One of the first games I played on my PlayStation Portable was a little strategy RPG (SRPG) called “Generation of Chaos.” I remember walking into my local mom-and-pop game store where a knowledgeable dude behind the counter pulled the game out and told me, “This series is hardly present in the US. If you like RPGs, you’ll love it.” I took his advice seriously, bought it, and then went home and played. I absolutely loved it, despite it being underdeveloped and unbalanced in so many ways. Generation of Chaos taught me many things about how to approach RPGs, chief of which being the importance of a hands-off approach to micromanagement and statbuilding.

Generation of Chaos was all about management, tucking away its simulation gameplay within 30 vs. 30 battles of armies of varying compositions. I would set up my little armies, give them a handful of orders, and off they went to battle in my name. For every minute I would spend attempting to theorycraft and thoughtfully configure my units, I would spend several more watching battles play out in real time.

Sohei Niikawa’s vision of a new SRPG connects with gameplay mechanics that are evergreen in the SRPG space, but with a massive catch. Take the familiar turn-based combat set on a grid, thoughtful unit management, and battles and twist them around the idea of sacrificing those units to defeat your opponents. Oh, and you do so from the perspective of a baby Devil masquerading as a black kitten in a cape who’s on the path of defeating God. All this is happening while there’s a Persona 3-esque race against the clock that limits how many actions you can take in a given chapter.

Thematically speaking, Demons’ Night Fever is bonkers and a breath of fresh air for someone who has fallen prey to the RPG habit of hoarding resources and grinding. The shock to the system that is literally sacrificing allies and casting them aside like literal pawns is undoing years of acquiring items and never using them. I thought that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (not a traditional RPG, I know) and its breakable weapon system was shocking. That is nothing in comparison to Demons’ Night Fever.

Demons’ Night Fever is all about unbridled evil. Giga Super Death, supposedly the most wicked Devil of all, was turned into a helpless kitten. As an act of revenge, Giga Super Death recruited a lonesome incel-ish game developer who hates the world (Killshiro Katanaka) to manage a peon acquisition system to take down God and his plans.

There are two main elements of Demons’ Night Fever: the familiar grid-based combat I mentioned above and the peon management simulation. The former can take place at any given time of my choosing, sending Killshiro to the battlefield with any peons he has captured thus far.

Like other SRPGs, the grid-based battles decide Killshiro’s progress towards demonic domination. I could freely move Killshiro around the field and make actions like attacking enemies and enacting “misdeeds” (Demons’ Night Fever’s version of spells). His peons, on the other hand, move on their own and live up to their name as being mindless peons under the control of the devil. Much of the corralling and controlling of the peons felt like I was assuming the role of the border collie. The peons would stupidly move in a direction (sometimes further away from the boss or enemy units), attack without care, and so forth. If they got too far away from the objective, I would swap Killshiro and the unit’s places with a quick button press. Doing so would consume some of my action points, but it helped accelerate battles.

The bread-and-butter (and most satisfying) approach to combat had Killshiro literally sacrifice friendly units, damaging any enemy within the explosion range. Or I could absorb their life force and regain health. It would bring down my available units in the short term, but I could summon more peons during my next turn…assuming I had more peons to summon. More on that last bit in a moment.

It took some considerable mental gymnastics to grasp the benefits of sacrificing my peons, as I had years of muscle memory of preserving my allies’ health as much as possible. The game warned me that allied peons that succumbed to enemies’ attacks were lost forever, thus encouraging me to sacrifice early and often. Still, it was a shift in how I was to approach managing uncontrollable units in real-time and using them wisely, as their explosive potential far surpassed Killshiro’s own combat prowess. My one real complaint about this mechanic is that the game doesn’t do the best job in explaining why some units do more damage than others when sacrificed – I had to learn the hard way after I had sacrificed several units only to find that they dealt 0 damage to the enemies I was trying to defeat.

