It feels like it's been a long time since we have had an all-new DRPG from Experience and it's been worth the wait. The setting is interesting (early 80s Tokyo, basically playing a miner brought in as all the 'best' people were already bought up by the big company in the area), though the story does kind of run out of steam by the end. In fact I'd argue the whole thing kind of settles into an old groove after about 15 hours; that said, it's a groove that I was looking to settle into anyway, and the whole game system has been made that bit nicer for the player.
The biggest concession is an extremely regular autosave which triggers every time you beat an enemy, go to a new area or even open and close the field menu. As a result, combined with the infinite use dungeon escape item you get after a little while, battles end up being relatively low stakes. This feels like Experience's final answer to the question raised by them still sticking fundamentally to the classic Wizardry game system, including instant kill critical attacks. There's no raising of characters in the field so it's still inconvenient to have someone struck down but the stakes aren't ever more than a few minutes of gameplay.
Overall, while I was a little disappointed that they didn't go further with the new setting and the battle system changes (though 0 MP abilities have been removed, you soon get the ability to take a turn without using any MP; this is actually a great balancing measure as it does limit the ability of a tank to just block everything for you while still making it possible for casters to attack regularly and combined with the other special abilities you get it becomes a new choice that I enjoyed having to make) it's the easiest Experience game to play without actually removing any of the systems that tie it back to that original Wizardry game in 1983. Well, there's one they removed but I'm not sure people will be that sorry to see it go.
In the end, I don't think it quite fascinated me like Stranger of Sword City did, but it came quite close. Well worth the time and money for any dungeon RPG fan who wants to map out some levels and hack some slashes.
Looking forward to what they put out next. Next time, I want to see curved corridors in the maps. I put on Shining the Holy Ark a little while ago and the maps in that are insane compared to this - and that game came out in 1996!
The biggest concession is an extremely regular autosave which triggers every time you beat an enemy, go to a new area or even open and close the field menu. As a result, combined with the infinite use dungeon escape item you get after a little while, battles end up being relatively low stakes. This feels like Experience's final answer to the question raised by them still sticking fundamentally to the classic Wizardry game system, including instant kill critical attacks. There's no raising of characters in the field so it's still inconvenient to have someone struck down but the stakes aren't ever more than a few minutes of gameplay.
Overall, while I was a little disappointed that they didn't go further with the new setting and the battle system changes (though 0 MP abilities have been removed, you soon get the ability to take a turn without using any MP; this is actually a great balancing measure as it does limit the ability of a tank to just block everything for you while still making it possible for casters to attack regularly and combined with the other special abilities you get it becomes a new choice that I enjoyed having to make) it's the easiest Experience game to play without actually removing any of the systems that tie it back to that original Wizardry game in 1983. Well, there's one they removed but I'm not sure people will be that sorry to see it go.
In the end, I don't think it quite fascinated me like Stranger of Sword City did, but it came quite close. Well worth the time and money for any dungeon RPG fan who wants to map out some levels and hack some slashes.
Looking forward to what they put out next. Next time, I want to see curved corridors in the maps. I put on Shining the Holy Ark a little while ago and the maps in that are insane compared to this - and that game came out in 1996!