Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, Switch 2

Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion is… fun… I think? I enjoyed it a lot of the time, but just as much of the time I spent with it, I found myself just feeling blank about it. Not negative, but also not positive. Titanic Scion is a game with a lot to explore, a lot to craft, and a lot to take in. The gameplay, in its stride, is very fun, but the story leaves something to be desired. A mecha game sort of, but, actually it’s a power suit, maybe? It’s hard to place exactly how I feel about everything, but I did enjoy my time overall with DxM: Titanic Scion.

As mentioned, where Daemon X Machina, really as a series at this point, hits its stride is in the gameplay itself. The combat is tight, fast, fluid, and fun. Dashing through fights at high speeds to clash with opponents and dodge attacks feels so, so good a lot of the time. However, counter-intuitively, being that the game is open-world in most of your time spent, so many enemies you fight are mindless and makes it so most of your combat time is spent really doing the bare minimum. It’s at conflict with itself, giving fights the potential to be simultaneously insanely fun and gratifying while also having the potential to be over in 15 seconds. Then you walk (or more likely fly) 15 seconds up the road and get another 15 second combat… hearing the same combat music restart again, and then again, and then again. Get used to hearing the first 15 seconds of that song, because you are gonna hear it A LOT.

I think if Titanic Scion balanced fights better to make the general enemies either more numerous, have more health, or just feel more involved in battles, the regular combat would be much more enjoyable. As it was in my experience, the boss fights in Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion are where I had the most (if not the majority of my) fun. Partially because, as you could gather from my previous comments, they last longer than 15 seconds. Boss combats are challenging in fun ways and long enough to put you in a bind if you’re not careful. I always prefer light builds, so of course I did a lot of zipping around and dodging in my way of play. My dark souls training has led me to have the dodge button on lock at any given moment, so running light is what I do best.

I do like the design of the mechs, if you want to call them that. I think Daemon X Machina has an excellent design language in the way of cool robot suits. I found it enjoyable to customize and design my own personal suit and ride around with it. I’m not really sure they qualify as mechs, though. They’re more… power suit. They seem to be lightweight, if I’m to understand, because you can ride horses with them on. I only played the first one a bit a few years ago, but I feel like I remember my sense of scale being much larger. I don’t know that this affects much, but I do certainly feel small. Your suit is only barely larger than the person within. Think Iron Man.

The story writing in Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion is… okay at best. At times it feels more like its presence is there as an excuse to get to more cool fights than to tell a story. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but it does make it slightly boring when you get into extended cutscenes. The animation sometimes on these can be good and carry you through, but usually it’s minimally animated with talking heads and little going on. It’s typical JRPG in that regard, but a lot of what I experienced made me wish they just owned that the story is just an excuse to fuel the fun parts and get to the point. Maybe the particular story just didn’t click with me and others will think it’s good, but it was not landing in my experience.

I don’t have a ton to say about Daemon X Machina just because it’s pretty simple in practice and our review is limited to speaking on content up to chapter 9 (about 90 minutes of gameplay). In my opinion, if you liked the first Daemon X Machina, you will like Titanic Scion. It doesn’t change enough to make it feel terribly different from that release, but does add enough to likely satisfy you if you were already a fan. If you didn’t like the first Daemon X Machina, I don’t think this changes enough to change your mind. If Titanic Scion has caught your eye and you’ve never played the series before, I would recommend starting with the first game. Not because of any story continuity reasons, but just because of the level of similarity. The first game will be a much cheaper way to learn if it can hook you.

Note: XSEED Games provided us with a Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion code for review purposes.