Dungeon crawler recomendations

Anything from run & guns to modern RPGs, what else do you play?
Searchlike
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Searchlike »

Vanguard wrote:Labyrinth of Touhou 2 got an english release on steam.
Great to hear that! In other news, PS1 Baroque got a Spanish translation. Anyone else excited?
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by guigui »

Vanguard wrote:Labyrinth of Touhou 2 got an english release on steam. It's got quite possibly the best turn based combat of any dungeon crawler. Check it out.
How would the Switch release Touhou Genso Wanderer -Lotus Labyrinth R- compare to Labyrinth of Touhou 2 ?
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Immryr »

there is a really interesting dungeon crawler on switch, kowloon high school chronicle. it's part visual novel, part first person dungeon crawler which was originally a jp only ps2 game.

it's a very unusual game, quite unlike anything else i've ever played.
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Vanguard »

guigui wrote:How would the Switch release Touhou Genso Wanderer -Lotus Labyrinth R- compare to Labyrinth of Touhou 2 ?
Genso Wanderer is a mystery dungeon clone. It's not bad but you're better off playing Shiren the Wanderer unless you just really love Touhou. Speaking of! Shiren 2 for the N64 got a fan translation recently and it's solid! I recommend it! The biggest flaw is that you have to complete the main dungeon multiple times before you unlock the rest. Anyway, Labyrinth of Touhou 1 and 2 are something like Etrian Odyssey but have a far superior combat system.
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by guigui »

Thank you both, Kowloon is on my wishlist, and I'll skip Genso Wanderer. Would like to try Labyrinth Touhou, just waiting for unavoidable Switch release.
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Vanguard »

By the way, have any of you played Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate? Be interested to know if that's worth picking up. I didn't care for Shiren 3, but maybe they learned from their mistakes.
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Searchlike »

Speaking of Shiren...
Spoiler
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3-digit numbers, let's rock!
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Vanguard »

You playing the DS or SFC version? In either case, ganbare!
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Searchlike »

Will do, thanks! It's SFC Shiren. Been playing it on and off since last year, super fun game, I don't even mind how much I suck at it.
Spoiler
My best run so far involved that woman who blinds you but later becomes your BFF basically becoming my bodyguard for a long stretch of the game. I managed to reach floor 21 that way.
I'm probably relying too much on luck, I've yet to come up with a good strategy.
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Vanguard »

Searchlike wrote:I'm probably relying too much on luck, I've yet to come up with a good strategy.
Here are some Shiren 1 tips and tricks:
Spoiler
The best way to secure access to food is to exploit rice changers. They'll have different names depending on the translation you're using, but they're the red guys with the big heads. They have a regular attack that inflicts damage and a special attack where they breathe on you, which converts one item in your inventory into a rice ball. You want to drop your good items on the ground (iirc equipped items are safe, also make sure no nearby monsters will mess with your items on the floor) and then deliberately allow them to attack you in hopes that they'll convert your less useful items into food. It's best to lower their HP so you can kill them easily when you need to - don't let them bring you to critical HP. It also works best if you have a good shield but you can't really control that.

Using healing herbs at max HP increases your max HP by a little bit. Whether it's worth boosting your max or saving them as emergency healing items depends on the situation, but generally I think it's best to boost max HP in the early game, and later on to use weak herbs for your max HP and save strong ones for emergencies.

Keep your rice balls inside of jars of holding so they aren't destroyed by rotting traps. Spread your rice balls out between different jars so that if one jar is somehow lost you aren't left without food. You know a jar is a jar of holding if you can put an item inside and then take it back out without breaking the jar. Another tip for jars of holding is that you can put bags of money on the ground inside them and the money will stay as an item in the jar instead of going into your wallet. This is valuable since bags of money are a potent throwing weapon. They do 1 damage for every 10 coins in the bag. Bags of coins in the 500+ range aren't too rare, and a 50 damage ranged attack is a big deal. You can take the money out of your jar, drop it on the ground, and pick it up normally if you later want to spend it instead.

