I wish this was a normal game. The first two story chapters do their respective sinners wrong but each canto gets better and it doesn't stop. You get to explore the world and wonder how the next canto will top the previous one. This is a sequel hacked into gacha, if it stayed a normal game it'd be a spectacular rush where story and gameplay both get better and better and reach for the stars. Canto 6 ditches gacha dungeons from previous cantos and is the closest it gets to the experience limbus could've been. And unlike some songs mili does for other series, the limbus ones are always story relevant, sure nobody will say anything if you want to listen to them outside the game yet the ideal is to wait for context and reach the epic ruina boss. Remember to read leviathan first ofc. Despite what some people might say If you arent familiar with previous games and the comic you won't know what's really going on since the start.

And sure, it has gacha issues I won't deal with since you can probably imagine like endless grind and dailies and gambling and crap, it's awful. You are going to read about how this is the best possible execution of gacha and it's just faint praise. I guess the first things you'll also notice are autobattles and the ability to read if attacks are going to land or not, such as Dominating and Hopeless ones, which is neat qol that is not present in ruina. Autotargeting enemies is something ruina has (press P) but barely works. In limbus it works but it's a gacha game. It would be a good idea if this was a normal ruina sequel of a couple encounters, one against mobs to play quick and farm resources followed by some boss to spam special attacks against. But this is gacha about autobattling a dozen fights against nothing until you reach a somewhat challenging fight, then you might start reading and manually deal your clashes like in ruina. This is why dungeons at the end of most cantos are weird, it's where the plot gets good and gameplay takes even more of a dive, encounters are just not interesting, there might be some bosses who require you to read, but it's just droning through mob fights and saving a ton of resources to launch your special attacks later. Compared to ruina I hated my first 60 hours or so in limbus. Again, they just kind of hacked great ruina combat ideas into a gacha game and made it braindead enough.

This is the game for the current pm crowd and some people just don't have it in them to play games well, even though it's this braindead, because of uis, because of bad tutorials, but really some are just not good enough and will never make it past a boss. If this is you, it's still nice to watch this on youtube. But I think it's self sabotage since the ludo in limbus is actually nice to experience through gameplay unlike the dumbass self flagellation ludo of lobcorp and this side of limbus too just gets cooler. I persevered through gachashit and was rewarded

tldr cool world to explore + cool ludo

Tales of Maj'Eyal plays like a standard roguelike with the addition of an impressive number of build options and a vaguely open world for you to explore. Some of it works, and some of it doesn't, but it is a very interesting entry in the genre that has been better every time I have tried it.

Besides the regular roguelike stuff, there are quite a few quality of life advancements here -- ToME eschews some of the things that I would call antiquated like randomized potions and scrolls, for instance. Other systems are obviated after a couple of plays with items that automatically identify everything for you, automatically destroy items for money, and let you warp out of dungeons easily. This stuff is welcome, but it feels like those systems should have just been removed outright.
ToME does have some UX problems that get in the way, however, with tons of menu and stat gore that make things generally difficult to easily understand and make equipment and abilities hard to compare. It is unfortunate since other modern roguelikes like Brogue and Cogmind have done a ton to move the genre forward in ways that ToME misses.

I like the build options, even though things can be a bit obtuse and the number of things to choose from is a bit overwhelming. Your character is just a set of skill trees defined by your race and class choices which works well as an interesting, modular way to build characters in a game like this. I did find myself tending down the same paths for any given class, but there are enough possible characters you could build that it doesn't really matter at all.
I really liked unlocking new classes and seeing what they have to offer. There is a lot of creativity on display here from straightforward melee classes of various flavors to ranged attackers, magic users, summoners, and mages who use possession. No other roguelike I have played has quite this variety in character options that can fundamentally change gameplay to this degree. The flipside of this is that many of the classes can play pretty poorly. The aforementioned summoner and possessor seem cool, but I found the actual mechanics to be clunky and dissatisfying.

ToME is an open world, but is heavily gated by level ranges you are sort of intended to find by trial and error, I guess. You can wander the (static, predefined) overworld and find your way into (predefined) dungeons that are procedurally generated at a specific difficulty level. Going into a dungeon that is too tough for you will almost always just result in near instant death. Because of this, despite the world being ostensibly open, things end up very linear. It is unfortunate, since you can see a lot of potential in a game like this with a generated open world layout or simply more options for where to go at any given time.
This is ultimately what has made me shelve the game both times, since even though the builds feel unique, what I am doing in the world feels repetitive and boring.

This is a cool roguelike to mess around with and worth trying out if you are a fan of the genre. I bounce pretty hard off the world/level design aspects, but find myself wanting to return just to explore the classes and unlocks and I haven't really even tried the expansions.
Tales of Maj'Eyal has only gotten better over time, so I hope dark7god continues to add cool things to this project.

PC port of this game can be found here: https://archive.org/details/infinity-blade-pc

This series was The Game at the time, it had a presentation and vision that was just something else compared to anything else you could dig out of an app store. Playing the PC port nearly a decade and a half later puts into perspective how much of the difficulty at the time came from doing all of the tapping and swiping motions on such a small phone screen. Playing it on said PC port now turns it into a bit of a meditative grind that you can do while half paying attention to something else. Hopefully there will be a source code drop for the sequels at some point, I'd love to explore memories related to those too.