Every first-person dungeon crawler I've had the chance of playing really does not mess around, and this game isn't an exception. Like in M&M and Wizardry, you get to choose the stats to start out with, and Strength and Wisdom are the main two I'd invest in to keep the main character HP and spells up. And trust me, these characters start out weak. The battles in the early part will take a while just to get rid of some enemies, sometimes I had to run. With a few levels, they can get better equipment and thus better survivability. And from then, the devil convincing and the devil summoning would then work, but I gotta be rationing them properly. Because nobody likes too many demons, so fusing the good ones to make even better ones is important. And then there's level requirements! More grinding! Ugh.
That's not even getting to the fact that statuses on your main characters can be very debilitating, yet for the demons themselves it's not as big a deal. Anything that prevents your movement is bad enough, but if Nakajima's hit with one he cannot summon or return any demons, and if it's Yumiko, you're not gonna be able to heal. Having only one place to restore statuses or resurrect fallen allies in the game is a huge problem, especially since you will get far from the beginning that you would LOVE seeing those warps to head back (at least until Yumiko gets Staruto spell). And then you have the ones who just simply hit hard and take lots of hits. Sure you only battle one species of enemy at a time in this game, but you could easily get more just immediately after them. No rest sometimes! Oh and the MAG currency is one I wanted to safeguard since it prevents demons from losing HP when walking through these maze-y corridors.
Ah yes, this being a dungeon crawler of course we've got to deal with mazes. What did you expect? Gotta have a guide handy to see where you need to go, look out for the traps and holes, find where the shops are (honestly these shops are so random), figure out hidden doorways, how to go through areas you can't see through, dealing with fixed encounters, tiles that disorient you. It's all here. Impressive amount of mechanics for a game on the Famicom, but it's like the others, HARD.
