Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Hinokami Chronicles 2 hands-on preview — Slay demons as your favorite Demon Slayers!

While I am a newer convert to the Demon Slayer franchise, I’ve already enjoyed so much of the world and how chaotic it can be. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Hinokami Chronicles 2 takes everything they did in the first game and takes it up a notch just a bit. 

The premise is the same, you’re playing through some of the iconic arcs from the show. This time, we’re starting around the third season and we go until the end of the most recent arc just in time for the movie. 

Playing through the levels for the demo, we’re in an area I wasn’t familiar with since I’m still in Season 2, but I’m told by the PR staff it’s about halfway through Season 3. I got to play as Tanjiro and Inosuke during the demo with Tanjiro using his Water Wheel the most and Inosuke using his chaos nature to stick his head through levels in the house while digging his way into the demon’s lair. 

The controls are as easy or hard as you want them to be. While you can do combos of sorts, you don’t need to in order to win. This game will be plenty easy for kids to play with their families while providing a challenge to those familiar with the franchise through the higher difficulty and online play (we did not play online in the demo). 

This is mostly sword combat with a third person view. I’m sure we’ll have plenty of beat-em-up areas where we have hoards of enemies, but for this demo it was pretty straightforward boss fighting. 

Taking on the bosses was definitely the most fun I had in the demo. While the scent tracking scene with Inosuke was funny, it wasn’t that difficult or interesting to follow. Once you get to the bosses, they’re fun to figure out as each one we fought had completely different timing and abilities. By the end, we were fighting an amalgamation of both the bosses we had fought against. That was the most difficult fight as it was the most difficult to figure out quickly. Once I had it though, I was off to the races with Tanjiro using a mixture of water and fire attacks to get this demon out of the way. 

The demo wasn’t too long, but showed a lot of aspects of the game from the combat to the humor and the story in general. If you like Demon Slayer, played the first game, or just want to see what it’s about; Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Hinokami Chronicles 2 could be what you’re looking for from the franchise. 

You can get Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Hinokami Chronicles 2 on PlayStation 4 + 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and on Steam August 1st.