This is a neat lil' rougelike dungeon crawler made by Konami. It's on Game Boy which is perfect for this game as it's best played in short bursts. You play as a new arrival to the town of Karuzu and are told by the Adventurer's Guild that you should train in the nearby dungeons if you want to become a proper adventurer. So off you go.
Each adventure into a dungeon starts by picking one of the four types. One has you defeating monster, one collecting gold, one collecting Orbs, and one freeing fairies. You then are bestowed four gifts from the Forest God to aid you but from then you're on your own.
Gameplay consists of exploring the dungeons. Each room in each dungeon has a grid layout and you move one square at a time. When you move, enemies move too. Outside dungeons where the aim is to defeat monsters, there is no point getting into fights as there's no experience points to gain. This leads to some fun strategic gameplay of timing your moves to the patterns of monsters and avoiding fights when you can. You still CAN fight but figuring out how to not engage is probably the most fun aspect of it all to me.
As you go through you make a map that you can check any time in the pause menu. Not really something I found helpful but it was neat to see. You also can find other items throughout that can do anything from healing you to turning you invisible or even doing bigger damage to enemies or helping find new paths ahead. There's also an option to view the HP of any monster on screen at any time which can help with choosing your battles.
The monster variety is pretty refreshing too. They can vary in size, taking up more tiles and they can have different movement patterns based on what they are. Tarantulas cling to walls and skirt around the edges of a room, giant crabs go side to side and centipedes go up and down. Also there's ones with more unique properties like following you around but not attacking unless you do but they also block your path and there are some that are totally stationary but block the way forward.
Also, this is a rougelike so when you die you have to start a dungeon over again and it'll be randomized to be different than last time. Fortunately it doesn't reset your progress completely, you'll still have whatever level dungeon you cleared last. It can be tricky though in later levels as they all get harder the more you clear.
So yeah I really enjoyed this. It's only like five hours long and I kinda blitzed through it but that just shows how much fun I had I think. I've never really played a dungeon crawler before but I absolutely loved moving one square at a time and really having to plan out where to move and what was worth risking going all the way across a room. Definitely recommend if you can get ahold of it and kill some time here and there. I'll be looking out for more games like this in the future.
Each adventure into a dungeon starts by picking one of the four types. One has you defeating monster, one collecting gold, one collecting Orbs, and one freeing fairies. You then are bestowed four gifts from the Forest God to aid you but from then you're on your own.
Gameplay consists of exploring the dungeons. Each room in each dungeon has a grid layout and you move one square at a time. When you move, enemies move too. Outside dungeons where the aim is to defeat monsters, there is no point getting into fights as there's no experience points to gain. This leads to some fun strategic gameplay of timing your moves to the patterns of monsters and avoiding fights when you can. You still CAN fight but figuring out how to not engage is probably the most fun aspect of it all to me.
As you go through you make a map that you can check any time in the pause menu. Not really something I found helpful but it was neat to see. You also can find other items throughout that can do anything from healing you to turning you invisible or even doing bigger damage to enemies or helping find new paths ahead. There's also an option to view the HP of any monster on screen at any time which can help with choosing your battles.
The monster variety is pretty refreshing too. They can vary in size, taking up more tiles and they can have different movement patterns based on what they are. Tarantulas cling to walls and skirt around the edges of a room, giant crabs go side to side and centipedes go up and down. Also there's ones with more unique properties like following you around but not attacking unless you do but they also block your path and there are some that are totally stationary but block the way forward.
Also, this is a rougelike so when you die you have to start a dungeon over again and it'll be randomized to be different than last time. Fortunately it doesn't reset your progress completely, you'll still have whatever level dungeon you cleared last. It can be tricky though in later levels as they all get harder the more you clear.
So yeah I really enjoyed this. It's only like five hours long and I kinda blitzed through it but that just shows how much fun I had I think. I've never really played a dungeon crawler before but I absolutely loved moving one square at a time and really having to plan out where to move and what was worth risking going all the way across a room. Definitely recommend if you can get ahold of it and kill some time here and there. I'll be looking out for more games like this in the future.