Arrows are versatile! You can fire an arrow into a dark hallway to find if anything is lurking there, and if nothing is, you can usually recover the arrow. Good for when you have low HP. You can fire an arrow into a wall to separate it from a pack of arrows, which is useful for many things. Drop the pack, pick up the single arrow, and let a rice changer convert it into a rice ball. Put the single arrow into a jar to test it without risking any valuable resources. If it's a jar of change, even better. Fill that up with single arrows and see if they turned into anything good.

Ally characters tend to be extremely powerful in the beginning, but they don't level up so they eventually turn into liabilities. At that point, the best way they can help you is to sacrifice themselves to a monster. Monsters level up after every kill they get, which tends to make them far more powerful and far more EXP rich. Find a nice minotaur or something, let it eat Oryu and Pekeji, and reap a bountiful harvest of level ups. Of course you need to make sure you can actually beat the monster before setting that up. A single shot from a staff of slow will let you 1v1 most monsters without taking damage. Monsters become fairly docile after being hit by a decoy staff, though if you go that route it's best to use ranged attacks. A scroll of sleep will usually work, but beware, any monster that survives to awaken from a scroll of sleep gets permanent double speed.

Don't feel the need to fight every enemy or fully explore every floor. In particular, you should probably get out of the swamp and the final stages of Table Mountain as fast as possible.
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Searchlike »

Vanguard wrote: Here are some Shiren 1 tips and tricks.
Stoked to try some of these out over the weekend. I'm in your debt.
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Klatrymadon »

The Steam release/update of Wizardry Gaiden: Itsutsu no Shiren is still on the way, and should be available as an early access title next week!

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app ... 1141300520

(It's difficult to keep them all straight in my head but I believe this is the last Gaiden game, and that it comes with an editor for creating your own full-length campaigns.)
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Licorice »

So I've mulled it over a bit and I've come to the following conclusions w.r.t. the whole genre thing

1. The dungeon crawler format (or "game loop", to use a cliche), best summarized as: "one town one dungeon"
2. The Wizardry clone: 1st person blob (discrete grid) exploration and turn based combat

Anyway, I have been playing Busin: Wizardry Alternative, or Tale of the Forsaken Land. Got to floor 5. My thoughts so far:

Excellent presentation and art from Katsuya Terada. It feels like a love letter to Wizardry from people for who played Wizardry when it was fresh and in whose imagination it represented a much greater adventure than the primitive technology of the time could depict directly.

Flows well and can be played through intuition rather than careful planning and number crunching. This means that dungeon exploration takes the center stage over combat and party management, although there's plenty of that too. The floors consist of a few building blocks beyond simple grid cells. Namely, you have curving hallways and staircases as well as diagonal corridors, much like in Shining the Holy Ark. This makes the dungeon more understandable as a series of actual locales rather than just a bunch of abstract mazes strung together. Some dungeon floors are random. The dungeon is littered with NPC encounters, five or more a floor, that spring up on you and add surprisingly welcome reading breaks to all the exploration and combat.

Random encounters are replaced with visible "ghosts" of enemies, telling you a bit about what you can expect should you occupy the same position and combat begin. Combat is much more predictable than in the classic Western Wizardries, which functioned as slot machines more than anything. This is, IMO, a big improvement. Like the dungeons, the combat has also evolved from its primitive forebearers through the addition of "allied actions", basically a team playbook menu that lets you use the turns of two or more characters for the round towards various tactical effects.

Spells are gained through an exceedingly simple crafting system that does not irritate me, and I hate crafting. There's a bit of calendar based spice here that's also welcome. Classes are the same as in the classic Western Wizardries (1-5), although I think stat growths and level caps have been changed, as has the MP system. My memory is fuzzy here so please verify this yourself if it's important for you. There are recruitable NPCs as well as character creation (unlocked after the first floor boss). The recruitables have better stats but you can't change their class except with special items.

An important note here is that the game eases you in to its systems. Firstly, you simply create one character to begin with, and are immediately dropped in the town, where you can recruit just 2 more companions at the bar. Better yet, IMO, there is no rolling in character creation. I found this very welcome because it reduced the amount of planning and research I had to do before I started playing. The game is very well "paced" to use an ambiguous term, which to me is really all to do with the balance between learning and play.

