Curate of Curiosities

So far, I have showcased three of The D's games in their entirety, as well as two demos. We've gone from a game that earned him understandable mockery on one of the Web's most infamous forums, to two games that languished in obscurity, to the two Skylight Freerange games that put him in the spotlight once again, even if very few of those that took notice of them were aware of his prior history.

Frankly, I'm amazed that he's managed to maintain a game development career for this long. I'm also amazed that, although none of his games so far can be called good, there has been slow and steady improvement in each of them.

In 2018, in honor of the 10th anniversary of The Demon Rush, his first game, he released a game on PS4 and Vita. Because getting mocked on the Something Awful forums is definitely something to commemorate!

The game's called Dragooned. Quite a weird title, that. I wonder what it could mean?

Forced into submission or compliance especially by violent measures (Merriam-Webster)

Man, he's really getting desperate.

It's some kind of Smash Bros. style platform brawler. Because since The D has done such an amazing job with turn-based combat in his previous games, he decided to try his hand at real-time combat.

I remember when I first saw footage of the game on YouTube, featuring some of the most awkward platforming levels I thought "isn't this by the guy behind that Skylight Whatever game? Why does this one character look like a Charizard?" and then, of course "wow, this looks like an absolute pain to play."

If you were expecting me to actually play this game for myself, you're out of luck. Not only does it (specifically the Vita version) not emulate past the main menu, but whenever I try, the whole laptop locks up and I have to restart it.

It's main gimmick is that it features characters from all of The D's game's so far. Not only does this include all of their playable characters, but also some villains and major NPCs. That's right, if you ever wanted to, say, pit Cherry Venus against that one man-kaiju thing from Skylight or that guy from the thumbnail of Skylight Freerange 2's trailer, then this is the game for you.

Here's the rundown of the gameplay: there are four different game modes, not counting the tutorial: Endless Dungeon, the "main" game mode, where you awkwardly run and jump through randomly generated platform levels and occasionally duel with one of the other playable characters, Skirmish, where you have a single battle with up to three opponents, just like in Smash Bros., Onslaught, where you fight hordes of increasingly annoying enemies, all of which are from The D's previous games, and Challenges, which is just like Smash Bros.' event mode. Speaking of, most of the challenges revolve around a particular playable character, and are named after one of their lines from their source games. Why on earth would you actually call attention to your so-called writing skill?

There are a total of 40 playable characters in Dragooned, and according to The D's website, he considered adding several more, such as Steve, the Enforcer, or Dean Lea. First of all, Steve wasn't all that remarkable in terms of a boss fight, but given his role in the game's setting, it would be understandable why The D considered him. But what would his special move be, trying to merge with the terrain and exploding? The Enforcer (remember, that metal ninja guy?) was a bit of a jobber, only posing a very slight challenge when disguising himself as his boss, only for him to die afterwards, and then nobody seems to care once the ruse is revealed. As for Dean Lea, not only do we never get to face him in combat in his origin game, but all he did there was give inflammatory speeches and be annoying, how does this translate to a fighting game?

This game made me notice something: I haven't actually finished The Demon Rush!

Let's introduce our last party member, shall we?

• Pound Falsch: Cook's son, and an officer of his demon-busting army. A dedicated mage in gameplay, even though he wields two swords.

Where we last left off, the game was doing the Chrono Trigger thing where you can go around the world doing sidequests connected to each of the party members.

First order of business, settle our score with the Sky Corps for wrongly trying to arrest us.

Our superior is a cyborg working for the demons. I'll give him credit, the cyborg thing was unexpected.

By the way, most of the bosses in this part of the game are nothing special. They tend to one-shot or nearly one-shot the party members, so it's best to bring plenty of revival items.

Since we didn't properly deal with the necromancers last time, we're going back to Crescence to deal with them properly.

Now, I brought up before that the necromancers seek to call forth the Destructor to stop the demon invasion by destroying the Absolute Siphon...boy, that's a lot of background terms. Here's where we find out why they did so: Steve riled the public against them because he was afraid of their powers. I reiterate, one of the Legend Vipers, the god-like rulers of the Mittu System, was afraid of a bunch of guys in cloaks. Yet at the same time, he was able to seal away the Destructor that they built out of the souls of everyone in Crescence.

