TL;DR:
a solid foundation that could have been fleshed out just a little more.

the lack of story, world building, and a deeper pool of visually distinct assets prevents me from feeling too strongly about this game. at the same time, it is innovative and meaty with satisfyingly designed dungeon layouts and monster interaction.

good 1 - an emphasis on boss fights and strategy for them. invulnerability phases, rage phases, add phases, narrow attack windows, damage type skews, really quite a large array of focus and none of it coming off gimmicky. more, they fully broadcast to you ahead of time what the party level average / boss kill turn number will net you a S rank. i think this is really refreshing. it presents a gentle alternative to the super bosses that you would find in a Dungeon Travelers game, which tend to be strongly bottle-necked by grind and gear. that said, i didn't have that hard of a time getting S rank on every boss.

good 2 - there are level caps and you determine when to level and de-level a character. leveling a character does not take long, and i rarely went over 1.5 hrs of dedicated grinding in a single dungeon. levels determine general stats as well as what skills you have access to. early on this limitations will cause you to potentially skew your levels towards one character just to access their skills for a boss fight.
independent to character levels are skill point accumulation and gear upgrades. every piece of a gear has an EXP bar and will automatically upgrade itself until it reaches that levels max rank. skill points are not capped in any form and will be slowly accrued over the course of the game. all this means that even if you are fiddling with the limitations in pursuit of the S rank evaluation, you can still be progressing in other ways.

good 3 - classes feel more individualized and interesting than they did in Undernauts. instead of subclasses you have alt classes that you can freely swap between. 'order' is focused strongly on the class (black mage for example) whereas the 'chaos' variant can pull from a variety of class skills (support mage w/hunter skills etc). inside of a dungeon you can freely respec your characters skill points and swap between these alt classes. however, you can only change profession back at base.
as much as i like the former freedom, i think you might as well go all the way and let us become FF14. allow me to have every hero be able to freely swap between every class, with gear load-outs saved and loaded in. if this were the case, they could focus even harder on the strategy side of things when it comes to boss fights.

good 4 - an interesting hedge on 'blind' dungeoning. every dungeon you start out in you don't have a map to. the map can be found eventually, or you can wuss out and permanently change to a mode where the map is always accessible. i personally used a third party program to map things out but at the end of the day i don't think it was necessary and probably would have been more fun without (i was expecting Dungeon Travelers-tier depravity).

good 5 - all the amenities of modern crawler: fast menuing, cursor memory, repeat inputs, auto-map movement that lets you quicksnap to exits and move across multiple floors and even through teleporters.

good 6 - delightful art style and animations. it's always pleasant to look at (even if i would have liked more monster variety)

medium 1 - as the game gets later the pool of available items expands making it more difficult to find relevant gear for your characters. i think this is where they could have benefited from the gem system that Demon Gaze uses, allowing you to specify what item bases will drop on the encounter to narrow your selections. but, at the same time you can stick with a lower tier piece of gear long enough it will have upgraded to the point that it is basically on par with stuff you are finding anyway.

medium 2 - dungeon hazards are underplayed to accommodate this emphasis on FOE movement and blindness. traditionally there are warping puzzles, one way doors, conveyor movement, spell restricted zones switch puzzles etc. by the end of the game i think i miss these qualities but at the same time the blind dungeon exploration was wholly unique that it almost balances out.

medium 3 - some text input puzzles, but they are very simple and just involve referencing documents you pick up.

flaw 1 - the dungeon biomes are not visually distinct enough. walls and tiles are essentially repainted or given a very slight flourish, and instead they opt for things like global tint or adding haze or lowering field of vision to change the mood, but Undernauts was much better in this regard.

flaw 2 - story and world-building is significantly weaker compared to Undernauts. there's a mimic you can talk to in every dungeon and a couple people in town you can chat up but there isn't much in the way of story here.
this could be a medium though since i think this appeals to the EO crowd who prefers games light on story but strong in every other area.

flaw 3 - a title this long with this kind of aesthetic evokes a plethora of off-the-wall comedy or rom/com animes that this game is very much not. and while the title an serve as a friendly reminder of how to approach playing the game, it is not emphasized of made meaningful by means of the game itself.
you boot up the game, and a mature female voice very patiently says the entire thing. it is not hammed up or made absurd. it is simply a few lines of dialogue that are said to you at one point early on.
ultimately, i'm not sure what their goal was with this title other than generating media buzz and i think this will only serve to cheapen its value over time.

Reviewed on Jul 19, 2021


3 Comments


2 years ago

thank you for being the only person to actually give this a serious review
someone actually played this game lmao

2 years ago

the title screen lady says the ENTIRE thing? aw hell nah bruh i gotta see this