In the world of Yoru no Nai Kuni (Nights of Azure), a demon was defeated long ago and her blood scattered all over the world, turning everything it touched into demons. Now demons appear whenever it's night, causing a lot of unrest sleepless nights and that's why countries are now "nightless (yoru no nai)". Two girls Lilysse and a half-bred, Arnice were born in this age, working as hunters and exorcising the areas they could to restore peace. When Lilysse is chosen as the next sacrifice to seal the evil away, Arnice is determined to find a way to defeat the Night for good.

It's kind of like Dynasty Warriors x Pokemon. You run around fighting lots of enemies and destroying objects that drop healing and power-up items so there isn't much downtime. Instead of controlling a full party of humanoids like in most JRPGs you can summon up to four demons to help fight such as a golem to tank. It's very simplistic.

Most of the time you'll probably stick with the same demons and there isn't much of a selection to gain from the dungeon crawling.

Levelling is quite odd. Your demons level up the usual way, gaining XP from defeating enemies and then you can choose what skills they gain similar to Pokemon. However, for the heroine you have to save up blue blood and offer it at an altar to level and gain new skills. Quite a different way of doing things.

You have limited time to defeat bosses and explore dungeons so it's like a race to the next checkpoint which is good because combat is mostly a hack and slash affair. Similar to Gust's Atelier games, any quests or expeditions you go on progresses time and the game actually forces you to do some side quests to push on with the story whether you like it or not.

In between you can just choose to chill out to gain more stat points and, see some silly events which is kind of entertaining if you don't mind the usual cliched Anime scenarios like girls can't cook.

Graphics are your usual Gust designs - character art is beautiful but the environments are quite bland. Props are mostly just flat images. Dungeons are fairly much the same, nothing that will make you go wow. The only place that looks any good is the base hotel.

if you're looking for a challenging game with a variety of skills to satisfy your tactics, Nights of Azure is going to be very boring for you. Even dungeon crawling isn't all that exciting because they are bland to look at and more importantly, no exciting rare drops to satisfy all that exploration. It's one of those games you'll probably play when there's nothing else to play.

Good

• Cute character art.
• Laid back dungeon crawling.
• Fun scenarios.
• Side quests really are side quests - they can be completed as you progress.

Bad

• Not many exciting rare drop rewards.
• Small selection of demons to party with.
• Hardly any skills to juggle between.
• Bland environments.
• Not exactly an exciting story.