Damn it! I absolutely cannot stand when an overall very fun game throws a completely bullshit challenge at you that sucks all the fun out of the game and that's what I'm experiencing with this game.
First of all, this is a straight-up Mystery Dungeon ripoff game. It plays exactly like pretty much any ChunSoft game and that's perfectly fine by me. I couldn't care less if a game is original, nor do I care that this game doesn't add one single new idea and is just an uninspired clone. It's still fun, and this game is certainly a very solid Mystery Dungeon entry with the added bonus of chocobo cuteness. All of the graphics and story and all that is very cute and silly, stupid fun. The game does what Final Fantasy side games usually do and it has your typical plot about some world-smashing god that needs killing and whatnot, but it's on a smaller and cuter scale. I like it.
And I just generally love the whole Mystery Dungeon design. Shiren on the DS was the game, way back when, that taught me what a roguelike even is and made me love the concept and even to this day, I think I really only like Mystery Dungeon games and not roguelikes in general even though I call myself a roguelike fan. This time, I found myself realizing that I actually very much like turn-based battles; I just don't like the J-RPG style that doesn't involve any tactical movement. I like this style of turn-based and I like it a lot.
The problem with this game is that it's got a strong yin and yang, heaven and hell, type of vibe. It's equal parts cute chocobos and brutal roguelike design by it's very nature, but it's also equal parts good designs and just awful ones. Good dungeons with interesting quirks and barely playable ones that suck all of the fun out. You've got equal parts fun depth and incredible tedium, like how spread-out the city is and how much running around you have to do just to maintain your inventory.
The worst offender is the bonus dungeons. Man, most of them are so boring, and they actually make up the meat of the game. You've got the campaign, which is I think five dungeons long and each one grows in size, difficulty and loot quality compared to the last one. The campaign and regular dungeons have a roguelite-inspired structure where you're meant to escape, which you can do with any staircase, if you find a good drop that you want to keep. It also offers checkpoints so you can get back to about where you were and continue on with your upgraded gear. This might be something different from ChunSoft's style, actually, as I don't recall them being this generous with hopping in and out of the dungeon, and it obviously makes the game easier, but I like this lighter change of pace and the heightened focus on upgrading equipment. With this part of the game, you do get a solid 50 hours of enjoyment so if all you do is the campaign, you've still made a solid game purchase.
However, there are more bonus dungeons than there are campaign dungeons, counted both in amount of dungeons and their combined numbers of floors (because one of the bonus dungeons has 500 floors so it alone wins that contest) and, man, do most of the bonus dungeons suck. They feel like unfair chores where RNG decides whether or not you win far too often. They're so high in difficulty that one miss can be the difference between winning and losing, and missing is pure RNG. The worst offender is the one called just Mystery Dungeon and it has so many bad designs that it's forcing me to stop playing to save my sanity right now. It's 50 floors long and you start from level 1 with no equipment, meaning that you have to painstakingly explore every corner of every floor to make sure you find every possible upgrade (since you can no longer partake in the leaving the dungeon to upgrade weapons in town system) and there are no shortcuts, meaning that you have to do the entire 3-5 hour dungeon in one go. And it won't let you save mid-dungeon, even though the game has that feature for other dungeons. Why would you ever do that? That's not difficulty design, that's just you being an asshole. In fact, whoever made these design choices is such an asshole that they won't even let us have a quit or abandon option. If you we enter a dungeon that refuses saving and we suddenly have to leave due to real-life issues, we have to find a staircase or intentionally get killed in order to safely leave without risking corrupting our save by quitting incorrectly. That's just...wow, what an asshole design decision to make.
In short, this game is a super fun lightweight roguelike with lots of charm if you just stick to the fairly easy but not too easy campaign. It's a very solid game that doesn't really suffer from anything except low quality of life with things like an inconvenient city design and, of course, the graphics that were dated even when the original came out in 2009, but that's not a very big deal. The game looks fine. Unfortunately, though, this game becomes an unenjoyable nightmare if you're a completionist who wants to take on all of the challenges and the game becomes tough to give a score for. I'll settle for four stars since the campaign was a lot of fun but the bonus content was lame, and the campaign is long enough for it to not feel like a ripoff of any kind. It just pains my completionist side that I now have to uninstall it because the bad dungeons frustrate and bore me too much.
