Oninaki guide: Five quick tips to help you navigate this melancholy JRPG

Pick a daemon and stick with it

Oninaki is a tangled web of upgrades, skill trees, gear, and daemons: who operate as the quasi-personas of the game.

One daemon handles swift sword slicing, another is adept in archery, you get the drift. Here’s a few quick tips on how to make sense of it all.

• Check your equipment! The text in the game is very small and it’s super easy to miss that you picked up a crucial new weapon. Periodically use the pause menu to go to your daemon list and check your gear for upgrades.

• It’s okay to boost the same daemon, and in fact I encourage it: at least at first. You’ll start with the katana-wielding Aisha, who has a really effect dash/dodge and some really damaging abilities.

• Speaking of abilities, tech into them first. You’ll find new powers marked with a sword icon on the skill tree, so make your way to at least two others before anything else. Each daemon can have three skills attached to its name, and you want that list to be full. Skills don’t take mana to use, and the only thing standing between you and skill spamming is an individual cooldown count.

• Start building out your passive skills next. These (denoted by the icicle icon on the tree) actually impact the entire party so long as that daemon is equipped in one of the four (cross) party slots. Once you get all four daemons and create a full party, you can start having them all buff each other.

• If things ever get too challenging you can swap the difficulty setting at any time from the checkpoint obelisks. It’s a fairly dynamic mechanic so you can swap as needed for tough fights.