waves of enemies, instead the minion will disappear and you’ll get a refund on the resources you spent on them. This likely won’t impact battle planning much, but there are also achievements to unlock that provide rewards if you complete enough of them such as a special unit. The translation can make what these achievements require hard to parse, but at least these could force you out of the comfort zone of normal effective tactics if you want to get everything you can out of the game. Even if you need to replay some levels to earn more food at times, the game still probably won’t take you more than 5 hours to complete unless you’re a bit bullheaded about trying to make more complex strategies work. There are definitely times you will need to be a bit strategic, waiting a bit to summon the more costly characters instead of sending in waves of weaklings, but your influence can also feel a bit passive, especially if you get an early lead and can just ride the snowball effect of launching tons of units without much need to consider what your opposition is attempting. You need to stay active in your deployment, but you rarely need to figure out much besides the rare moment the other side whips out a surprising bit of synergy that can be a road block if you’re not strong enough to squash it.

THE VERDICT: There is some talent on display in Demon King Box’s character art, but elsewhere everything seems to come up short. The translation makes simple conversations a bit tough to understand and the battles seems to emphasize power over strategy. You will need to make sure you deploy your small band of minions with some degree of thought, but the difference between victory and defeat in the levels that actually put up a fight can often boil down to how much food they’ve scarfed down to earn their upgrades. Special unit abilities are often secondary to raw strength in importance and while you need to make a slightly varied team to cover some bases, Demon King Box is defined more by the time you’re tapping lanes to deploy troops with little thought rather than actually figuring out counter plays or seeking out unit synergies.

 

And so, I give Demon King Box for Nintendo 3DS…

A BAD rating. If the translation was handled a bit better than Demon King Box might do a better job of amusing the player with its character interactions, but it would hardly mask the issues found in the battle system. Having to select your available units before a battle means you’re going to likely emphasize broad flexibility over unique advantages, and the food system further pushes you into getting comfortable with utilizing the same band of minions and only integrating new troops when they seem a direct improvement to the previous ones. There is at least a tiny bit of room for a special unit to make a difference, a team with a Succubus is going to be more efficient than a team with just another plain attacker, but that special unit will still have to be fairly capable, well upgraded, and backed up by a good batch of more standard units or your team will too often crumble under the enemy assault. Rather than difficult fights encouraging trying new tactics, they seem to instead nudge you towards plainer play. The upgrade system was a well-intentioned addition but likely what harmed this game the most, the player encouraged to bulk up rather than learn the intricacies of how units function, although the game doesn’t always do the best job explaining what units do even when there are no translation issues. The fact some missions can come down to borderline mindless tapping kind of stands at odds with a strategy game’s appeal, and it’s not like you’re using an clever lineup to reach this point either.

 

There are certainly worse games that can sneak their way into 3DS digital libraries with a low price and pretty face, but Demon King Box is at least a bit interesting despite its problems. The tactical battle system, while flawed, has a rare moment or two where you do feel the pressure, and you do need to at least feel out a proper team to invest your upgrades in. Some of the systems like the three lane structure, commander abilities, and specific minion niches could have worked well in a proper strategy game, but the follow through on the good ideas often comes up short and other elements have to fill in for them like the upgrade system. For some people, even a bad game is fine to buy at a dollar or two though, but the good news is many other games go on sale for such a price as well, so while you may not regret if Demon King Box lures you in, there are better ways to spend even such a small amount of money.