Dungeon Encounters

2025-06-04
Motorcycle Ride Review #5

I get geeked up off any hit of Etrian Odyssey that Atlus will slang my way. So when I heard Square Enix was making an old school dungeon crawler I lined up on the corner with the rest of the junkies. But for all it’s sublime minimalism in its board-game-looking dungeons and beautiful character portraits it tosses in just enough anachronistic friction to make the cut not worth markup. I came to my senses when a level 80 Black Hole appeared on a lower dungeon floor and one-shotted my party of level 20s before I could even have a chance to run. I then spent the next couple of hours sending a new party to recover the OG party members who were left “Wandering” like spunions at a music festival. For some people maybe that sounds like a good time but I think I’ll stick with my old dealer.

??? 2021
Ah tragic how this game turned out. It starts off so wonderful: a pure bare-bones JRPG where you descend further, and further into a dungeon beefing up your party on random battles and better gear to combat new threats. The problem is the first 5 hours are the same as the next 30. The numbers get larger and that's it. Compounding with this is the fact that they do a bunch of other "old school" stuff like if your party dies they're stuck "Wandering" and you have to construct a NEW party from whatever level they were left at (sometimes level 1) and grind ALL OVER AGAIN and fight your way back down. One time I met an enemy, "Black Hole", that was like level 80 and I was level 20 and it had a move that one shotted the party. I spent hours and hours getting that party back.

Things it did well? The art was very good. The minimalism including the little lore bits of your characters was cool. The way you built characters was very cool. You basically had equipment points for everyone and you could choose what to spend them on. So a good sword would cost more points than a bad one. But it also meant you could have a mage in heavy armor or any other weird combination you imagine. Of course this also fell apart like many other systems because the best strategy ended up being just equip your whole party with the best AOE magic item and spam it to cheese encounters.

So yeah, huge disappointment. If they had just pared back some of the "old school" stuff that only added frustration and made the game shorter I would have enjoyed it.