Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion presents a fun take on anime mech gaming, but also falls into a bit of the same trap that the genre can’t seem to overcome.
Xseed’s 2019 mech-based game Daemon X Machina had a lot of interesting ideas and equally interesting style, but ultimately it felt a bit hollow when it came to depth. The sequel aims to rectify that by really focusing on customization, combat and character development, and does a much better job overall at what the potential of the games can be.
We’re a chosen hero given a mech, and we can customize every aspect of it. In the original we were limited in that customization, but here we can adjust almost everything, even how we engage with it in combat by mapping different weapons to each bumper. But how we get that customization doesn’t work.
This time around the game is open world, with the game requiring us to pick up loot that’s needed to enhance our mech. Enemies drop a bunch of stuff but we can only pick one thing at a time from the loot. So if a lot of the loot is cool and worthwhile, we can only ever take one of them. An enemy can drop a few different valuable weapons, so okay, I’ll pick this sword over the gun. But now I need a gun! Hopefully, the next guy has a gun. If he doesn’t, I may have to go through a long enough wait to get one.
It has a gameplay loop of doing a main mission, following the story, fighting enemies, finding weapons, finding things to break down, and then crafting. We’re doing this a lot. We need a good story to back that up and keep us going. The game kicks off with big themes and symbolism, and makes us interested to see where it goes, but then it ends up just going to kill the bad guy at the end of this particular loop.
And that’s it. It’s a lot of build up just to do the thing that always happens. Like, me and my squad are going to get together and fight this dude, but it’s the same thing we just did. I love anime mecha and have a high expectation of what storytelling in the genre can be, but it just kind of falls flat here. I like my anime bullshit, regardless of whether it’s good or bad, but this doesn’t do either. It’s just there and misses that opportunity.
Everything else is really good, though. The anime aesthetics are great, the voice acting is great. And it has a little whimsey, too. We can be a guy in a mech riding a horse or a guy in a mech driving a car. That earns some anime brownie points, at least.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. The video originally appeared on The SideQuest LIVE on October 30th, 2025.
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