Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark is a follow up to 2023's Gal Guardians: Demon Purge. These games are spin offs of the notorious Gal Gun franchise, but instead of a rail shooter where you're fending off schoolgirls with love bullets, you hack and slash your way through 2D action platformers. Demon Purge was more of a traditional level-based Castlevania-like, while Servants of the Dark is an open world Metroidvania through and through.
To get it out of the way early, I don't know if the Xbox release of Servants of the Dark was censored compared to other versions. It's only rated T for Teen on all platforms, so it couldn't have been that bad to begin with, but I just can't say for sure. It does still have some great looking fanservice-y anime girls, busty monster waifus, and even an extended scene at a hot spring with partial nudity. As far as fanservice and overall lewdness goes, I'm pretty satisfied here. The visuals are fantastic, the music is great, and the cute voices are perfect.
I also have to say that playing as demon maid sisters is a fun twist here. Servants of the Dark follows the recent anime trend of depicting the demon lord and their minions as friendly and likeable but just misunderstood, and it works really well here. Everyone is super charming and lovable. The demon hunter protagonists from Demon Purge (who also appear in the Gal Gun games) make an appearance as well, and the interactions between the pairs of sisters are some of the best moments in the game.
As for the gameplay, however, Servants of the Dark falters a bit. It's a Metroidvania where you earn new abilities as you play that allow you to reach previously inaccessible areas of the map. They tried to reinvent the wheel, though, so instead of earning abilities by beating bosses or discovering them organically as you explore, in Servants of the Dark progression is tied to finding the demon lord's bones that have been scattered all over the map. That doesn't sound so bad, but there are hundreds and hundreds of them and you need to find pretty much every single one of them to level up and progress through the game.
You find bones in treasure chests, and as occasional rewards for beating bosses, but mostly you find them as totally random RNG drops from regular enemies. It isn't so bad early on when there are bones freaking everywhere, but in the latter half of the game when you have cleared most of the areas already and there aren't any easy bones available anymore, it's a total momentum killing grind. It becomes a matter of literally scouring every accessible area on the map to try to find 5-6 more bones so you can unlock the next progression ability that opens up the next section of the game. It really, really sucks the fun out of the experience.
It's a shame the progression system is such a drag because the moment to moment gameplay is pretty solid. Just like the previous game, one of the playable characters uses melee weapons while the other uses guns, and you can switch between them freely, so you swap back and forth constantly depending on what you need to do. It's generally really fun.
I do also have to say the game doesn't do a very good job of indicating what you need to do next or where to go. Sure, you get a marker on your map - that is always weirdly a million miles out into uncharted territory - but there is never any direction on how to actually get there. So you squint at the map and try to see if there are any doors you didn't go through or rooms you didn't completely fill in and go there only to find out you need a new ability that requires you to wander around for another hour to hopefully scrounge up enough bones to level up and make progress. I know it just sounds like I'm complaining about normal Metroidvania stuff, but I can't emphasize just how bad the progression and pacing is here. It is momentum killing anti-fun that really ruins the experience.
On that note, it's pretty hard to recommend Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark. You'll want to love it, but the progression and pacing really is a mess and it becomes a real slog the further into the game you get. It's only $30, though, and pretty much everything else about the gameplay is fine and the presentation is great, so you'll have to decide for yourself if it's worth it. But I'd recommend the previous game Demon Purge, or Yohane the Parhelion: Blaze in the Deep Blue, or Sword of the Vagrant, or Afterimage, or Shantae and the Seven Sirens instead if you're really in the mood for a 2D action waifu game.
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