My complaints are that the encounters are all quite easy beyond the short amount of thinking it takes to come up with a winning set of moves when you come across a new composition of enemies, and there's no macro (Why did no one copy this from Phantasy Star 4?) system or animation skip feature to breeze through them. Speaking of animation skip, this is my main complaint. The animations are very long. Everywhere. The game really does waste your time in many ways, from slow text speed, to an annoying pause when identifying items, to a stupid little graphic animation when crafting spell stones. Since I'm emulating, I just turn off the frame limiter, and the game becomes playable. It would not be playable at all without this feature and I would have dropped it long ago. Other crawlers are much better in this regard. I heard that this is fixed in the sequel? I don't know yet.

tl;dr if you play it in an emulator and can fast forward, it's more enjoyable IMO than at least the first 2 classic Wizardries, in no small part due to the geometrically complex, 3D, only loosely grid based dungeon, and much more sensible combat. That said you're not going to get gold standard blob combat or party management. For that, the best I have experienced is still Labyrinth of Touhou 2.
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by LichbannMejolaro »

I love the concept behind Dungeon Crawlers and I'm very attracted by how atmospheric they are. For me, the problem is that I could never figure out how to play the turn-based ones. As for real-time stuff, like Legend of Grimrock 1 and 2 and even Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder, I can go on pretty well, always develop a good strategy and since the combat is based on "tile dancing" I feel I'm always in control of stuff and if I die it's always my mistake.

With turn-based ones, I have the impression that I'm always in need of the flip of a coin for things to happen. The very same enemy that can use an AOE and destroy your party can use a simple "attack" command for 2 straight turns and be demolished.

Another problem I have with these games (which is one I have with roguelikes as well) is that it seems that 95% of the time you can win every battle just by mindlessly choosing "attack". Then, out of the blue, you face an enemy that forces you to think and this somehow breaks the braindead pace I was playing on. Maybe I should look for some dungeon crawlers where the encounter design is more meaningful and where every battle matters, but I don't even know if this exists, maybe only in tactical games (which in turn haven't the exploration that DC's offer).
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Mischief Maker »

LichbannMejolaro wrote:Maybe I should look for some dungeon crawlers where the encounter design is more meaningful and where every battle matters, but I don't even know if this exists,
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Ghegs »

I, too, like the concept of dungeon crawlers, but whenever I try to play them I get either overwhelmed by the amount of options, mechanics, and numbers, or on the flip side, they feel much too basic.

A little while ago I tried out the demo of Potato Flowers in Full Bloom on Switch (also available on Steam) and it seems to hit the midway point that suits me great. Your party only has max. three characters (but you can create multiple parties, and several races/classes are available) so it feels very manageable, all the enemies are visible in the dungeon so no random battles (always a plus in my book) and the combat is pretty unique, I think.

The biggest thing with the combat, that even directly addresses LichbannMejolaro's "The very same enemy that can use an AOE and destroy your party can use a simple 'attack' command for 2 straight turns and be demolished." -issue, is that each enemy's next action is displayed, so you always know if they're going to do an AOE, or attack your mage directly, or whatever. And then you can plan your responses accordingly, by guarding, dodging, etc. Resting during battles is also important as the characters have a stamina meter, and if it's empty, you can't do anything but rest. And after each battle the party is healed completely, and even knocked out characters are revived, all without any cost it seems.

I imagine the more hardcore fans of the genre will dislike the combat as EZ mode, but if felt really fun to me. You can even see your characters and their actions during combat, which certainly helps in making the game feel more than just the crunching of numbers. Also, I love that the dungeons are actual 3D spaces - you can look around your current position with the right analog stick. I think this feature alone made the environment feel like a real place to me, instead of just a slideshow of dungeon-y backgrounds.

The game just oozes charm in a lot of ways. Will buy.
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by LichbannMejolaro »

Ghegs wrote:I, too, like the concept of dungeon crawlers, but whenever I try to play them I get either overwhelmed by the amount of options, mechanics, and numbers, or on the flip side, they feel much too basic.

