Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy is brought to us by the same developers who made the awesome Demon Gaze, EXP. Changing it up this time around, they decided to switch from a Euro-Fantasy vibe to Modern Sci-Fi Fantasy. While taking a few key facets from the successful Demon Gaze, their new title manages to do enough things differently to stand on its own.
The game starts off with you waking up in a room, in an unknown location. Shortly after, a man breaks in to inform you that you’ve been kidnapped, and that you need to trust him to get you out. Following his orders, you eventually meet up with a character named Alice Mifune, who slays a giant crocodile beast right in front of you. These monsters are called Variants, and they utilize sci-fi fantasy armaments to attack. When the fellow delivers you to her, after nearly dying, he heads off. Alice informs you that you will be able to utilize Code-Rise ( The armaments) to slay Variants once she gets you out.
She takes you to Hinowa Academy, which appears to be a normal school, until she reveals the secret elevator to the Underground Base of Operations for the Xth division. This division wards off Variant attacks and investigates abnormal cases, which are typically linked to murders. Alice introduces you to the Director of the Xth Squad and his Vice Captain, Kaito. Afterward, she urges you to become a member, which you accept, and afterward are given a party of randomly generated characters to dungeon crawl with.
The rest of the story is quite good for the most part. It’s relatable due to being in modern times, and the narrative does have plenty of twists and intrigue. However, one of the things that bugged me was this: you’re supposed to be a part of a super-secret organization that no one knows about. If you reveal the location, or do anything to give yourself away, you’re threatened with a MIB-style memory wipe. Nonetheless, the first thing you do is go to class, and a classmate recognizes you to be a part of the rumored Xth division. A private investigator also butts herself into some of the cases, and she knows you’re a member as well.
There’s also surprisingly few people panicking, despite several of their classmates being murdered. On top of that, you often skip one class to go out and perform squad activities, and the teacher just seems to accept it as a fact, despite knowing nothing about what you do. The premise is very cool, especially with its little touch of politics in the mix, but I’d prefer if they focused on the story a bit more. Emphasize the detective work, or even the complexity and anxiety of managing school life and solving murders. I know, it sounds like I’m telling them to make Persona, but the story was just a bit too flat.
A good tale is important, but what really spurs on fans of this particular genre is gameplay. Well, luckily, when it comes to hardcore dungeon crawling, Operation Abyss hits the mark. It takes pride in its roots, playing a bit like Demon Gaze, but adds a ton of new features. In fact, so much changed that a learning curve was presented, which threw me off as a fan of Demon Gaze’s relatively simple interface. Operation Abyss adds a lot more complexity through its wording, naming conventions, and even functionality, so following the same formula of letting the player run wild after a few moments of play is a bit rough.
The tutorials are sparse and too spread out, so by the time you get a mission to learn what junk equipment’s purpose is, you’ve already made 30 sets of gear out of them. Additionally, the way to identify code chips wasn’t described, so you kind of just had to figure that one out on your own. After falling for three traps or so, I learned to always listen to the Academic class character’s advice. It sucks that the game tends to just throw you into things without explaining them much, but after the initial learning curve fades, you really get into the meat of the game.
Changing jobs was a fun and flexible feature in this game, done by switching the “blood code” of your characters. This allows them to utilize the blood of different legends or folk tales, which are all represented by varying styles, pertaining to the legend or culture. This proved to be an entertaining feature, at the expense of giving the game a slightly inconsistent overall art style. With the blood code system, you can configure your six person team the way you like, and even change the way their stats will grow.
Gender is factored into the appearance of your characters, but alignment will also change the way they look. I did find it a bit weird to only level up by resting in a similar convention like in Final Fantasy XV. Its interesting but it does end my expeditions early since I want to suit up properly before big fights but to anyone else it does add a bit more challenge to the crawls and tries to nudge your arm into shortening your expedition.
When it comes to the dungeon-crawling, Demon Gaze fans will feel right at home with the Memo Pads the player can utilize. These allow you to place notes, and read notes other people have placed. It’s a bit hard to comment too much on this, since we received the game before release, and as such there were very few messages. However, often in dungeon crawlers, it’s easy to miss the single event prompt in a corner of a hidden room, and wander around for hours trying to locate it. This feature alleviates that pain, which is a very nice bonus.
The music and sound effects are great. The voice acting was decent enough, with a few exceptions. The English VA for the character Johnny Sakuraba, who had a a southern drawl and awful jokes, was quite bad, especially when he had the character design of a rebellious spiky haired student. It’s a huge shame that the game didn’t provide dual audio for those particular scenarios when the English acting was a bit too much. Most of the other characters voices were okay. In fact, my favorite character is Mr. Cohen for many, many reasons.
On the topic of visuals, the art in this game is thankfully quite good. It goes for an anime style, with blended colors to give it a more realistic tone. I also enjoyed the idea of multiple artists with different styles putting their take on the game, despite my previous statement that it did muddle the cohesion a bit. I really loved that in the beginning of the game, you can choose between classic and casual style. this allows you to either customize the look of your character from scratch, (which makes the style a bit flat, but shows all of the equipment you receive cosmetically on your character) or go with a character portrait. The art is well-done for these, so it was a tough decision.
The one big critique on the art would have to be the HUD in general. When dungeon crawling and even battling, the screen seems to be too cluttered with items. It doesn’t help that there are more playable characters in a party and more features. They had to make the text smaller then usual, and the screen is filled with more text than the actual visuals of the game, which is a poor design decision, really.
The difficulty does spike a bit in certain parts, but for the most part, it’s at a reasonable level. My personal take is that Demon’s Gaze has the slight edge in quality for its lessened learning curve and more cohesive story, but that doesn’t mean Operation Abyss is bad. It’s still a very enjoyable dungeon crawling experience, and is well worth checking out.
Overall, If you liked Demon Gaze, you will love this game. The setbacks are going to be the extra difficulty in the initial learning curve and the lack of tutorials. To those who are unfamiliar with Demon Gaze and the style, it might be a bit offputting. The game really does bring the tone of a traditional dungeon crawler, however, which is refreshing in a time of constant ARPG’s and 3rd person adventures.
Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy was reviewed on PS Vita using a code provided by NIS America. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here.
The Verdict: 8.5
The Good
– Plenty of new features, compared to Demon Gaze or previous Experience DRPG’s
– Very challenging, in a satisfying way
– Beautiful artwork
– Memo Pads!
The Bad
– Steep initial Learning Curve
– Cluttered/Busy UI
– Muddy story that could have had stronger focus on certain elements
