Demon Gaze: Boss rush, solo style (1)

Let's have a nice little Boss Rush, fellow gamers! Whilst the boss fights in Demon Gaze are not wildly original and don't really revolutionize the exercise, they are still interesting enough to make me want to write about them. They present an gripping variety of challenges that call for different strategies, and they keep things interesting by offering various difficulty levels throughout the game: instead of getting steadily harder and harder, bosses go from tough-as-nails to piece-of-cake to tough-as-nails again and so on, in an endless wave of difficulty fluctuation. I hadn't had that much fun fighting bosses since Criminal Girls, and I'm lapping up every single fight, even the toughest ones. Especially the toughest ones.

Since I'm playing solo, it is pretty much mandatory to fight bosses with an open demon by my side—so you can expect a major focus on the demonic side of boss-killing strategy, so to speak. I'll skip the first fight with Comet, since she is basically a warm-up boss, and jump straight to the main courses. Bon appétit!

—Mars: Despite being only the first real boss of the game, fire demon Mars is quite a tough cookie. She has incredibly high attack, which put me in serious trouble given my weak level at this early point in the game, and I had to endure a solid amount of level-grinding to even stand a chance against her. Once I reached a decent level, beating her mostly boiled down to luck and good timing. With Comet healing me at the right moment and my attacks landing successfully, I finally managed to pummel her into submission after a couple of infructuous tries.

—Chronos: Earth demon Chronos is the polar opposite of Mars: while Mars is all about high attack, Chronos boasts sky-high defense and a vertiginous amount of HP. On the other hand, she is quite slow and she doesn't strike hard enough to require regular healing from Comet, so my winning strategy was to invoke Mars and to attack Chronos relentlessly while enduring her not-too-threatening blows and healing when necessary. This is actually a rather easy fight that provides a welcome respite after the red-hot struggle against Mars.

—Hermes: The first male demon of the roster ramped up the difficulty again. As the resident wind demon, he boasts high speed and agility that allow him to attack first, strike twice every turn and evade your blows with an irritating regularity. He is quite weak, both in terms of attack and defense, but has great accuracy and debuffs than reduce agility and evasion. The biggest risk during that fight is to see your blows go down the drain while Hermes and his seeds pummel you to death. The best way to deal with that slippery demon is to dispose of the seeds swiftly in order to land as many hits as possible on Hermes himself—the more powerful the hits, the better. After failing to beat him with both Comet and Chronos, I finally managed to take him down neatly with Mars by my side.

—The Mimic: Beating that boss is a matter of levels over strategy. Although he's available early on, the story requires him to be defeated only after Hermes is added to the roster, and his levels are in keeping with that timeline. I tried to tackle him before his time was due and failed miserably, but took him down without breaking a sweat after I captured Hermes. I teamed up with Mars to get rid of the Mimic's hindering veins (yes, veins) faster and took him down switftly and neatly.

—Neptune: Water demon Neptune is not much when it comes to attack and defense, but she has stellar healing abilities as well as a good range of status effect attacks. Still, she's significantly easier to beat than Hermes—that is, if you don't make the fatal mistake of fighting her with Mars by your side like I did at first. Since fire is weak against water, Neptune and her seeds can take Mars down in two turns—literally—while not suffering any sort of significant damage. For my second try, I teamed up with Hermes and things became much smoother, and it wasn't long before Neptune was added to my roster of demons.