A little while ago I tried out the demo of Potato Flowers in Full Bloom on Switch (also available on Steam) and it seems to hit the midway point that suits me great. Your party only has max. three characters (but you can create multiple parties, and several races/classes are available) so it feels very manageable, all the enemies are visible in the dungeon so no random battles (always a plus in my book) and the combat is pretty unique, I think.

The biggest thing with the combat, that even directly addresses LichbannMejolaro's "The very same enemy that can use an AOE and destroy your party can use a simple 'attack' command for 2 straight turns and be demolished." -issue, is that each enemy's next action is displayed, so you always know if they're going to do an AOE, or attack your mage directly, or whatever. And then you can plan your responses accordingly, by guarding, dodging, etc. Resting during battles is also important as the characters have a stamina meter, and if it's empty, you can't do anything but rest. And after each battle the party is healed completely, and even knocked out characters are revived, all without any cost it seems.

I imagine the more hardcore fans of the genre will dislike the combat as EZ mode, but if felt really fun to me. You can even see your characters and their actions during combat, which certainly helps in making the game feel more than just the crunching of numbers. Also, I love that the dungeons are actual 3D spaces - you can look around your current position with the right analog stick. I think this feature alone made the environment feel like a real place to me, instead of just a slideshow of dungeon-y backgrounds.

The game just oozes charm in a lot of ways. Will buy.
Loved your description, this seems like a Dungeon Crawler I might actually enjoy. The way youd described combat, you the option to see enemies next action and such reminds me a lot of Into the Breach, which is a strategy game I love exactly for the transparency. Every action you make is solely based on what your enemies are going to make next, and this is the top of strategy level for me, since you don't have to play blindly against RNG.
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by cj iwakura »

Licorice wrote:So I've mulled it over a bit and I've come to the following conclusions w.r.t. the whole genre thing

1. The dungeon crawler format (or "game loop", to use a cliche), best summarized as: "one town one dungeon"
2. The Wizardry clone: 1st person blob (discrete grid) exploration and turn based combat

Anyway, I have been playing Busin: Wizardry Alternative, or Tale of the Forsaken Land. Got to floor 5. My thoughts so far:

Excellent presentation and art from Katsuya Terada. It feels like a love letter to Wizardry from people for who played Wizardry when it was fresh and in whose imagination it represented a much greater adventure than the primitive technology of the time could depict directly.

Flows well and can be played through intuition rather than careful planning and number crunching. This means that dungeon exploration takes the center stage over combat and party management, although there's plenty of that too. The floors consist of a few building blocks beyond simple grid cells. Namely, you have curving hallways and staircases as well as diagonal corridors, much like in Shining the Holy Ark. This makes the dungeon more understandable as a series of actual locales rather than just a bunch of abstract mazes strung together. Some dungeon floors are random. The dungeon is littered with NPC encounters, five or more a floor, that spring up on you and add surprisingly welcome reading breaks to all the exploration and combat.

Random encounters are replaced with visible "ghosts" of enemies, telling you a bit about what you can expect should you occupy the same position and combat begin. Combat is much more predictable than in the classic Western Wizardries, which functioned as slot machines more than anything. This is, IMO, a big improvement. Like the dungeons, the combat has also evolved from its primitive forebearers through the addition of "allied actions", basically a team playbook menu that lets you use the turns of two or more characters for the round towards various tactical effects.

Spells are gained through an exceedingly simple crafting system that does not irritate me, and I hate crafting. There's a bit of calendar based spice here that's also welcome. Classes are the same as in the classic Western Wizardries (1-5), although I think stat growths and level caps have been changed, as has the MP system. My memory is fuzzy here so please verify this yourself if it's important for you. There are recruitable NPCs as well as character creation (unlocked after the first floor boss). The recruitables have better stats but you can't change their class except with special items.

An important note here is that the game eases you in to its systems. Firstly, you simply create one character to begin with, and are immediately dropped in the town, where you can recruit just 2 more companions at the bar. Better yet, IMO, there is no rolling in character creation. I found this very welcome because it reduced the amount of planning and research I had to do before I started playing. The game is very well "paced" to use an ambiguous term, which to me is really all to do with the balance between learning and play.