I'm not sure who to root for here. Sure, as established, Steve is a moron who's responsible for the current state of the Necromancers, but at the same time, don't forget that they helped to bring about an invasion of demons so that they could stop it and look like heroes.

After we beat him, we head to the abandoned city of Abaddon to pick up Jimmy's ultimate weapon and a Light Ball.

Well, maybe your daughter shouldn't have zombified a populated town, and she might still be here!

Back to the pyramid for more trauma monsters and a Dark Ball.

Next up is the Charizard village in the cardboard mountains. The villagers basically call Pound's mother a whore for running off with Cook, but after some convincing, entrust him with the sacred treasure of the Charizards.

Oh, there's also this dungeon near the mountains with another killbot and the best armor in the game.

Then we have this massive store of siphons, in the basement of Monarge Tower. I'm not sure if any of them belonged to Steve, though.

No actual boss here, just a whole bunch of mages.

Next stop's the Demon Cave, right next door to the final dungeon.

So this is the real Kent Buckle that was mentioned all the way back at the beginning. I guess I can see the resemblance.

With that, all we have left to do in terms of sidequests is the Destructor. While we have both of the orbs needed to access its lair, defeating it, or even reaching it, is a different question. Mount Vorpal, the dungeon where it resides, is a narrow hallway where you'll be forced into encounters with two monsters at once that you can't run away from. In normal circumstances, this would merely be annoying, but these monsters have high attack, high defense, high health, and elemental attacks that one-shot the party.

However, there's another, similar dungeon on planet Thormia--Nethereal Cave. It seems you're meant to go through here before you challenge the Destructor.

The monsters in both of these bonus dungeons are the strongest normal enemies in the game, and are themed after the four elements--Bad Pupils for fire, Icemen for water, Windmills for wind, and Teras (above) for earth. Mercifully, you only encounter one of these monsters at a time in Nethereal Cave, but not only can you still not run away from them, but they can still demolish you with their powerful elemental attacks.

However, there's a secret to these monsters. Any party member equipped with a knuckle weapon can steal from enemies in battle. While most enemies have unremarkable items to steal, these enemies hold bandanas that confer immunity to their respective elements. So, with enough patience, you can obtain a full set of elemental bandanas for each of your active party members. You can bet that that's exactly what I did.

And it's a good thing I did, because there's a boss at the end that no one mentions.

It has only three attacks, a regular physical attack with hits Alberto for only 1 damage, even when he's not defending, a self heal skill, which it only uses around half health, and Heaven Collapse, which not only lags the game a bit, but does an immense amount of wind-elemental damage, that wiped out the party the first time I faced it. But with the proper elemental bandanas equipped, the Hellspawn is quite literally incapable of killing the party.

The Destructor is a bit harder. On top of its elemental nuke (earth-elemental this time) it has an attack which inflicts random statuses, which did catch me off guard seeing as very few enemies in the game make use of status effects, and its physical attack can actually deal noticeable damage to Alberto, to say nothing of the other two party members. Not even turtling and activating an Extreme can help much on my first few attempts. I had to leave the dungeon to stock up on status curing items, then fight my way through the dungeon again, gaining more stats on the way.

To recap, with the exception of this boss, there were precisely two instances where I had to actively grind for stats: Jimmy and Brooks facing the necromancers while storming Crescence and Tara's duel with Fleming.

And with that, we have in our possession the Destructor's core, which we can use to blow up this Absolute Siphon. But here's the thing: the way to form the Absolute Siphon is by using the souls of all three Legend Vipers. Meaning doing so will end up killing all three of them. Ignoring the logic of how a creature made of the souls of a bunch of seemingly ordinary humans can destroy the souls of three gods, given the way they've been acting, I don't think that very many people will miss them.

All that's left is to storm the demons' stronghold and bring the fight to the Possessor.

Oh it's you guys again. Now, you may think that the public will see you as heroes, but the mutilated corpse on the wall over there would say otherwise.

First phase: you fight Thormia's dragon form again. He's probably easier than last time, since we now have element-blocking gear, but his Legend Shield can be annoying.

Then Diamo shows up all of a sudden and gnaws Thormia's head off. And now that we finally see her in the flesh, I can tell you right now that an oval with horns doesn't really look like final boss material.

With that, she's two thirds of the way to ultimate power. Oh wait, she's somehow already nicked Steve's soul from afar! Now she's all the way there! Why is this game so intent on handing the villains an unearned advantage whenever it's convenient?

