Dungeon Encounters (Switch) Review
Release Date: 14 October 2021
Date Played: 20 June 2022
Are your favorite parts of an RPG the combat, level grinding, and item farming? If so, Dungeon Encounters was made especially for you. If, on the other hand, your favorite parts are the story, interesting characters, and inspired world building, then this game may not do much to pique your interest. Developed and published by Square Enix, Dungeon Encounters takes the standard JRPG format and strips away everything that isn’t related to combat. That includes the aforementioned story and environments, but it also includes graphics, animations, dialog, and music. It has been met with some mixed reviews from the public with people both praising and lamenting its simplicity.
The premise is that a 99 floor dungeon has appeared and everyone wants to go explore it. You select your party of 4 from the available characters and dive right in. There is no difference between the characters other than their portraits and some slight defensive gains when leveling up. Stripped away are character classes and unique abilities. Most character stats are tied to the items you equip. This essentially turns your characters into nothing more than living mannequins to hold your weapons and armor for combat. Likewise, the dungeons themselves are represented by nothing more than a grid system. There are no buildings, terrain, NPCs, music, or anything else that you might expect to see in, well… any video game. Locations of interest are marked on the grid based map with numbers. White numbers represent shops, healing fountains, items, stairs to other floors, etc., while black numbers represent combat encounters. You won’t know what the numbers mean until you encounter them. After that, notes about what they are appear in a reference in the game’s menu. It’s a bit cumbersome to remember that tiles labeled, “06” are healing fountains and, “9B” has that annoying enemy you don’t want to deal with, but it does serve to maintain the austere premise of the game. As you continue to explore the dungeon, the tiles you’ve walked over change color and you’re given skill points for fully exploring entire floors of the dungeons. These skill points are essential to your success in the game, so it’s imperative to explore as much as possible. This is easier said than done because many of the floors have hidden paths, riddles, and overpowered enemies that will impede your progress. You’ll have to do the best you can and come back later when you’re stronger. The dungeon layouts aren’t randomized, but the enemy placement is. So, if you’re struggling, you can move to a different level of the dungeon and immediately come back to rearrange the enemy locations. The riddles are usually in the form of number array math problems where you have to find the missing numbers from a pattern. These numbers give you the coordinates of a secret item. They can be challenging, and will take some serious thinking to solve some of the harder ones. There are also wandering characters hidden down in the dungeon where you have to use context clues to find a specific tile to find them. These characters can be very helpful, but are kind of annoying to locate. I know these sorts of puzzles are supposed to be one of the big features of the game, but they just didn’t do anything for me. A lot of these locations you’ll have to physically write out the coordinates on a note to yourself so you can remember to find that specific square on the grid several floors down (or up). There’s nothing on the grid to show they are there, so you are essentially running around and clicking on empty spaces until you find something.
Combat is your standard turn-based style that you see in most JRPGs. Everyone can equip two attack items which usually include one melee and one magic as well as a couple of armor/item slots. The enemies all have defensive and magic armor that you need to deplete that you can deal actual damage to their HP. It adds a nice strategic element to the game as you can’t simply 1-shot most enemies and you’ll have to carefully figure out your course of action by reviewing the turn order. This goes for your characters as well as they all have both defensive and magic armor. For a lot of the game, these armors are usually depleted in a single hit. Meaning, boththe enemies and your characters are usually killed in 2-4 hits. You have to pray that one of your characters doesn’t get hit with 3 magic attacks in a row, because that will most likely be curtains for them. Enemies also have lots of annoying attacks that can poison, petrify, steal your gold, and just eat your character in 1 bite. There isn’t really a way to deal with these until you locate skills on specific tiles placed around the dungeon. These skills can be equipped for the whole party but require the usage of skill points (the ones you get for exploring the floors fully). These skill points are limited in the allocations until you explore more, so choosing what skills you want to equip takes some careful consideration. This is also where you’ll be able to equip your only healing/resurrection skills. So, you’ll need to equip your best skills using your limited skill points before many of the more difficult encounters to have a fair chance. There’s nothing quite like having one of your characters petrified and turned to stone. They are too heavy and you can’t carry them with you. So, you have to leave them behind and make a mental note of the coordinates where you left them on which floor and continue to explore without them until you find a gorgon shrine somewhere else in the dungeon. Then you have to use it to input the coordinates of the petrified character to return them to normal. Then, you have to traverse all the way back to where you left them and add them back to your party. It’s a HUGE pain to do this and after it happens to you, you’ll do everything in your power to make sure it doesn’t happen again. So, before going into combat, make sure you have your petrify immunity skill equipped. There are lots of instances of having to backtrack in the dungeons to do stuff like this. I personally didn’t find it very fun at all and it pretty much made me wince every time it occurred. The grid system is so boring to look at that backtracking over the same areas again and again becomes very boring and tedious. The lack of music while exploring doesn’t help at all.