My complaints are that the encounters are all quite easy beyond the short amount of thinking it takes to come up with a winning set of moves when you come across a new composition of enemies, and there's no macro (Why did no one copy this from Phantasy Star 4?) system or animation skip feature to breeze through them. Speaking of animation skip, this is my main complaint. The animations are very long. Everywhere. The game really does waste your time in many ways, from slow text speed, to an annoying pause when identifying items, to a stupid little graphic animation when crafting spell stones. Since I'm emulating, I just turn off the frame limiter, and the game becomes playable. It would not be playable at all without this feature and I would have dropped it long ago. Other crawlers are much better in this regard. I heard that this is fixed in the sequel? I don't know yet.

tl;dr if you play it in an emulator and can fast forward, it's more enjoyable IMO than at least the first 2 classic Wizardries, in no small part due to the geometrically complex, 3D, only loosely grid based dungeon, and much more sensible combat. That said you're not going to get gold standard blob combat or party management. For that, the best I have experienced is still Labyrinth of Touhou 2.
I adore TotFL. Fantastic art and OST, and the story gets really good too. Lot of great NPCs, super immersive. I even imported the (JP only) sequel, though I haven't made much headway... (Wizardry Alternative Neo: Busin 0)


I've been dabbling in Touhou Labyrinth, and it's fun, though the combat is a little too "you win or you don't" sometimes, since battles can end REAL fast if you're underleveled. Still, it's been pretty generous with the cameos, so I appreciate that.
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Ghegs »

Ghegs wrote:Potato Flowers in Full Bloom [...] Will buy.
So it is written, so it is done. I decided to take advantage of the 10% release discount on eShop and use my eShop credit to bring the price down even lower.

And I just finished the game, after 16 and a half hours, with all the achievements gained.

Overall, I loved the game. Right from the get-go where you create your characters, there's no fiddling around with a million stats, you're basically only choosing the classes you want in your three-person party, and then customizing their appearance. As far as I can tell even the race is a completely cosmetic thing and doesn't affect stats or what classes they can be at all, so if you want to have an orc healer or a dwarf ranger, that's a perfectly valid choice. The class dictates that character's skill tree, so while you CAN equip your healer with plate armor and a double-handed sword (which they can use without any problems), their skill tree won't have anything that allows them to take full advantage of that equipment, while the fighting classes will have skills like Sword Spin and Shield Bash. So you'll end up using equipment for their "traditional" classes because it behooves you, not because the game arbitrarily forces you.

I really can't stress how much it increased by enjoyment to actually see my characters in combat from a third-person view, and watch them attack, defend, dodge, and cast their spells. And they're actually holding the weapon, shield, and headgear I've equipped them with. The only exception here is the armor which isn't represented visually at all, which is a shame, they'll always be shown wearing that class' default outfit. Using the headgear does help here, since you can equip your wizard with a proper hat and a knight with a solid helmet. But the headgear is a visual thing only, they have no use beyond that (except for a minor puzzle...)

You can also see the characters when you're taking a rest in the dungeon, and they're doing things appropriate to that location. If you're resting next to a chest, they're shown inspecting it, if at an intersection, one of them will be shown peeking around the corner. And in the Homebase you can see the trinkets you've collected hung up on the wall or filling the shelves, and the characters themselves are relaxing, reading, eating, and so on.

The dungeons, of which there are a handful, were fun to explore. I especially liked how the tutorial dungeon was handled. Not really a spoiler, but if somebody want to go in completely blind...
Spoiler
You can return to the tutorial dungeon afterwards, and it's revealed that the area where the tutorial takes place in is only a small part of a larger single-floor dungeon. It's totally optional to explore the rest of it, but there are some good items to be found and as well as some difficult battles, but beating the true boss of this dungeon is absolutely worth it for the reward. I ended up returning here several times over the course of the game, to see if I could beat that difficult enemy now, or open this locked door with a key I found in a different dungeon.
There is one that can be considered the main dungeon, and it's got several floors and tons of shortcuts within a floor and between floors. The game has automapping, and it's a 3D model so you can spin it around and look at it from different angles, very cool. And you can place tokens on the map to remind you of important places.

