An interestingly weird minimalist dungeon crawl style jRPG. Recommended if you are a fan of JRPGs and are interested in seeing a weird, competent deconstruction of jRPG mechanics. The game takes the basic mechanics of JRPG combat and exploration, strips them down to their fundamentals, and makes something as interesting as possible with what's left. I think it is a successful experiment, but it wont be to everyone's tastes. Exploration: You explore a dungeon made out of a large 100 x 100 x 100 3d grid, starting from the top, and fighting increasingly more powerful monsters as you dig deeper down in the cube, each layer a different "level", and every 10 layers make up a stratum of the dungeon with its own set of enemies, visual themes, music and level design gimmicks to keep things fresh. Some grid spaces are marked by white or black hexadecimal numbers (00,01,02... through FC,FD,FE,FF) that mark those grid spaces as special. Black numbers mark the location of random battles, and are scattered at random every time you enter a floor. White numbers are fixed special locations, such as stairs up/down, special abilities to collect and shops. Along the way, you discover new movement and exploration abilities you can use to explore, such as a leap that skips over a few spaces, or the ability to dig straight up or straight down one level. These abilities allow you to find shortcuts by figuring out short 3d paths through the maze that allow you to return to safety in few steps, or sometimes allowing you to find secrets or access special locations on certain levels. However, some of these abilities are dangerous to use: One of the "dig down" abilities, if used carelessly, can result in your party falling through the entire maze and down into the void below, which leads to your whole party getting scattered all over the map. Combat: Battles use a simple but effective, stripped-down active time battle (ATB) system such as found in most Final Fantasy games from FF IV onward. Much of battle strategy comes down to prioritising targets in combat, choosing the right attack ability for the right enemy, and building a party with varied attack options so you can reliably take down any combination of enemies with various strengths and weaknesses. The game manages to do this with shockingly simple components that strip these sorts of combat fundamentals bare, removing nearly all obfuscating layers that would otherwise hide them. Enemies and party members all have very simple characteristics and combat actions which you can see at a glance during combat. You know exactly how much damage your attacks do, and how much damages enemies can soak up before they die, which allows you to pick exactly the right moves in combat to eliminate your foes while taking as little damage as possible. Enemies have three separate life bars: HP, Physical Defence and Magical Defence. You need to deplete either physical defence or magical defence (using physical or magical attacks) before you can attack an enemy's life directly. Your own defense bars replenish between battles, but your characters' life bars do not. A lot of enemy variety comes simply from giving them a different balance between these three numbers. There are some patterns in their designs, such as undead enemies always having exactly 1 hp but high physical and magic defence, making them very vulnerable to the few rare abilities and weapons that pierce defence and attack life directly. There are also flying enemies that cant be targeted with Melee attacks, and Reflecting enemies that bounce Spell attacks back to the caster. The weapons/abilities you can equip to your party members are very straightforward, and can all be described with only 5 characteristics: Damage Amount (from 1 to 999999), Damage Variance (either Fixed or Random), Damage Type(Physical or Magical), Range(Melee or Ranged) and Targeting (Single or Multi). All abilities and weapons are just different combinations of these, with very few exceptions. Conclusion - It is impressive how much depth the game manages to pull out of such stripped-down mechanics, it really squeezes every last drop of blood out of that stone. it feels like playing a JRPG that's been taken apart, all of its pieces labelled and categorised for you to poke at as you play. Never quite played any other game like this. It's not for everybody, but I think if you played a lot of JRPGs before, this could be interesting to you. If you're not sure, get it when its on sale.
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