Demonschool Flunks on Making Style its Substance
The modern entries of Atlus' Persona series carry a certain renown among not just RPGs but Japanese games in general. The first three games hew closer to the old-school dungeon-crawling of the parent Shin Megami Tensei series (which I've explored recently), but Persona exploded in popularity after 2006's Persona 3 swapped the esoteric Demon Negotiation system for social life/dating sim mechanics. As entries like Persona 5 further broke into mainstream Western popular consciousness and audiences aged, certain questions started to come up more often in discussion. Most pertinently to today's topic, "Instead of high school, why not just make Persona with adults in college?"
Describing Necrosoft Games' Demonschool as simply "Persona with college-age characters" would be reductive to both, but it's a comparison the game clearly wishes to evoke. Whether it succeeds either at this or its own goals (whatever those be) across its 40-hour runtime is a more difficult question.
You primarily play as Faye, a spiky-haired, physically-inclined, all-loving-but-hot-headed protagonist in the familiar pattern of any number of shounen battle anime. Supposedly the final demon hunter in the world, she travels to the secluded Hemsk Island to stop the prophesied apocalypse. Across the last ten weeks of 1999, conveniently about a single university semester, Faye collects a cadre of companions to her cause and kicks a whole lot of people and demons in the face along the way.
Let's start positive: said kicking is the part of the game I most consistently enjoyed. Other than Faye, you take three additional members of the massive party into any given battle. Each character has their own unique combination of attack style, elemental attribute, and special move, grouped into larger categories. For example, brawler-types like Destin can push enemies around or knock down lines domino-style, while phaser-types like Namako move through those lines and pop out the other side, striking them all in turn. Learning swappable abilities to improve or modify their attributes costs school credits, of which you can earn up to three in any given skirmish via a grading system.
In general, I like to think of tactics games as falling along a spectrum. On one end are games like Into the Breach or Tactical Breach Wizards with heavy focus on positioning, field control, and maximizing value. I call this the "Chess Puzzle" style, as battles tend to present as a problem that can be solved with precise actions. The other end has games like XCOM: Enemy Unknown or Dungeons & Dragons, where battles are more about adapting to shifting situations and managing multiple resources over time. I call this the "Campaign" style, where often you must consider your long-term plans across both micro and macro scales. I suppose you could simplify this to just "tactics" vs "strategy".
Demonschool firmly lands on the Chess Puzzle end, which isn't my personal preference but isn't unappealing either. The objective is always the same: within a certain number of turns, defeat a certain number of enemies and get at least one party member to the final row. Missing turn par or losing one of your own squad takes one credit off your score at the end. Though some encounters can get pretty dicey, the difficulty is quite forgiving. The game never imposes a real-time clock, and you can reverse your moves as many times as you want before committing to a "turn". If necessary, restarting the entire battle is also quick and easy.
As is common in any game with a large enough party, I settled on a solid team about halfway in that could handle 90% of problems, only changing out members when absolutely necessary. This was partly to avoid having to shuffle around ability loadouts but mostly because I found certain characters unbearably annoying. I would never use Jem or Ocean unless the game absolutely forced me to.
Aesthetically, the game makes some clever plays. Modern Persona - especially the widely-idolized 5 - is known for striking visuals with hyper-stylized UI and animations. Demonschool visually patterns itself off the early Persona games, mixing isometric 3D environments with simplistic 2D sprites. It's a smart choice that lets the game play into low-poly PS1 nostalgia while maintaining the veneer of modern Persona via slick typography and screen transitions.
My absolute favorite effect is how all of a given turn's actions play out in sequence when it ends, which I also liked in Phantom Brigade. Any turn-based battle in a game is always undergoing some kind of time dilation, like how a big fight in D&D might take several hours at the table but in-fiction happens over a mere thirty seconds. Showing everything at once helps the player feel smart for orchestrating the falling row of dominoes and makes the party feel coordinated. With a smidge of editing, you could probably make some pretty neat .gifs of the battles.
It's outside of the demon kicking where Demonschool loses me. The cast and script start out charming enough, playing with broad archetypes and pleasantly casual dialogue. But as the game progressed, the party ballooned in size, and familiar archetypes of gags appeared more often, I felt a void growing within me. Something wasn't working.
I couldn't dial in on what was bothering me for most of my playtime. I was chuckling at the jokes, but I wasn't feeling any actual pathos from any of the characters. Calling it "twee" in the vein of something like I Was a Teenage Exocolonist didn't feel quite right. Nor was it "quippy", in that MCU-movie style I've come to dislike. When talking to friends I hesitantly compared the script to the comedic style of Yakuza/RGG substories; Demonschool certainly has a similar penchant for silly NPC names. I just couldn't place what I was feeling until I randomly checked the "shitposting" channel in one of my Discord servers. Everything clicked: the entire game is written like social media.
Some among you might stop me there, saying, "But Iro, you love Disco Elysium, and the text in that game was patterned off Twitter!" But Disco Elysium utilizes the form and pacing of social media with the goal of making the act of reading its text more engaging. Demonschool feels like just scrolling social media.
Let me elaborate. Everything in Demonschool feels designed to get people to share screenshots of it first and actually serve the plot, characters, or themes second. Each conversation feels like a bit that goes on for 2-6 posts before you scroll to the next, a never-ending series of casual "yes, and"-ing. They aren't zingers or quips necessarily, just silly responses that you might see in, say, a quote tweet. The characters seem like they have a rapport because they build on each other's jokes like this from the second they meet. It's all cute and charming enough that you politely chuckle and move on without thinking about it. Unfortunately, I started thinking about it.
The script has the same rhythm and tone as reading a bsky thread of screenshots of tumblr and twitter threads. It all feels tailor-made for the type of folks who will post screencaps of girls kissing captioned "GAY GAY GAY" or "Fuck cops!" or "Yeah, mutual aid!" or something equally tame. It's a game where you can Pet the Dog. From a certain point of view, that's quite clever design. Making the game a word-of-mouth generator has the potential to pay dividends in sales, and Demonschool appears to have done quite well for itself. But shitposts are inherently shallow and disposable, so Demonschool feels that way as well.
By the time Demonschool introduces a fourth lesbian party member, I felt little but exasperation. What are we even doing here? I have no reason to actually care about the party when their friendship quests are set up to go from, "I have never met you," to, "I love you and we are making out on the roof," in literally less than an in-game week. But it does mean there's easy access to screenshots of characters flirting that you can post on your timeline. Persona has romance paths, but not for every character, and even the datable prospects have other things going on in their social links that help deepen your understanding of their character over time. Reducing the long-term hangout-itude of social links to repetitive three-stage kiss-or-don't sequences does the format a disservice.
Like, you know what, sure, the prerequisites are technically there to describe Demonschool as a well-produced indie tactical RPG inspired by Persona starring adults with relationship mechanics and palatable progressive politics. But it doesn't cohere in any way deeper than ticking those check marks. The 1999 setting only causes dissonance when everyone talks like leftist millennials. The supposed university setting feels like lip-service when the academy is blatantly set up like a high school. A diverse 15-person party reduces any individual's permitted complexity to that of a three-line Twitter bio. There's nothing for me to grip.
Part of me asks, "Yes, and?" I did laugh, decently often. I enjoyed myself enough to finish the game. My standards are not so high that I could not derive some measure of entertainment from Demonschool; perhaps you will get more out of it than I. But I know that the second I'm done writing about it, the game is going to slide directly out of my brain, lost in the infinite scroll of the timeline. There's always another post.
---