First of all, this is a straight-up Mystery Dungeon ripoff game. It plays exactly like pretty much any ChunSoft game and that's perfectly fine by me. I couldn't care less if a game is original, nor do I care that this game doesn't add one single new idea and is just an uninspired clone. It's still fun, and this game is certainly a very solid Mystery Dungeon entry with the added bonus of chocobo cuteness. All of the graphics and story and all that is very cute and silly, stupid fun. The game does what Final Fantasy side games usually do and it has your typical plot about some world-smashing god that needs killing and whatnot, but it's on a smaller and cuter scale. I like it.
And I just generally love the whole Mystery Dungeon design. Shiren on the DS was the game, way back when, that taught me what a roguelike even is and made me love the concept and even to this day, I think I really only like Mystery Dungeon games and not roguelikes in general even though I call myself a roguelike fan. This time, I found myself realizing that I actually very much like turn-based battles; I just don't like the J-RPG style that doesn't involve any tactical movement. I like this style of turn-based and I like it a lot.
The problem with this game is that it's got a strong yin and yang, heaven and hell, type of vibe. It's equal parts cute chocobos and brutal roguelike design by it's very nature, but it's also equal parts good designs and just awful ones. Good dungeons with interesting quirks and barely playable ones that suck all of the fun out. You've got equal parts fun depth and incredible tedium, like how spread-out the city is and how much running around you have to do just to maintain your inventory.
The worst offender is the bonus dungeons. Man, most of them are so boring, and they actually make up the meat of the game. You've got the campaign, which is I think five dungeons long and each one grows in size, difficulty and loot quality compared to the last one. The campaign and regular dungeons have a roguelite-inspired structure where you're meant to escape, which you can do with any staircase, if you find a good drop that you want to keep. It also offers checkpoints so you can get back to about where you were and continue on with your upgraded gear. This might be something different from ChunSoft's style, actually, as I don't recall them being this generous with hopping in and out of the dungeon, and it obviously makes the game easier, but I like this lighter change of pace and the heightened focus on upgrading equipment. With this part of the game, you do get a solid 50 hours of enjoyment so if all you do is the campaign, you've still made a solid game purchase.
However, there are more bonus dungeons than there are campaign dungeons, counted both in amount of dungeons and their combined numbers of floors (because one of the bonus dungeons has 500 floors so it alone wins that contest) and, man, do most of the bonus dungeons suck. They feel like unfair chores where RNG decides whether or not you win far too often. They're so high in difficulty that one miss can be the difference between winning and losing, and missing is pure RNG. The worst offender is the one called just Mystery Dungeon and it has so many bad designs that it's forcing me to stop playing to save my sanity right now. It's 50 floors long and you start from level 1 with no equipment, meaning that you have to painstakingly explore every corner of every floor to make sure you find every possible upgrade (since you can no longer partake in the leaving the dungeon to upgrade weapons in town system) and there are no shortcuts, meaning that you have to do the entire 3-5 hour dungeon in one go. And it won't let you save mid-dungeon, even though the game has that feature for other dungeons. Why would you ever do that? That's not difficulty design, that's just you being an asshole. In fact, whoever made these design choices is such an asshole that they won't even let us have a quit or abandon option. If you we enter a dungeon that refuses saving and we suddenly have to leave due to real-life issues, we have to find a staircase or intentionally get killed in order to safely leave without risking corrupting our save by quitting incorrectly. That's just...wow, what an asshole design decision to make.
In short, this game is a super fun lightweight roguelike with lots of charm if you just stick to the fairly easy but not too easy campaign. It's a very solid game that doesn't really suffer from anything except low quality of life with things like an inconvenient city design and, of course, the graphics that were dated even when the original came out in 2009, but that's not a very big deal. The game looks fine. Unfortunately, though, this game becomes an unenjoyable nightmare if you're a completionist who wants to take on all of the challenges and the game becomes tough to give a score for. I'll settle for four stars since the campaign was a lot of fun but the bonus content was lame, and the campaign is long enough for it to not feel like a ripoff of any kind. It just pains my completionist side that I now have to uninstall it because the bad dungeons frustrate and bore me too much.
2 Comments
Nah, it just has Mystery Dungeon in the name. Official Mystery Dungeon games are developed by ChunSoft and this game was made by some japanese outsourcing company I've never heard of.
Nessun
1 year ago