This second battle has every single member of our party, even the benchwarmers, take part. Which may seem like an interesting idea, but it's quite likely that most of your party members will be underleveled, and die in short order. On my attempt, Knight got downed before he even got his first turn in. But that aside, she's pretty easy, especially after you deal with the demons and ghosts supporting her.

But it's too late, after defeating her, the Absolute Siphon forms within her, in an absolute mess of particle effects. She boasts about her new power, resulting in perhaps the best line in the whole game, coming from Alberto:

"Hell no! Our souls are damn strong! You and your Absolute Siphon can go eat a dick!"

She drags us to a place that looks a lot like the Devil's Playground, and the final battle begins.

Diamo, not wanting to be outdone by Thormia, has an AoE elemental attack that's even louder than his. But once again, we have the equipment to shrug them off. She only has two other attacks, a basic physical attack, which she only targets Alberto with for 1 damage, and one that poisons the party, which Alberto has a skill to cure. So this is the ultimate power that we've been fighting tooth and nail to stop the bad guys from obtaining? How embarassing. I know that our quest has been utterly pointless, since the villains managed to make it this far to begin with, but now I feel like their evil plan has shown itself to be just as pointless, the "unimaginable power" that Absolute Siphon supposedly imparts can be easily foiled by some guy in a tank top and fancy bandana.

And so it is done. The Possessor is defeated, and the Absolute Siphon is right there for us to annihilate with our Destructor Core...or rather, for Cook to walk right into and gain its power! Did you really think The D wouldn't leave you with one last stupefying plot twist? But no matter, we can just use the Core to...oh wait, Jimmy got knocked on his ass before he could use it. So what was the point of us stealing all that element-blocking equipment and grinding experience just so we could have a chance of claiming it!? And just to add insult to injury, he eats the soul-splitting sword that we picked up like ten hours ago.

So what will be the first thing Cook does, now that he's all-powerful? If you guessed "fly off into space, announce that he's going to murder God, and then explode," then you'd be right. But then again, I'm not sure how you could guess what comes next when it comes to this game.

Also in the next scene, we deal with DEST's leader for good, but it really doesn't matter.

So like I was saying, this whole game has been pointless. We go through hell to stop the villains from getting ahold of this Absolute Siphon, only to make it easier for everything needed to form it to gather in one place. Then one of our party members bonds himself to it, then flies away before anything can be done with it, safely disposing of both of them for good.

So that was The Demon Rush. But in the decade since that game came out, The D has been so focused on this Skylight saga, that it seemed that he had completely gotten that out of his system, aside from the odd reference or crossover game. So that's the last we've seen of that game, right? Right?

Evidently not.

The Demon Rush: Legends Corrupt was first released for the Playstation 4 on June 2, 2020, with a Vita version coming out a few weeks later. In a first for The D, it was released on Steam on January 29, 2021.

Notice how the main menu above has a "Story Modes" option, as in, more than one? And below that there are Adventure Modes, Action Modes, and Strategy Modes?

That's right, it looks like The D has decided to transplant the iconic characters of The Demon Rush into new gameplay genres! We have, just to name a few, a prison life sim, a heist mode, a naval combat mode, and a grand strategy mode. For the sake of my sanity, I'll stick to the game's primary story mode.

The good news is, plot-wise, the game is incredibly faithful to the original game. The bad news is, well, that, but also that they added even more exposition vomit, now with fully cinematic cutscenes like in The D's recent games. And a couple of them even have full frontal nudity! You can only imagine how I felt seeing Cook's dingaling in 3D. That, and in the flashback where Knight injures Cherry, we actually get to see her breast get sliced open. Lovely.

The combat's been entirely reworked too. Emboldened by his experiment with real time combat with Dragooned, it seems he decided to make this game a full-on action RPG. Plus side: the party is no longer at a constant risk of dying in two hits like in the original game! But now, everyone moves like they're on cocaine, and it's impossible to tell whether or not you're hitting an enemy half the time. Especially when you take into account the fact that using certain skills can result in various effects being activated, which can hinder you as much as the enemies.

Another thing, the way you gain stats has been reworked from allocating bonus points in the menu to the Soul Triad option, which is basically a skill tree with some similarities to Final Fantasy X's sphere grid.

