Serment- Contract With a Devil is a visual novel and dungeon crawler hybrid with a dash of time management for good measure. We can choose to play as one of four different classes, each having their own look and personality. Your choices are between a Rogue, Warrior, Mage, and a Freelancer. It is a pretty big decision right off the bat, that will not only affect all of the dialogue and the way people interact with you but also determines your love interest. Whichever you end up picking, it starts off the same. You begin your adventure dead and hear a voice in the darkness offering to bring you back to life in exchange for paying it back in gold. That voice belongs to the devil, and you accept.
It is an ominous intro that quickly shatters your expectations when you awaken and find that the devil is a kind young girl named Lucifer. You’ll spend quite a bit of time in this visual novel segment before being let loose as you meet the equally friendly inhabitants of the demon world. There is no big threat or villain to the story; it is an entirely carefree and peaceful place. No one can die or be harmed here either, not even you, meaning losing a fight means nothing. Your only threat is scrounging up an ever-increasing payment of gold each weak, or the devil will return you to your previous state of death.
Once you clear the tutorial, you can freely travel around in the hub-world. There are various locations such as a Shop, a River to fish in, and Lucifier’s mansion in where you can upgrade your stats. Traveling anywhere will take a chunk of your time, more so the further away from your house it is. It is best to plan a route to the places you want to go as you may find yourself wasting an unnecessary amount of time if you travel all over the map in an inefficient manner. Be you in the middle of something or a few steps from completing a dungeon, as soon as that clock hits 7 PM you will be teleported back home.
There is no way to make money other than delving into a single dungeon found in the world and braving its depths. Your two main methods of making cash there is by simply beating the retirement funds out of any demon you encounter or finding treasure chests hidden about. In either case, you will be much more likely to strike it rich if you team up with some of the title’s characters you’ll meet throughout, instead of going in alone. Battles are balanced in a 3vs3 fashion, and while you can handle it alone, that will prove far more difficult. To gather up some allies, you simply go to the Summoning Site before heading into the dungeon. At times, some characters will be unavailable since they may have things to do, but that is rare, and there is no reason not to take everyone possible as everyone levels up that way.
You can have three characters active at any one time with the rest of them in reserve, in case someone gets downed. When they are in reserve, it is treated as if they actually fought in the battle, so their weapon skills and experience steadily increase as well. Each character has their own abilities and fighting style they are proficient in. If they are downed in combat, they still receive all of the usual XP gains as normal, and if everyone is downed nothing happens, you simply continue on your way. It is a very forgiving game, meant more for those that want a laid-back experience instead of your traditional hardcore affair.
Combat is pseudo turned based, with the first character filling up their yellow meter being able to make a move. It is based on your agility, and if you neglect that stat, you will find your foes always getting an attack in before you do. You may find an enemy able to make up to three moves before you manage to fill your meter even once, so it is a big deal all around for any type of character. Your choices in combat are either Attack, Skills, Food, or Focus. If you’ve ever played a JRPG before you know what the first two do and the third is essentially your item menu. Focus is a unique function here as it will use up your turn in exchange for restoring some mana, which even melee fighters use for their skills. Winning or losing a battle will restore all your health, but mana, on the other hand, will stay drained and eventually leave you unable to use your big attacks if not careful.
All of the demons and monsters you’ll face are cute, typically animal-like creatures. They get more challenging as you go down into lower floors, though they do match your current level to a certain degree, as to give you somewhat of a challenge. Most foes are easy, to the point where a single character can wipe out an enemy with one blow or even an entire squad of them before they can react if you have high agility. Bosses offer more of a challenge but are not found on every floor. These are unusual affairs in where more strategy than usual will be required as to deal with their attacks or abilities like constantly spawning in additional foes. The last boss fight was quite a pleasant surprise; she felt straight out of another game with how brutal she could be.
None of the bosses or quests are necessary; you can ignore them entirely if you find them too difficult. Your only objective is to collect enough gold to live another week. In that time, no events or quests will expire. You are free to explore and do things at your own leisure. Once you reach the sixth week, that will be the date you finally pay back your debt and no longer have to worry about it. Afterward, you are still allowed to delve into the dungeon and do things as normal without having to worry about your finances or how you spend your time since there is no longer a deadline. It was never that big of a challenge to gather the necessary gold up. The real danger came from the temptation of spending it instead of actually saving it up.
