First off I want to say this game is my first introduction to Dungeon Crawlers, so I didn't know what to expect from it besides the basics.
PS. This is pretty much a spoil free review I just touch upon the basics of the story that you learn in the first 10-15 minutes of the game and the mechanics.
Starting this off with the weakest link of the game would be the story with how basic it is. It starts you off after making your team in a test to wipe out ink fiends as conscripts for the Shogunate. After you pass your trial you go to Edo Castle which acts as your base and you have access to 4 things being Team list, Temple, Trading Post and the Labyrinth. You get a few tid bits of of story in the labyrinth and from the narrator basically after a dungeon clear. The amount of text i got for stroy equated to roughly one chapter of a book if that. So don't go in expecting a good story.
Onto the Art which was the reason I decided to pick this up for my switch and is probably the main reason other people want to pick this game up, besides looking for a new Dungeon Crawler. I personally love ink and watercolor and the art style feels like a mix of both and I will say they executed it well and it fits the theme of the game.
Definitely some gameplay of all time, but not in a good way or bad way. There are no tips to help you along the games so guides are helpful if you get stuck or lost. My main issue with the combat was how sporadic and easy your characters can die in one shot to non boss like enemies and until I learned the basics of the game it happened often. Even when it comes to bosses half are easy and the other make no sense on how they spring up in difficulty.
The first 3 labyrinths out of 5 are pretty easy although you can pass by some things if you don't know about what some spells do to make it easier to find hidden doors and whatnot. When you don't know what your looking for it requires a lot of backtracking I don't know how many times i trekked through each labyrinth until I figured out how to get to the next floor of it. So expect a lot of back and forth and dealing with enemies in the same spots you already cleared 10 times before hand.
Characters and how confusing they are if you don't know anything about RPGS or Dungeon Crawlers specifically. First off when you start the game you can use the premade characters which I don't suggest you do, since the issue with them is they have very low bonus points and if you make your own character you can reroll till you get 20+ pts to allocate instead of six or something. There are also different races like Human, Elf, Dwarf, Half-Oni, Neko (Cat people) and a monster race I forgot about. I suggest using Humans since they are a neutral race and are suited for either the front or back row ( 3 people in the front like warriors and samurai with Wizards and Clerics in the back). Once you make all 6 of your conscripts to your liking you start the tutorial.
Edo Castle was pretty cool at first with the 3 different things you can do there being Trading Post where you buy and sell items and can put stuff into storage and your storage being the most basic thing same with the store is pretty annoying. Can't organize either your inventory or storage besides the order you put them in. I would like for a revamp of them but i doubt it.
Oh boy, I can't forget about the Temple and how it rips you off with the prices for resurrection and Purification. So purifying a character removes ink that reduces your health with ink and some monsters are annoying with it. It costs 30 or 60 sen which is the currency in the game per hp point. Then reviving a character costs more the higher the level i think it's 600 per level since my lvl 20 at the time cost 11k give or take to revive. They need to reduce the prices for the earlier games since you gain currency at a snails pace and making a new character takes a long time since xp gain is very slow.
Finally my last topic of today will be the barracks where you can edit, make new characters, delete and change classes which is the most important aspect of this category. You will have no clue how classes coexist with each other unless you figure it out yourself, hoping you don't lose your other skills from your current class or know what classes work together without playing for a while.
All in all the game is ok would i recommend it at the $30 price tag then no, but I picked it up on sale for $17 and that is about the price i would give the game. I had a lot of gripes with the game and a mechanic that cause me to level 3 new characters in the last labyrinth which made me spend an extra 8 hrs farming xp. So with all my gripes and with the game i did enjoy playing it until the last 1/3 of the game where i had to look up a guide to figure out what I was doing wrong with my characters. If you go in with some knowledge on how the game works and it's mechanics or at least just the classes then you will have a good time.
Thank you if read this review with it being practice at writing my thoughts on things and I'm trying to get better at it along with my grammar lol. Rating 5.5/10
PS. This is pretty much a spoil free review I just touch upon the basics of the story that you learn in the first 10-15 minutes of the game and the mechanics.
Starting this off with the weakest link of the game would be the story with how basic it is. It starts you off after making your team in a test to wipe out ink fiends as conscripts for the Shogunate. After you pass your trial you go to Edo Castle which acts as your base and you have access to 4 things being Team list, Temple, Trading Post and the Labyrinth. You get a few tid bits of of story in the labyrinth and from the narrator basically after a dungeon clear. The amount of text i got for stroy equated to roughly one chapter of a book if that. So don't go in expecting a good story.