On the peon management side, it felt like I was playing Persona 3 Portable in that I had a limited number of possible decisions over a set period of time. The upper right-hand corner reminded me of my deadline and how each one of my moves on the peon management screen worked against the clock. I could take a day (out of thirty in each chapter) to conduct other misdeeds and gain “perverse points” alongside permanent stats for my units. I could conduct “abductions” to grow my army of peons or enact “larceny” to acquire new items. And then…there’s Pillaging.

I’m not the biggest fan of the Pillaging mode, though. It feels too much like a sicko mode that adds too much stress in an already stressful gameplay loop that boils down to making thoughtful decisions against the clock. Pillaging is a condensed version of Demons’ Night Fever’s battles, albeit with a set number of turns. The number of turns can be set (from one to five), giving the player some agency in determining how many turns are needed to complete the battle and obtain a larger-than-usual rewards. In practice, the mode feels too risky for my liking. I can understand that Demons’ Night Fever is meant to be difficult and appealing to SRPG fans who want a good challenge, but the high-risk-high-reward that was Pillaging didn’t feel worth it.

I imagine that those who prefer more difficult SRPGs will love the potential difficulty spikes and strategic depth offered by Demons’ Night Fever. Some of the difficulty comes from weighing luck during the peon/item acquisition process, while other elements of the difficulty stem from navigating which actions being the most ideal given the limited amount of time during each chapter. The combat is pleasantly deep and links well with peon management, but having to be a sheep herder might not be the most appealing.

The battle between evil and good is broken apart and told through chapters, the earliest of which being framed around an elongated tutorial. It’s not surprising that the training wheels are kept on for as long as they are because Demons’ Night Fever has depth and nuances. Like any SRPG, combat mechanics and character management have complex intricacies that, if dropped all at once, produce information overload that are straight up overwhelming. Generation of Chaos is one of those bad examples, whereas Demons’ Night Fever drags it out over multiple battles. While I appreciate the ease at which Demons’ Night Fever I was able to grasp the core gameplay loop and mechanics, tying in tutorials with superfluous banter felt excessive. Killshiro and Giga Super Death would have back and forths about what to do, what buttons to press, and occasionally comment on whatever was on screen in a pseudo-fourth-wall-breaking manner. It bordered repetitious and left me wanting to fast-forward through the conversations just so I could get to the next event or battle. I’d rather Demons’ Night Fever focus on getting the player into making decisions without being bogged down by skippable content.

Demons’ Night Fever’s approach to showcasing the Devil’s perspective is novel. Far too many stories are binary in that they construct a good vs. evil arc, only for the “good guys” to come out on top after an arduous hero’s journey. I love the attempt at portraying Killshiro as a protagonist with a meaningful story to tell, but relating to him is difficult. Like much of Demons’ Night Fever, nothing is taken too seriously…but that persistent mockery and exaggerated satire of anime tropes is taken to an uncomfortable extreme. I’ll admit that I might not be the target audience for some of the memes, as I’m apparently an “unc” compared to younger Millennials…

The art style and menu designs are top-notch. The fonts, color schemes, and character designs have strong similarities to producer Sohei Niikawa’s past work on Disgaea. In the dialogue screens, characters’ designs are detailed and vibrant to the point of clearly separating from the equally colorful backgrounds. Characters are emotive throughout the story; rather than erring on reusable assets, each chapter is filled with novel designs that resonate with the over-the-top nature of the story that’s currently being told. I love it because it feels distinct from other anime-heavy JRPGs that overuse common archetypes and tropes. Here, the designs feel unique, even at the expense of them feeling somewhat obscene.

Demons’ Night Fever is a bold step in changing up the SRPG genre, largely in part thanks to the peon acquisition and sacrificial mechanics. The designs are vibrant and stark enough to turn some heads, but some of the humor might be too on-the-nose to be fully appreciated. Either way, it’s a devilishly good time that will whet the appetite of an SRPG player wanting something new.