Dungeon Encounters (Switch) Review

 

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)

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel (PS3) Review

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel (PS3) Review

Date Released: 23 September 2013

Date Played: 30 May 2022

I tried with this game, I really tried.  Trails of Cold Steel is a spinoff series set in the Legend of Heroes universe.  This universe consists of fourteen interconnected games that span several subseries.  The closest thing I can equate it to is the Marvel Cinematic Universe where characters, plot points, themes, locations, and events all carry over between the individual entries in the various series and a deep knowledge of the lore and background of everything associated with it not only enriches the experience but is essentially required to derive enjoyment from playing an individual game.  This very traditional JRPG , published by Falcom, was met with high praise from the RPG community.  However, if you do some digging on the internet, you'll see that many people have the same issues I do.  The game has been followed by 3 direct sequels that apparently continue the story.

Story:

You play as Rean Schwarzer and his classmates from Thors Military Academy.  This academy resides in the Eribonian empire and is a central location in the overall Legend of Heroes universe. After arriving at the academy, Rean learns that the school is split between the nobility and the commoners, but he, and some select classmates, have been chosen to join an experimental group called Class VII.  This class has been selected for mysterious reasons and they are charged not only with completing their school work and military training, but also taking on a host of field studies, fetch quests, and other time wasting opportunities all over the empire.  

As you learn about the struggles of the various regions of the empire during your field studies, you'll see the class struggle between the nobility and their subjects, political espionage, shady pasts of the characters, masked villains, and the unavoidable "chosen one" concept that creeps into basically every RPG.  You're supposed to learn all about your classmate's backgrounds and their struggles and fears as you build relationships with them. This all builds up to a "twist" ending that you'll see coming about 20 hours before the story concludes. Sadly, the game ends on a cliff hanger.  So, you'll need to invest another 240 hours into playing the rest of the games in this sub series to see where it goes.  You'll need to spend over 1,000 hours to play all of the games in the Class of Heroes cinematic universe.  

Honestly, it's all extremely cliché and I feel like everything in this game has been done before... and better.  The story is just standard anime/JRPG stuff... the military academy, the political unrest, and mystery in the school are all done to death.  In addition to this, all of the characters are just generic stereotypes.  There's the pretty girl who gets angry and thinks everyone is flirting with her, the girl that secretly a ninja, the stand-offish noble, the stoic sword master, the overly flirtatious and heavy drinking older teacher, the protagonist with the mysterious background, the nerdy sidekick, the try hard that feels like he has to prove himself to the world, the genius that is top of the class and knows everything, and even the purple cat that always seems to show up at the strangest times. It's just... exhausting. 

At times, the game feels like a visual novel as there is way too much text and dialog that seems to go on and on.  Whenever someone says anything, every other character has to chime in about it and conversations that should only be a few sentences long are dragged out to an almost comical degree. I'll admit that I have much less patience for this now than I did when I was younger.  However, games like Persona are full of dialog.  Maybe even more dialog than this game.  However, the Persona games have style, interesting environments, likeable characters, and unique stories. All things that Trails of Cold steel lacks.

As I mentioned, most of the beginning of the game involves traveling to various regions in the empire.  These are guised as "get to know the region" missions, but really they all involve doing a bunch of fetch quests.  Go find 5 flowers, kill this monster, carry a letter back and forth, etc.  Then, suddenly, some event will happen and you'll have to go investigate and uncover some sort of secret conspiracy.  The town folk thank you, then it's back to school.  In between classes, you hang out with your friends, but mostly you do more fetch quests.  It's very grating and takes like 40 something hours to get past this part of the game.  Considering this is just the introduction to the game where you're getting to learn about your surroundings and classmates, it becomes very abundantly clear that this game has serious pacing issues.  Like, some of the worst I've ever seen.  That includes most JRPGs, which are notoriously slow. This game has no problem wasting your time.

The fans of this game will tell you that you really need to play the games from the other Legend of Heroes series to fully appreciate this game.  Well, I'm not going to spend 1000 hours of background research to gain slightly more appreciation for a game that I don't think has a very interesting story or characters.  They claim that the draw of this series is the "world building" and how all of the political turmoil through the various regions plays out.  Well, I don't like that either.  I just couldn't muster up any feelings about anything in this game.  Even if a game is tied to an overarching series, it needs to be able to stand on it's own.  And in the case of Trails of Cold Steel, that just doesn't happen.

