Daemon X Machina

Genres die. Rail-shooters like Starfox and Panzer Dragoon struggled for relevance at the turn of the century. Point-and-click adventure games disappeared for ten years. Call of Duty 4 killed the conception of a first-person shooter. Affordable creation tools and the flourishing independent development scene have assured a revival, of sorts, for practically every weirdo style of game imaginable, but it’s still hard to find a major publisher with the confidence to put one in a box and sell it at full-price.

And here we are with Nintendo (Nintendo!) putting its name in front of Marvelous’ mech-action revival, Daemon X Machina. Getting in a giant robot suit, or literally becoming a giant robot, was a late 90’s and early aughts specialty. Virtual On and Tech Romancer put them in a fighting game. Xenogears stuck massive machines in a role-playing game. Most famously, the Armored Core series carried the torch for Gungriffon and Mech Warrior through the last generation of consoles. Daemon X Machina specifically looks to revitalize the tinkering and toiling behind assembling a giant robot and using it to shoot outrageous weapons at everything in its path.

Like any variety of popular giant robot fiction, Daemon X Machina opens with a premise designed to proliferate its hotshot pilots. After the moon collided with an earth-like planet, it released mysterious Femto particles and actively corrupted AI-controlled machines. Fallout from the collision also affected members of humanity, creating specialized individuals (Reclaimers) capable of piloting mechs (Arsenals) via an operations contractor’s (Orbital) contact (Four) within a designated zone of the planet (the Oval Link) to kill rogue AI (Immortals). Daemon X Machina invents a lot of proper nouns as it justifies the machinations that turn its fiction.

A player-created character, The Rookie, is physically dropped into a mech suit and emotionally consumed by myriad big-personality pilots. Daemon X Machina’s overarching narrative presents a broad-strokes argument on the nature of AI and its conflict with humanity, but a majority of its runtime is devoured by eccentric pilots from different mercenary groups becoming friends and enemies and then, usually, friends again. Dialogue before, during, and after operations presents these scenarios in predictable, sometimes interminable back-and-forth dialogue sequences.

It’s easy to watch Daemon X Machina’s pontificating pilots fall in line with a Saturday morning cartoon. It’s composed of PG-13 language and ultimately ruled by machine-on-machine violence, sure, but it’s a smattering of big personalities smashing against equally big personalities. Knight’s name and moustache present his character as regal and orderly. Johnny G has glasses and is a huge dork. Abyss is goth to the extreme. Via Orbital, you’re constantly sent to raid one faction’s base with the help of another faction. In almost every operation another faction shows up, surprised and confused, but ultimately decides to follow orders and engage in combat. If it were more consequential to the overall plot the number of times this happens, and how it somehow always surprises its characters, would imply Daemon X Machina is attempting to satirize genre tropes.

At best, Daemon X Machina’s cavalcade of pilots can be seen as an attempt to envelop the player in the maelstrom of jumping into a ready-made war full of opposing points of view that all, after spinning the compass a few times, maybe point in the same direction. A lot of dialogue repeats identical themes. Much of it is composed of terms that are ultimately nonsense. It can feel like an obligation to absorb and internalize everything, not to mention keeping track of every pilot, before the next mission. Fortunately, it has little material effect on the flow of the game and can (probably!) be skipped without much fear of missing out.

Control, usually a facet of gaming so ingrained and established that it is rarely worth writing about, is a major point of success for Daemon X Machina. The default control layout provides able options for firing each arm weapon, switching between two alternate weapons for each arm, firing an auxiliary canon on the shoulder, engaging Femto buffs, turbo-boosting around, and complete three-axis flight. Lining up shots and keeping track of targets, even with the swarms of quick enemies in every direction, becomes second nature. Daemon X Machina’s control scheme provides a strong compromise between complexity and accessibility. Or at least it does through the Pro Controller, as playing with Joy-Cons seemed arduous.

Weapon selection is another strong suit. Rifles and machine guns deal quick damage but are subject to time-consuming reloading animations. Bazookas pack an area-of-effect punch but are incapable of hitting quick enemies. Huge god damn laser swords, which can lock-on from close by, provide a melee option and trade safety for proximity. Daemon X Machina allows the player to mix up and combine two active and two available lasers, guns, missile launchers, acid-spouting canons, stun guns, flamethrowers, and/or shields. And don’t forget the missile-launching shoulder weapon on top. Provided you have the ammunition to fuel your pursuits, your Arsenal isn’t short on ways to express power.

Offer Missions advance Daemon X Machina’s story. Free Missions are optional and can be replayed to grind parts or currency. Both usually boil down to the same set of objectives. Infiltrate one of Oval Link’s diverse environments and take out some impish fodder Immortals before the Real Villain reveals their presence. This is almost always in the form of the aforementioned rogue mercenaries. Daemon X Machina usually presents an appetizer before its main course. Mechs with capable maneuvers and firepower (and giant health bars) are more interesting and more challenging than roving Immortals.

