Dice Gambit
Review
2025-10-18
Portuguese Persona x Disgaea sounds like that piff truly. And I was immediately pulled in by the endless style. A melange of weirdo anime art imbued with an over-saturated neon hue and the ripping soundtrack of Portuguese guitars paired with a medley of hip-hop beats and EDM. This shit is cool.
Pumped up by all the style, I jumped into the first battle only to find some boring enemies to fight with my one (1) character with their two (2) moves. Even the fun of being introduced to the game’s core mechanic of throwing a set of dice–semi-realistically bouncing across the screen to determine what set of moves you have available to you that turn–couldn’t stop it feeling like Dice Gambit immediately tripped and fell on its face after its grand entrance.
Thankfully it recovers pretty quickly as you start to level up and get introduced to the randomized growth of your characters where their moveset and skill growth is heavily RNG-based. The excitement becomes never knowing what new broken combo of moves and stat increases you'll get to choose from at each level. My favorite is the dice stat, a stat that determines the number of dice you throw each turn. If you just min-max that you'll end up taking mega long turns and be able to run across the entire map or get off a million attacks. FUN. And yet it's also frustrating because if you fuck up, that's that. Send your character to the pasture and make a new one and grind 'em up. Making new characters to expand your roster is a matter of either marrying a suitor with an existing character (random character) or spawning a child from an existing married couple (character that inherits stuff). But it's the grinding--and the overall structure of the game--where it falls apart.
Similar to Persona there's a contrived clock ticking down till Game Over[1]. You have X weeks till Blah Blah blows up the Something Or Other. Each week you send out an expedition which consists of a board game grid of encounters. Some are battles, some heal you, some give you money, whatever. The problem with this structure is two fold.
Problem one: the battles become monotonous almost immediately. Samey maps, samey enemies, samey objectives. Sure, late game they become better but that's only because your characters start to become so overpowered that each turn becomes this fun challenge of how to stunt on enemies. But fundamentally after you've done 5 battles you know what the next 30 or so to finish the game look like. This becomes especially bleak when you face the failson situation I mentioned earlier. Cool so one of your progeny ended up fucked, with some combination of decidedly un-synergistic abilities and stats. Each time its their turn you say "Fuck, this guy again?" knowing you're going to have another lackluster turn of them not really doing much of anything. So now your choice is to stick with the drip and make the game a drag or start fresh with a new kid and grind them back up (and make the game a drag.)
Problem two: the countdown. I get the need for some external pressure to keep things rolling but, fuck man, can you just let a motherfucker live? You give me all these systems to build roided out characters with dumb broken combos but I can hardly experiment because I don't want to end up underpowered for the final level. I said Disgaea but in this respect Dice Gambit couldn't be any further from Disgaea, a series famous for its emphasis on fucking off for hours and hours to grind up characters so you can clown on the main story.
And you know maybe the monotony would be fine if the tacked-on Persona-y accoutrement of relationship building wasn't so anemic. Yeah, you can occasionally have a little meetup with one of the side characters and by doing that (or engaging in specific battles) you'll level up your relationship conferring permanent bonuses. But there's almost no interactivity. It's just some extra dialogue and some meters going up. Hardly enough to distract you from the work that is random battle after random battle.
And yet when you get a good character build going with the lady who has 50% crit and causes chain teleporting attacks to every enemy in a square mile or the dude whose "add armor" move actually adds attack and then one shots boss characters from across the map...it's great. It's great. And for a freshman effort from a new studio I can't help but applaud it even with all the rough edges. Even if it's mostly because of the soundtrack:
Choice tracks
- I'm going to assume that's what happens because I never actually let it go past 0. In fact there’s a whole aside I could have written where this game may be a roguelike but that wasn’t explained at all so I didn’t treat it like one. In general the tutorials and onboarding need a lot of work.