Onto the Art which was the reason I decided to pick this up for my switch and is probably the main reason other people want to pick this game up, besides looking for a new Dungeon Crawler. I personally love ink and watercolor and the art style feels like a mix of both and I will say they executed it well and it fits the theme of the game.
Definitely some gameplay of all time, but not in a good way or bad way. There are no tips to help you along the games so guides are helpful if you get stuck or lost. My main issue with the combat was how sporadic and easy your characters can die in one shot to non boss like enemies and until I learned the basics of the game it happened often. Even when it comes to bosses half are easy and the other make no sense on how they spring up in difficulty.
The first 3 labyrinths out of 5 are pretty easy although you can pass by some things if you don't know about what some spells do to make it easier to find hidden doors and whatnot. When you don't know what your looking for it requires a lot of backtracking I don't know how many times i trekked through each labyrinth until I figured out how to get to the next floor of it. So expect a lot of back and forth and dealing with enemies in the same spots you already cleared 10 times before hand.
Characters and how confusing they are if you don't know anything about RPGS or Dungeon Crawlers specifically. First off when you start the game you can use the premade characters which I don't suggest you do, since the issue with them is they have very low bonus points and if you make your own character you can reroll till you get 20+ pts to allocate instead of six or something. There are also different races like Human, Elf, Dwarf, Half-Oni, Neko (Cat people) and a monster race I forgot about. I suggest using Humans since they are a neutral race and are suited for either the front or back row ( 3 people in the front like warriors and samurai with Wizards and Clerics in the back). Once you make all 6 of your conscripts to your liking you start the tutorial.
Edo Castle was pretty cool at first with the 3 different things you can do there being Trading Post where you buy and sell items and can put stuff into storage and your storage being the most basic thing same with the store is pretty annoying. Can't organize either your inventory or storage besides the order you put them in. I would like for a revamp of them but i doubt it.
Oh boy, I can't forget about the Temple and how it rips you off with the prices for resurrection and Purification. So purifying a character removes ink that reduces your health with ink and some monsters are annoying with it. It costs 30 or 60 sen which is the currency in the game per hp point. Then reviving a character costs more the higher the level i think it's 600 per level since my lvl 20 at the time cost 11k give or take to revive. They need to reduce the prices for the earlier games since you gain currency at a snails pace and making a new character takes a long time since xp gain is very slow.
Finally my last topic of today will be the barracks where you can edit, make new characters, delete and change classes which is the most important aspect of this category. You will have no clue how classes coexist with each other unless you figure it out yourself, hoping you don't lose your other skills from your current class or know what classes work together without playing for a while.
All in all the game is ok would i recommend it at the $30 price tag then no, but I picked it up on sale for $17 and that is about the price i would give the game. I had a lot of gripes with the game and a mechanic that cause me to level 3 new characters in the last labyrinth which made me spend an extra 8 hrs farming xp. So with all my gripes and with the game i did enjoy playing it until the last 1/3 of the game where i had to look up a guide to figure out what I was doing wrong with my characters. If you go in with some knowledge on how the game works and it's mechanics or at least just the classes then you will have a good time.
Thank you if read this review with it being practice at writing my thoughts on things and I'm trying to get better at it along with my grammar lol. Rating 5.5/10
A Wizardry clone that modernizes the traditional systems and gives them a beautiful coat of paint, but utterly fails at dungeon and item design. Also hampered by lackluster dungeon graphics past the first dungeon and a weird difficulty curve.
Nearly every non-spellcaster class possesses a variety of in-battle skills, giving attackers more to do than hack away every turn forever. Each class has a niche: Warriors are tanks with extremely strong single-target physical attacks but no other options; Samurai have excellent damage output but poor defense for a frontliner; Monks have a grab bag of special attacks but no strong single-target attacks; and so on. Besides ensuring niche protection, this encourages you to multi-class. Unlike in Wizardry, multi-classing is a fully functional system that works about how you'd expect it to, though halflings' and half-onis' wacky statlines make it hard for them to meet the prerequisites of some classes.
Other key modernizations: fixed encounters are visible as pools of fog; item information is fully exposed; level drain and aging (but not, surprisingly, permadeath!) are out; ironman mode is a toggle rather than an obligation. Unfortunately, the game's big gimmick, max-HP-reducing attacks, doesn't really work: the only way to restore your max HP is to return to town, and there's rarely a compelling reason not to return to town, so when you get hit with one (which is pretty rare), you just return to town.
