Dusk Diver

Dusk Diver can best be described as the love child of the Persona and Yakuza series in that it lets you beat people to a pulp in between trying to seduce your waifus into doing that weird anime thing you’ve always fantasized about doing. You know the one. And as unexpected as it may be considering its ambition and lower budget, the game actually manages to pull things off pretty well most of the time. And all while looking as pretty and vaguely erotic as anime tends to be.

Party All Night

Dusk Diver features a large and very beautiful open world where you can run around and explore before you go back to fighting crazy enemies with Devil May Cry-like combat. It has so many features in it that are combined from other games like Persona’s social interaction options and Dynasty Warrior’s huge waves of weaker enemies. And thankfully they all end up complimenting each other very well without everything clashing into each other.

The game takes place in Taiwan, specifically its capital Taipei’s shopping district of Ximending. The area is pretty popular in Asia and known for its trendy, upscale vibe that’s beautifully recreated inside this game world. You can check out all manner of shops and streets before fighting demons in the shadow realm of “Youshanding”. All in all, everything is lovingly created by developers who wanted to make a game that’s both fun and authentic. Something they’ve clearly succeeded at.

If Night Only Lasted Until 2:AM

The main drawback with this game is the fact that despite its core gameplay being a really good combination of other popular games, it just doesn’t have a lot of depth to it if you look too closely under the hood. The city can be extremely barren with not much to do in the long term. Combat is also fun and stylish but not very complex and is clearly a watered down version of similar titles such as Yakuza.

This is to be expected from an indie developer but it still leaves you wishing that there was more stuff to do overall. Another problem is the somewhat tedious searching you have to do to find Dragon Shards. Running around an empty city looking for trinkets isn’t very fun at all.

The Good & Bad of Dusk Diver

Pros:

• Beautiful recreation of Taiwan’s premier shopping district.
• Fun and exciting combat.
• Dazzling visuals, sounds and voice acting.
• Persona-like vibe and social interactions.
• Really high quality indie game.

Cons:

• Shallow combat that’s a little too simplistic at times.
• Mostly barren open world.
• Tedious side objectives.