Egrigori is a direct sequel to the first of the DepraviA series and features an entirely new heroine to take on the forces of hell that are once again rampaging on the human plane. Luckily, the story is hardly important, leaving us Westerners to freely jump straight into this entry without playing the first Japanese exclusive title, if we choose to do so. We start off our adventure as an insomniac angel named Selenia that finds herself in a seemingly abandoned church. As we venture further inside, her initial judgment of evil lingering in this building turns out to be very true and we are quickly forced to defend ourselves. Despite knowing nothing more than her name, it becomes all too clear this is a battle she has to fight or be swallowed up by the hellish identities roaming these halls.
It is one heck of an opening, even more so for those familiar with the first title and can see the massive improvements on the graphics, as well as the music. Its soundtrack which was one of its weakest flaws is now one of its strongest aspects. This is quite a fitting OST, reminiscent of the original Silent Hill. It makes use of loud industrial machinery and bone-crunching sounds to create an equally morbid & catchy tune you alternate between jamming to and clenching your gut. If you have heard the My Heaven track from Silent Hill, you have a good idea of what to expect here, alongside some more techno sounding tracks featured throughout. On the graphics front, everything from the character sprites to the backgrounds has had their quality greatly improved. They make better use of suspenseful atmosphere as well. In the original, you start off in the thick of it, with a city on fire and everyone within being massacred. With Egrigori, you start off with nothing that is out of the ordinary until you start to come across hung corpses, then eventually the fiends that made them, and finally stumble into something much worse as you finally make it out of the church.
Before starting the game you’ll have a choice of three difficulty modes. Easy for those that want a laid-back experience, Normal to cater to those that still want some form of challenge, and Hard for those experienced action platformer fans out there. You will not miss out on any content despite which you choose, though keep in mind that you can’t change it down the line. DepraviA plays much like the earlier linear Castlevania games with a good amount of Ghosts n Goblins mixed in. Our heroine starts off with a throwable sword as her basic attack and comes upon other weapons, either through the environment or by breaking open treasure chests. Each hit she takes will break off another piece of her armor. With two hits she will be completely naked and will die if struck once more unless you find further armor pieces to equip. If you play well enough, you may come upon a rare piece of bikini armor which transforms your character into a new outfit and grants you a much-improved rate of fire & damage with your equipped weapon. It also unlocks your weapon’s secondary ability that is called Magic in the UI. These new abilities can be used up to three times, granting useful effects like a floating mini-gun that will fire until it runs out of ammo, or a hail of arrows falling from the sky to smite your foes.
No matter the armor, there are some things that can slay you in a single hit. Mostly these are the environmental hazards such as lava seeping through the floor or trap spikes continually contracting and retracting. Your surroundings can be just as much of a danger to you as any monstrous creature you face. Being an angel, Selenia can temporarily fly, making any platforming or mistake you commit much more forgiving with that added air time. Depravia contains some RPG features to further aid the struggling player. Scattered around the levels or dropped from defeated enemies are souls that are used as currency. You can upgrade your damage, rate of fire, attack speed, or the amount you’re able to fly. Whether you end up completing or failing a stage, the souls are yours to keep and incentivize the player to keep trying. This makes the prospect of playing on any difficulty setting and even replaying it on a harder mode than you’d usually try be quite the tempting option.
The RPG aspects are for the most part optional. You can beat the entirety of the game without leveling up your damage or the like. What you will need is to invest some souls into your flying skill to be able to cross a certain section that allows you to travel into the later levels. It is physically impossible to get to the second half of the title otherwise. This is a minor cost, and even though I wasn’t going out of my way to collect souls, I found my character ended up with all of her skills maxed out by the end. There is no grinding required. Did that make the game easier? It sure did, but you can choose not to invest in more than flying. Did it negate the challenge? Nope, this is a significantly more difficult title than the original. This is not Ghosts N Goblins hard, but you’ll still find yourself occasionally holding your breath and cursing yourself when you miss a jump only to fly directly into an enemy soon after.
A large chunk of the challenge will be self-imposed due to every stage giving you a rating once you complete it. The ranks are D, C, B, A, and the best being S. It takes the number of hits you take, how many times you’ve died, and the overall time you took to complete it into account to give you a rating. Most importantly it takes your ace up the hole, the Obscenity ability into heavy consideration. It is a powerful skill for the player to use, one that transforms us into a devil and makes us temporarily invincible while buffing our attacks to boot. You will be able to lay waste to anything in your path if you take the game up on this ability, yet using it even once will drop your rating massively, to the point that an S rank becomes impossible for that run. There are five endings to see and which one you receive will be up to the total ranking you’ve earned from all the stages you’ve played. It is something I wouldn’t stress much over considering you can come back to replay levels at any time, even after receiving an ending. This is just something you may want to be aware of.