Everything uses gold, from upgrading each individual stat in Lucifer’s mansion, to crafting gear from the materials you’ve collected. Leveling up acts more like a multiplier instead of how it works in most other games. Your stats do not increase nor do you learn any new skills. In order to get better at fighting, you need cold hard cash to hand to the devil in exchange for power. The higher the stat, the more expensive it gets to increase. All of the main stats cap out at 50, yet the four additional magic resistances go to 60. It gets pricey fast, and that is without taking into account you need to do so for every character, lest they become near useless. To further your temptation to overspend, there is a single one time sale for a unique item, which will never be obtainable again over at the shop every week. In the exact same day your payment to the devil is due.
Skills are learned via items and will be removed as soon as you unequip them. It leads to some interesting situations in where you find some loot that far exceeds the stats of your current armor, yet you refuse to give up its unique ability, like restoring mana every turn. That also goes for offensive attacks. Even as a Mage, if you want to learn more magic, you need to equip something that contains it. Your total gear consists of your weapon, armor, and accessory. With only three things, you have to choose how to build your character carefully. The equipment you find in the dungeon is pretty decent and more than enough to easily get you through all eight floors. To get the top tier items however, you need to give out some cash and gather the materials to craft them. It isn’t an immediate process either; it will take a few days to craft something.
The dungeons themselves are not overly elaborate but do contain a few unique quirks to them. One such feature is the key system. Each key is bound to a floor, and there is never enough to open all of them. To get around this, every floor has a specific location to once again close every door and give you your keys back. It allows for some rather cool, yet not too complex dungeon puzzles. Later on, they also introduce colored orbs to temporarily remove a barrier blocking your progress. Once you remove the orb from the barrier, it will become active again. These orbs are usually found on floating staffs which require you to put in another orb before you can remove the one it currently holds. Given they also expect you to make use of the fact that you can teleport back to the entrance of the dungeon, discovering how to get through a floor has more to do with brainpower than fighting things.
A huge knock against this game is the lack of tile sets for the dungeon. From the start of the game to the very last boss fight, it will always look exactly the same. It wasn’t a looker to begin with and to see just those same endless and dull brick corridors all throughout is tiring. There are not even any unique landmarks. Minus the layout, all floors are carbon copies of one another graphically. The worst part is how poorly this game ran in the dungeons. Every step you take will see your framerate dip massively, making it feel clunky and messing up any sort of rhythm to your movement. Turning off the dungeon animation in the settings menu did nothing to alleviate this and testing it out on another computer still resulted in the same unstable performance.
The visual novel segments usually occur every seven days, when your payment is due. On the over-world, it will tell you if anything is going on in a location and you can choose to go there if you please. They appear to occur randomly and will always show up again if you are pressed for time so decide to skip out on it. There does seem to be a glitch when it comes to the Library area, however. Every day it says an event is going on, and while that is true, it is always the same exact one. Considering your time is limited, wasting so many hours to view the same scenario is not the best idea. There are other events there too, but since you never know if it is new or not, you are likely to ignore it completely.
Another way to spend your time while not adventuring is cooking. Food is important and takes the place of your traditional items for benefits such as restoring health or mana. They can also can provide a significant boost to your defense or stats for a brief moment. Cooking will take some time out of your day though, and the ingredients you need are not found in the dungeon so you will need to go shopping or fishing for them. Going to the Pub and buying some pricey meals is also an option for those that don’t find that appealing. The foods they offer are not great in comparison to what you could make, but by the end of the game, they sell something so potent that it entirely negates the entire purpose of cooking anything again.
Once you do reach day 42 and complete your contract, you are given incentives to replay it again by giving you options to start with one million gold and an object to reduce your travel time. Since each of the four playable characters has a different story, as well as dialogue and love interest, there is a lot left to see. Going through the entire dungeon again is not a tempting prospect, however. Luckily for us, we don’t even have to step into the dungeon if we start with all that gold. The entire reason we needed to go in there was to get cash, but since we are already filthy rich, we don’t have to do anything. We can skip past every day and get straight to all of the VN sections to unlock all of the gorgeous CG artwork. While we may have begun to question this monetary scheme during our first playthrough, it turns out that the devil’s capitalistic style of governance is pretty sweet, comrades.
In total, it took me 15 hours to see all that it had to offer, with the other three playthroughs being done via the manner above. It was quite the unique and laid-back experience without any world-ending threats, death, or conflicts of any kind. Playing a carefree game with a solid sense of humor was a very refreshing thing, and with features such as crafting, cooking, as well as dungeon diving to name a few, it always had something you want to do. It does feature homosexual romance that is handled in a sweet and adorable manner without much lewdness. While not something I’d call a must play for dungeon crawler fans, it still handles that and all of its other aspects quite well. Serment Contract With a Devil was a delightful experience that was more than the sum of its parts and is a great title for those that want to unwind.
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