Area layouts seem to be a 1 to 1 recreation of their original counterparts, evidently without considering their ease of navigation in 3D. Remember the Devil's Playground, the maze of bland gray corridors? Now that we're in 3D and every part of it looks the same, it's now next to impossible to navigate! Not to mention that, like in Skylight 1, battles take place in the same areas that you navigate, with no way to escape them, so to accomodate this, many of the game's dungeons consist of overly spacious corridors.

Since the world map in the original game was basically a formality, Legends Corrupt's world map is a glorified menu rather than a free-roaming environment.

Although the basic plot is an exact copy for the most part, there are a number of changes made not only to the dialogue, but also with regard to gameplay progression.

In the original game, if Tara loses her duel with Fleming at the Thalassa Labs, she dies for good. This is no longer the case here, you're just forced back to the main menu and forced to retry. She's a lot easier to deal with, but can still clock you if you're not careful, especially if you've been relying on your computer-controlled allies the whole game.

Speaking of Tara, there's a whole bunch of scenes where she and Alberto are hitting on each other. I'm sure there were hints to this in the original game, but it's much more overt here. Also speaking of Alberto, he had his characterization expanded upon, and by that, I mean now, he's even more of an obnoxious know-it-all than he was in the original. On top of that, following the example set by Tyler from Skylight, he's also much more of a horndog, which comes to a head when he winds up in bed with Tara.

The D, please stop putting sex scenes in your games. Now the payment processors are going to come after you. But at least you sort of figured out what breasts look like. Even when they're being sliced open.

In the game's second half, after returning to Earth--no wait, it's called Altair now, there's a sidequest where you rescue a dog from a comically evil kennel owner. As a reward, you can summon that same dog in battle, and even level it up.

And while you do gain access to the Pursuit after defeating Steve, you can't just make a beeline for the final dungeon this time. Instead you're forced into doing most of the endgame sidequests in set order, including the Destructor. But not only is it nowhere near as hard as it was before, I have an ace up my sleeve.

In this game, Pound has an attack called Viper King, which fires an aimable laser beam. using the skill tree, it can be made to last longer and do more damage and have a different one of his skills give this attack a damage multiplier. One of Pound's weapons specifically boost the damage of this attack. With all these combined, bosses and other forced encounters (read: basically all of them) get melted in a single shot. Even the mighty Destructor went down in mere seconds, and I'm not even exaggerating.

There's a rather lengthy section of the game where the party passes through a portal to Rasalhauge, Diamo's home planet which was stated to be destroyed in the original version of the game. Here, not only is it not destroyed, but it's populated entirely by Diamo's children that she conceived with the other Legend Vipers. There they get involved with a dispute involving the planet's king, Cherry and Knight get imprisoned and meet up with Knight's long-lost grandfather, whatever, this whole arc was put in there to pad out the game length. And even then, it still took me less time to beat than the original (10 hours as opposed to 13).

The most notable things about this arc are that Brooks' ghost briefly joins the party for whatever reason, and that there are a bunch of enemies called "Siphon-Ripped" that are really annoying to fight.

The final battle plays out very differently than in the original. When you reach the end of the final dungeon, Thormia and Diamo are already there, about to duke it out. Seeing Thormia as the lesser of two evils, the party decides to join forces with him to take Diamo down, and so, in lieu of having the entire party face off against her, we are instead aided by Thormia and a few of his soldiers.

And then we fight Perfect Diamo like the original. Yeah...her attacks can't be no-selled in this version, but even it's not enough to save her. At least she can survive one fully powered up Viper King.

The ending is nearly identical, except that Cook has a moment of clarity after flying off into space.

In the years since its inital release, a number of updates were released for this game, introducing new gameplay modes, such as the aforementioned grand strategy mode. Which just goes to show you exactly where The D's priorities lie. So what if the main game didn't go over well, if he adds more varied gameplay modes, then someone is bound to find something to like about it! But the problem isn't just superfical, it's at the design level. When the core gameplay is this poorly thought out, what makes you think that transplanting it to, say, a roguelike or three-on-three sports mode will make things better?

So that was all of Dragoon Entertainment's games. Like I said back at the start, these games are the product of a developer with more enthusiasm than talent. Although he has clearly learned a few things about game design in the more than a decade since he started, it's clear that his games are simply too ambitious for their own good.