Gameplay:

It's a JRPG.  There aren't random battles.  Instead you wonder around in the dungeon and can see the enemies.  You can attack them from behind, a la Persona style, to gain an advantage in battle.  After that, things take place in turn-based combat like you would expect.  There are a few gimmicks that you need to use to be successful like linking your characters together to give them dual attacks and such, and positioning your characters to avoid area of effect attacks, but in general it's just the same old attack, skill arts, spells, and items. You also have S-breaks, which are powerful attacks, that the characters can unleash if they have their gauge full. Skills are done through slotting gems that you collect into your Arcus.  The game goes all into how Arcus technology works and tries to explain how it's possible.  But, in the end, it's just putting gems into gem slots like in almost every Final Fantasy game. I enjoy turn based combat, and thought that the battles in this game were decent enough.  They aren't good enough or innovative enough to carry the whole game though.  Not by a longshot.  

The game can be a little challenging as you're getting the hang of the combat and the enemies hit pretty hard. Luckily, you don't really need to grind too much. In fact, grinding doesn't work very well because leveling up is so slow.  It's better to just try to hone your tactics and methodically move your way through the dungeons. Most enemies have a trick or weakness that you'll need to exploit to be successful. Once you reach the boss and take them down, you'll be awarded with enough XP to put you around your target level for the next section of the game. Some of these boss fights can be difficult and slow.  So, when you fail, it really feels like a kick in the teeth. Fortunately, if you fail on a boss fight, they give you the option to try again with the difficulty of the boss turned down.  I know this is an answered prayer for a lot of players and I'll admit I did it a couple of times when I was getting tired and ready to put down the controller.  On top of this, you're able to save anywhere in the game (outside of the lengthy cutscenes) so if you're diligent with saving, you shouldn't lose too much progress.

I was struggling with the game at some point and looked online for advice.  Most of the advice in the game involved exploiting its weaknesses.  Things like, "equip all of your characters with delay runes so the enemies never get a chance to attack", or "the only way to make money is to spend 5 or 6 hours crafting omelets with one of the characters and selling them."  It seems like this is one of those games where more people are interested in "breaking" the game rather than mastering it. 

There's also a minigame called "Blade" that is a card game you can play with your friends.  It's very simple and a lot of fun, and honestly was my favorite part of the game.  I wish it was expanded upon more and served as larger component in the overall game.

Presentation:

The game looks really bad.  I know it's a PS3 game from 2 generations back, but it looks rough for even a PS3 game and would look more at home on the PS2.  The characters are very anime looking and have very few features, the environments are bland and textureless, the animations are clunky and awkward, and everything just feels flat and lifeless. If it weren't for the character's hair and the color of their eyes, I don't think you could tell them apart.

The music, on the other hand, is absolutely fantastic.  This especially includes the combat music which is some of the best in the game and is catchy as can be.  The different regions you visit in the game all have unique themes and the music changes to suit them.  It blends harmoniously well with the different environments and I don't recall hearing anything that I didn't think was great.  It's a stellar soundtrack for sure and is one of the best parts of the game.  

The game luckily has English voice acting to go along with the text.  It's pretty well performed, but feels like your typical anime delivery.  The girls are either shy and quiet, or overly cutely.  The guys are quiet and stoic, or overly aggressive.  There's very little in between these two extremes and you can tell the voice actors did their best to give life to these flat and uninspired characters. 

Conclusion:

I had such an unexpectedly boring and unfulfilling time with this game that it made me question if I even liked RPGs anymore.  I have played dozens of them, and before this, I would have considered them a "loved' genre of mine.  Maybe I'm too old for the cliched anime stereotypes and the cookie cutter story... or maybe, it's just bad writing.  It's hard to tell.  The characters, the story, the world... everything in this game just did nothing for me.  I don't want to have to play fourteen 80+ hour long games to feel like I "get" what's going on in the world that the developers have created.  Those sorts of things should be a bonus, not a requirement.  One person online said, "the biggest draw of this game was the promise of things to come in the next games."  Ugh... no.  

It's not a bad game.  It's a completely fine, boring, everyday, cliched, standard RPG.  There are a million just like it.  However, the enormous Class of Heroes world is unique.  If that's something you're really interested in diving into, this game may be for you.  If you're looking for an interesting one-off story with cool characters and exciting locations... this may not be your cup of tea.

I have a really high tolerance for terrible games and have literally beaten thousands of different games.  I'm not sure how many JRPGs I've finished... but it's a lot.  This game was so boring that it took me 6 months to work my way through it.  Mustering up the energy to play for even a couple of hours at a time was a real chore.

Final Status: Played

Final Score: 5/10 (very mediocre)