The art is excellent. Enemies look cool; the character portraits, while few, are good; the UI is fairly stylish (if you can excuse the inexplicable bloom). Dungeon graphics are a bit weaker: the first major dungeon is a gorgeous blend of 2D and 3D, but everything after looks like PS2 textures as seen through a crappy black-and-white filter. The music is outstanding, but the battle theme's lead-in is longer than the average encounter; it wore on me before the game was out.
The big problem: the dungeons are really boring. Like, less interesting than the ones in Wizardry 1, the decades-old game that founded the genre. The penultimate dungeon was decent aside from some truly heinous mandatory secret doors, but it takes maybe eight hours to get there, and then the final dungeon sucks again (mostly because it's incredibly short, leaving you to grind to fight the final boss).
Equipment drops are unvaried and largely boring until the final dungeon, which hands out special items like candy. A DRPG with boring items is almost as bad as a DRPG with boring dungeons, and this game is both.
Also, there were a few large difficulty spikes. The first, a quartet of heavy-hitting minibosses partway through the second dungeon, made me drop the game until I came back and spent an hour grinding. The second, a pair of even heavier-hitting minibosses at the start of the final dungeon, was maybe half that. The last, the final boss whose AoE attacks can take out endgame-level thieves and wizards in a single round, took a few hours. The common thread here is that there isn't really any way around it: if you don't have enough HP, you gotta grind (and probably reclass your characters so they can level faster and get more HP). I'm not particularly enthused about spending four or five hours in a 15-hour game grinding, especially when said game costs $40.
The localization has some small technical issues, but it reads well.
Overall verdict: absolutely not worth your time or money, but a sequel with better dungeon design might be.
Nearly every non-spellcaster class possesses a variety of in-battle skills, giving attackers more to do than hack away every turn forever. Each class has a niche: Warriors are tanks with extremely strong single-target physical attacks but no other options; Samurai have excellent damage output but poor defense for a frontliner; Monks have a grab bag of special attacks but no strong single-target attacks; and so on. Besides ensuring niche protection, this encourages you to multi-class. Unlike in Wizardry, multi-classing is a fully functional system that works about how you'd expect it to, though halflings' and half-onis' wacky statlines make it hard for them to meet the prerequisites of some classes.
Other key modernizations: fixed encounters are visible as pools of fog; item information is fully exposed; level drain and aging (but not, surprisingly, permadeath!) are out; ironman mode is a toggle rather than an obligation. Unfortunately, the game's big gimmick, max-HP-reducing attacks, doesn't really work: the only way to restore your max HP is to return to town, and there's rarely a compelling reason not to return to town, so when you get hit with one (which is pretty rare), you just return to town.
The art is excellent. Enemies look cool; the character portraits, while few, are good; the UI is fairly stylish (if you can excuse the inexplicable bloom). Dungeon graphics are a bit weaker: the first major dungeon is a gorgeous blend of 2D and 3D, but everything after looks like PS2 textures as seen through a crappy black-and-white filter. The music is outstanding, but the battle theme's lead-in is longer than the average encounter; it wore on me before the game was out.
The big problem: the dungeons are really boring. Like, less interesting than the ones in Wizardry 1, the decades-old game that founded the genre. The penultimate dungeon was decent aside from some truly heinous mandatory secret doors, but it takes maybe eight hours to get there, and then the final dungeon sucks again (mostly because it's incredibly short, leaving you to grind to fight the final boss).
Equipment drops are unvaried and largely boring until the final dungeon, which hands out special items like candy. A DRPG with boring items is almost as bad as a DRPG with boring dungeons, and this game is both.
Also, there were a few large difficulty spikes. The first, a quartet of heavy-hitting minibosses partway through the second dungeon, made me drop the game until I came back and spent an hour grinding. The second, a pair of even heavier-hitting minibosses at the start of the final dungeon, was maybe half that. The last, the final boss whose AoE attacks can take out endgame-level thieves and wizards in a single round, took a few hours. The common thread here is that there isn't really any way around it: if you don't have enough HP, you gotta grind (and probably reclass your characters so they can level faster and get more HP). I'm not particularly enthused about spending four or five hours in a 15-hour game grinding, especially when said game costs $40.
The localization has some small technical issues, but it reads well.
Overall verdict: absolutely not worth your time or money, but a sequel with better dungeon design might be.