Every 10 floors or so, you’ll encounter a town which is just a large group of white numbers that will allow you to heal and purchase new equipment and spells. You’ll really need to stay on top of keeping your characters maxed out with the best equipment you can afford. This means you’re going to be doing a fair amount of grinding for money and rare item drops. The enemies can be rather unforgiving in this game and it’s not too hard to get your party fully wiped out. If this happens, you have to go back to the starting area and pick all new characters and then try to progress all the way back to where your other party died and try to save them by carrying them one at a time to the nearest resurrection shrine. Also, once again, extremely tedious. If, by an unlucky turn of events, all the available characters in the game become unusable due to being K.O.d, petrified, or what have you, you can start the game over from the beginning but maintain all of your levels. You will lose all of your equipment, skills, and dungeon exploration, unfortunately. Grind, grind, grind.
In terms of the presentation, the character model walking around the map looks decent, but that’s really all there is to catch your eye. I mean, you’re looking at a grid with numbers on it. The color of the background changes every 10 floors but that’s all you’re going to get in terms of variety. Even the enemies are repeated over and over and just get stronger as you progress. The combat music and victory music are interesting in that they are themes from classical favorites arranged for 3 part electric guitar (and nothing else… keeping with the minimalistic aesthetic). You’ll hear Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in the first area and A Night on Bald Mountain in second. There’s also hits from Wagner, Grieg, Rimsky-Korsakov, Dvorak, and Chopin. This is capped by the fantastic L’Alesienne March by Bizet for the victory music (one of my favorites). It’s a nice selection, but I wish they had included some songs outside of the combat scenarios. Also, while I love the distorted guitar arrangements, the mixing is thin and the guitars sound very trebly and tinny. Coming through the Switch’s speaker in handheld mode can be a bit off-putting as it’s pretty shrill.
The game’s overall length seems to clock in around 40-50 hours based on how much grinding and backtracking you need to do. Sadly, after 6 hours or so, you’ve seen everything the game has to offer. The combat encounters don’t get much more complex and the enemies just have more health and hit harder. The weapons and the spells are all basically the same and just deal more damage as you upgrade them. As another reviewer put it, “I realized the game was just the same thing over and over with switching out lower numbers for bigger ones.” Unfortunately, I have to agree with that assessment. It's all the tedious parts of playing a JRPG without any of the narrative, environments, characters, and charm. You know those parts in JRPGs when you get into a dungeon and your characters just aren’t quite strong enough and you’re struggling against every encounter? Maybe a couple of characters in the party are K.O.d, or you’re low on healing items, or you’re just trying to make it to that next save point so you can have a reprieve. Dungeon Encounters basically feels like that most of the time. When it doesn’t, it feels like you’re just steam rolling over everything with little to no effort. So, there are somes slight balance issues and difficulty spikes that the developers are counting on you grinding through.
Conclusion:
Dungeon Encounters isn’t a bad game. It’s just that it feels like the combat system to a more grand and epic JRPG that doesn’t exist. The combat is engaging, fun, and addictive. It’s just that it gets very repetitive without the other RPG elements to spread it out. The fact that it’s drawn out to the length of a standard RPG despite missing those elements means that fatigue will set in rather quickly.
I have to commend the developers for trying something new and I think a stripped down JRPG is a good idea. But, perhaps they took it a little too far and expanded what was left a little too much. If you are the sort of person that skips all of the dialog and cutscenes in an RPG and just tries to get to the next battle, then try this out. If you’re the sort of person that rushes through the battles as fast as possible so you can get to the next bit of story, skip it altogether.
Pros:
Good and addictive combat system
Innovative and new concept
Can pick up and play in small bursts
Awesome combat music
Cons:
There is no story or anything else outside of combat
Game gets very repetitive and recycles a lot of its own ideas
Exploring the dungeon floors feels tedious and a bit like a chore
Game is too long and overstays its welcome
There’s not really anything to look at in the game and is little more than a graphically improved spreadsheet.
Final Status: Played
Final Score: 6/10 (Ok)
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