Daemon X Machina also makes some room for some sporadic, weird battles. At one point I found myself behind the controls of a giant, lumbering mech and was tasked with stomping around a field and eliminating dozens of Immortals. It was more of a slow motion kaiju Dynasty Warriors diversion than anything else in the proper game. There are also a handful of missions where the player is on foot in order to infiltrate a base and steal an Arsenal. Yet another mission asks the player to shoot meteorites out of the sky before they collide with and damage four precious towers. Marvelous tries to get the most out of Daemon X Machina’s ingrained mechanics.

Boss fights against colossal Immortals typically close out story arcs of Daemon X Machina. I fought a giant flying serpent train with weak spots all over its back. I battled a flying gunship that occasionally went too high up for me to chase. I took out this quadrupedal giant Wild Wild West spider thing with a weak spot on its back. The mercenaries that usually accompany the player on a mission provide some help, but Daemon X Machina usually leaves the player free to develop their own strategy. Either take potshots with bazookas, risk going in close with a giant sword, or maneuver around until you find a weak spot. They’re all classic, pattern-based boss fights amplified by player-selected options to conduct the battles on the ground or in the air.

I didn’t really get Daemon X Machina until a D-class mission, about five hours into the game, where I was pitted against two other Arsenals. Until then I had been unloading two Grim Reaper assault rifles into practically everything in front of me while I was flying all over the place, but suddenly that wasn’t working for me anymore. I tinkered with my equipment—at that I had been half paying attention to parts in pursuit of “higher numbers=better” philosophy—and dove deep into a more specific build. I traded speed for weight and switched out my flashy, fast flying parts for armored bulk. I also tried to stick to the ground, canceling out the paralyzing landing animation that came with my hefty new model. The product was a game that now played more like Virtual On than an aerial shooter. I won the battle. Daemon X Machina let me change the game and, I would like to think, rewarded me for that experimentation.

Weapons and parts can be claimed in a variety of ways. They can be bought at a rudimentary store, developed with blueprints and other parts, or pulled from defeated AI or mercenary Arsenals. There’s something of a gotcha mechanic inside the scavenger option, as each fallen mech contains a selection of standard and rare parts, and you only get to pick one each time. Several Offer Missions even make Arsenal combat optional, creative an incentive to go out of your way and melt the health bar of whoever is standing in opposition.

Very easily, Daemon X Machina can lead to the player spending as much time obsessing over stats and gear as they do in actual missions. It’s less of a process of trial-and-error and more an ever evolving test to see what feels right in the proper circumstance. I like having an acid gun that creates armor melting green clouds and a sword made of plasma that is good for almost nothing. It looks cool and I feel cool, even if it occasionally results in my death and I have to switch to another loadout I made when it’s time to Play For Real.

Daemon X Machina is a complete embrace of aesthetic in the realm of mecha action. Environments are hyper-saturated deserts, frigid urban wastelands, forsaken red canyons, and acid-tripping neon wildernesses. It stylistically rules to see your mech—the mech you have colored and outfitted to your exact specifications—in a flip-book series of perfect action-figure poses as idles in place or assaults its opponents. Daemon X Machina is focused on looking cool 100% of the time and, thanks to the player’s agency their mech’s construction, it usually succeeds.

I imagine it’s also possible to cruise through a majority of Daemon X Machina with an escalating pair of Grim Reaper assault rifles. Most levels have enough ammo-dropping fodder Immortals around to sustain the player until the objective is completed. The amount of available parts, the gross amount of stats in every piece, and the will to make any sense of it might be too much for someone who only wants to blow stuff up. Daemon X Machina facilitates this by not being especially difficult, but it could have really used some kind of easy Do This For Me mode as a means of creating pure accessibility.

It’s also possible to complete special missions online with up to three other players. In my experience this involved battles against bosses I had already fought in the main game, albeit with three live humans fighting the thing instead of some AI Arsenals. Everyone I was paired with in three sessions was always grossly overpowered and we usually melted a health bar down in less than a minute, earning all the optional rewards in the process. I made bank and was able to flesh out my character’s skill tree at the Lab as a direct result. This kind of felt like cheating.  It also felt awesome, so I am willing to consider it a draw. Either way, it was fun and relatively smooth to team up people and destroy giant mechanical monsters.

Above all else, Daemon X Machina operates with earnestness uncommon in other niche releases. It understands that shooting a pilot out of the sky while you’re also in the sky and watching their inanimate machine corpse drop like a meteoric rock, with your loot in tow, should produce a feeling of pure elation. It isn’t cynical like Dynasty Warriors or deliberately mindless like Earth Defense Force. Daemon X Machina may use a game plan from the early aughts, but its candor feels right at home in 2019.

Built from pieces thought too inscrutable to survive 2019, Daemon X Machina is sincere in its appreciation for a bygone era of mech action games. It understands the charm of assembling giant robots, the appeal of blasting exotic weapons, and the fantasy of combining both together in dozens of pleasing arrangements. Daemon X Machina revels in its esoteric reverie.