—Astarte: My, this was a wake-up call boss if there ever was one. Astarte looked innocuous at first, with her sprite hardly bigger than a regular foe sprite and the absence of any minor foe to fight alongside her, but she was one nasty, hellish proposition. For one thing, you must have a demon by your side at all times, because Astarte has an attack that will ultimately kill you if there is no demon to intercept it. Astarte can also modify the party's formation, cast debuffs and status effect spells and hit rather hard as a whole—not to mention that she gets to move twice every turn and can land several blows with each attack. As though this were not enough, she has sky-high evasion as well as excellent healing abilities. In a nutshell, she's HARD. I needed no less than five tries to beat her, and managed to do so only by focusing heavily on healing. On top of having Neptune by my side, I stocked a couple of Full Healers that proved very useful when I was dangerously close to death and not sure Neptune could heal me in time and enough to keep going. It's also worth noting that Astarte is the first boss that forced me to pay close attention to the passive stats bonuses granted by demons and to choose very carefully whom I was taking into battle with me, as I quickly found out that I didn't even stand a chance without the attack and defense boosts provided by Mars and Chronos. After that, it was a matter of keeping an eye on my health while attacking relentlessly. Neptune did an amazing job at healing me and curing me of status effects when I needed it; and since she can also heal herself, she managed to maintain her HP at its fullest and to stand by my side throughout the whole fight. Even with this winning battle configuration, defeating Astarte was a long and arduous affair: it took me a good ten to fifteen minutes to eradicate her, which is much longer than the other boss fights—all that in order to defeat a minion that didn't even join my roster of demons. Wake-up call boss in all its glory, folks.

—Skull Lord: Strategy is crucial with this one. Although the Skull Lord cannot hold a candle to Astarte when it comes to sheer difficulty and nastiness, I found out the hard way that a bad start in this fight can smother any chance of winning it in the long run. Having a good stock of Dolls to endure attacks in your place as well as weapons with an anti-undead effect is highly recommended, as well as having Neptune by your side and a couple of Full Healers in your bag. Once the fight starts, it is vital to ignore the rows of minor foes and to concentrate on the Skull Lord in order to take it down as fast as possible. Left alive too long, the Skull Lord will generate rows upon rows of minions that will attack relentlessly and eat away the party's HP. My winning strategy was to use a powerful two-handed Lance of the Dead +10 found in Grimodar Castle on the Skull Lord, ditching a portion of my defense in the process, and to switch back to my usual one-handed weapon+shield set to get rid of the rest of the minions once their master was disposed of. With Neptune's diligent ministrations to keep me perked up, the second-hardest boss fight of Grimodar Castle was soon done with neatly and swiftly.

—Jupiter: For all her taunting and graphic death threats, Jupiter was by far the easiest boss in Grimodar Castle. The hardest part of the fight was actually to chase after her, first in the Treasury and then in the Clock Tower; once I had her cornered, she hardly opposed any resistance and yielded much faster than Astarte or even the Skull Lord. Did I mention that I managed to defeat her on my very first try? That's how much of a breather she is, and a most welcome one after the odiousness of her two predecessors. Jupiter has average stats except for her high accuracy, and her healing ability is so pitiful that it's hardly worth mentioning; as a result, I'm pretty confident that she could be taken down with any demon without too much hassle, although I didn't get the opportunity to tinker much with strategy against her. I teamed up with Neptune and the whole fight went quite smoothly; the only real issue I encountered was the complete depletion of the Demon Gauge at some point in the fight. That was the first time this ever happened, and since I was not closely monitoring the gauge, I have no clue about why or how it did happen. I remember being vaguely aware that Neptune was regularly using several moves in a row during that fight, so my best guess is that she simply emptied the gauge faster than it could refill. Anyway, enraged Neptune was kind enough to mostly abstain from hitting me and to maintain her ministrations to some extent, and I managed to wrap up the fight without too much hassle.

My boss run stops here for the time being. Next in line should be Venus, unless another minor boss stands in my way. We'll see! Grimodar Castle was quite the wake-up call, although I took up the gauntlet and pretty much own the place now. The atmosphere is slowly getting grittier and heavier as dungeons become darker, more enclosed and considerably bigger, and I expect other nasty difficulty spikes along the way. I have a foreboding feeling that I will be forced to fight the misnamed Lord Shark at some point and a growing hunch that Fran is a dragon in disguise and probably the exiled daughter of some Dragon King living in a faraway land. To be continued! Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!