The last DepraviA game had you need to get pure S ranks all around to face the true final boss, yet this time around all you get is an additional sex scene. It does drop some lore to set-up the next game, but getting the best rank possible is much less rewarding nonetheless. Defeating the campaign with any rating will unlock two very neat things. First off is the Saint Cannon. It is a frankly overpowered weapon to help you blast your way through any levels that were giving you trouble and get a better score. This was also featured in the first title, and once more, retains the same flaw when replaying stages. The bosses at the end of the level stay dead after defeating them once. You will not have to deal with them on future occasions whenever you enter the level again, making getting an S rank that much easier, and mostly invalidating the need of the Saint Cannon. I’m not a fan that you are unable to face off against the bosses again as it leaves the entire stage feeling empty without them. If you spend the time to unlock every ending, you will unlock a Boss Rush mode, which while cool does not fix this issue.
To reel things back, let’s talk about the second thing you receive for beating the game once. The Zealot difficulty. This isn’t an option for us to select our first time around for good reason. Your enemies move much faster and take more damage, meanwhile it now only takes one hit for us to die. Further stacking the odds against us is that it removes the Saint Cannon and our ability to enter Obscenity mode for those desperate situations where we need to make use of the power of demons. It took me slightly over three hours to beat the game on Hard. I’m about five hours into Zealot and have been unable to finish it. Despite getting the stuffing beaten out of me, I’ve been really enjoying the intense challenge of Zealot and it has added greatly to the length of the title. With each of the stages having its own theme and some unique enemies to them, replaying all nine of the traditional levels was still a joy. There is one level that attempts to mix up the gameplay by turning it into a rail-shooter. It is necessary to complete and I can see it being an unwanted addition to those that don’t enjoy that genre. With no checkpoints throughout the long stretch of that stage and its moderately high difficulty, I imagine that section being a low-point for many.
Another low-point is the story itself. I’m legitimately unsure if it is just uninteresting or the bad English translation simply lost too much of its intricacies. The game data states that the developer used Google Translate, but I found it to be even more confusing to understand than many other games that do so. That includes the original DepraviA which has never been translated and I used a third-party program named ‘The Textractor’ to automatically convert its Japanese to English via Google Translate. Regardless, this is a mostly self-contained story. The only character that returns is Sariel who somehow made it back to earth, the archangel Michael is more of a cameo than anything, and Angelica the previous protagonist is nowhere to be seen. Don’t get me wrong, it is still serviceable and you can understand the gist of things with some effort, but do not expect an epic continuation of our last adventure or a gripping narrative to draw in new players. This is not the kind of genre one would usually come to for the plot, in any case. These are more about the journey itself i.e Ghosts N Goblins. I’m just content I can navigate the menus without a third-party solution and do not want to discourage devs to use this free method to bring their titles over to the West. Unless its a visual novel or text-heavy, in which case, just no >_>
That slightly off-topic rant aside, I bet quite a few of you are wondering “well, what about the hentai?” by now. That brings us to a pretty interesting and divisive part of this series in general. If you haven’t looked at the store page or garnered by a name like Depravia, this does not heavily feature your vanilla types of sex. Most of what is on offer here is extremely violent to the point of making Mortal Kombat fatalities look like they’re having a friendly debate. This is known as the Guro fetish. Urinating out of fear moments before you lose your strength and are thrown into a meat-processing machine. Having a metal pole stuck through your body and have your limbs cut off as your body violently twitches over an open flame while they roast you alive. And so much more. With the focus on pregnancy this time around there is more Vore content, but it is still mostly Guro. It is more extreme than the last title which was far from tame itself. These moments happen whenever you take the final hit and are defeated. That will cause the pixel animation to play out, and when you lose all lives or exit the level will receive a CG. There are a ton of animations and artwork to unlock. If Guro is your jam, then this aspect alone makes the title worth it.
You can unlock all the H content via the main menu to freely be able to view all of the death animations, CGs, and Endings without bothering to unlock them one by one. It is a much-appreciated option that I criticized the prior game for lacking, though I hardly suggest spoiling the game for yourself before you even start. This also unlocks the Boss Rush mode that would otherwise require you to get every ending or in other words playing through it entirely five times. Dying to every enemy to unlock its unique animations was also a massive grind last time. It is a huge quality of life improvement. On the flip side of that coin, if you do not wish to see the gore you can censor it and the game will blur all such content. Egrigori is a damned good game in its own right that I can see plenty of mainstream gamers enjoying if it wasn’t for the adult content, and while simply blurring it doesn’t negate that, it could ease some into this experience. It has smooth controls, good weapon variety, and a good number of abnormal enemies to use them on. This is just as much of an actual game as it is a hentai title.
As for the controls, you can use either your keyboard or a gamepad. I’ve tested both the Xbox One and PS4 controllers, both of which worked perfectly fine minus the fact you can’t pause the game with them. Egrigori is a challenging title, but one with fair difficulty. I’ve never found it to be cheap, leading to having your face clawed off by these ‘Saya no Uta’ level eldritch horrors typically being one’s own fault. It is an improvement in basically every regard over the prior DepraviA title and that was already a great experience. With Egrigori, it takes it just that bit further with smoother gameplay, better graphics and music, as well as including a whole slew of quality of life improvements. This is easily worth the purchase for fans of the genre or those that enjoy good body horror where the consequences for failure is high, and the price of using the very power you fight against to avoid it being even higher. It is simply put one of the best titles I’ve played on Dlsite over the years and can be fully enjoyed without playing any of the previous entries.
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