My party consisted of a human Warrior, a dwarf Knight, and a dark elf Wizard. The wizard was really the MVP of the group, her spells saved the day many times, and it was she who delivered the killing blow to the final boss after her comrades had already been knocked out. I kind of mishandled the Knight a lot regarding his role in the party, his equipment, and skill points, but it also shows that you don't have create an absolutely fully-optimized party in order to get through the game. There is a way to respec, but it's very expensive.

And speaking of, you can't really grind in the game. The XP enemies give out drops like a rock pretty fast, I think it's tied to the difference between their levels and the character's. Late game I was going through a (probably optional) dungeon where I had a lot of difficulties, and after a grueling battle that I got through with the skin of my teeth, the characters only got 8 XP each. It always takes 100 XP to level up.

Iron, which is used as money to purchase and upgrade equipment, is oddly inconsistent to acquire. Enemies drop it sometimes, but rarely. It can be found in dungeons, but those are one-time-pick-ups. At times it felt like it been hours since I last gotten a single one. Then suddenly several thousands can be acquired in minutes. Equipment can be disassembled for iron, but drops are pretty infrequent as well, so it's not really a viable option. But I also never felt like I was struggling for money, I mostly just used it to upgrade the items I found in the dungeons.

If there's anything to complain about:
  • Not having the armor they're wearing visible on characters. C'mon,
  • At times the game felt even too lenient, there's no punishment at all for dying or party wipe, you're just brought back to Homebase with all your characters, money, exp, equipment, etc. fully intact. Which is nice, but sometimes I felt like I'd like to gauge the condition of the characters and decide whether I want to risk attacking one more group of enemies.
I'd be curious to hear what "serious" dungeon crawler players think of Potato Flowers in Full Bloom. I imagine it'd be considered as an entry title to the genre, and that seems like a fair assessment, honestly. Very approachable, not that difficult (though there were battles that I had to try many times), and doesn't overstay its welcome. There is no post-end game content (that I can tell, anyway) but it does hint that there's more to come, by encouraging the player to keep exploring for things they might have missed, because "the items and knowledge gained will surely be helpful in the following adventures", or something to that effect. So it could be DLC, or maybe a full sequel to which you can transfer your party. The latter is just my wishful thinking though.

I do think I'd like to try the game again at some point with a completely different set of classes for my party. Or if anybody knows of any other similar, lighter takes on genre, I'd be interested in hearing about those. Switch has at least Moonshades, The Keep, and Heroes of the Money Tavern, are those any good?

Earlier I forgot to mention another lighter entry I played through previously and quite liked, that being Severed. It's even lighter than this, as in it you battle by actually swiping your finger on the screen, Fruit Ninja-style, so it's only playable in handheld mode. But I enjoyed it, and it's been on sale for €2,99, so it's an easy recommendation.
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by guigui »

Thanks for the nice writeup about Potato Flowers on Full Blossom Ghegs, as always.
Will definitely try this one when price gets down more.

As for other "light" dungeon crawlers on the switch, I tried the demo of Heroes of Monkey Tavern, but everything felt sluggish in there. I read good things about Operencia Stolen Sun. The classic Vaporum sounds maybe a little too on the puzzle side for my taste, but maybe the new Vaporum Lockdown address this ?
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Ghegs »

guigui wrote:I tried the demo of Heroes of Monkey Tavern, but everything felt sluggish in there.
I tried it out as well. The combat felt pretty meh, at least in the demo it's just "Press B to attack, ZR to switch to the next character, repeat four times for each character, wait until cooldowns reset, do the whole process again until the enemy dies"...not very interesting. But I see the game has been on sale for €0,99 at some point, maybe I'll pick it up when it hits that again.
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Vanguard
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Vanguard »

Ghegs wrote:Potato Flowers in Full Bloom
Potato Flowers is an outstanding game. Lots of cute details - I love how while you have a menu open, you can see your party acting out different things like investigating a treasure chest or carefully approaching a doorway, and of course how Dark Elf-chan waves to you as you depart and return from your excursions. But the best thing about it is its combat system. What JRPG/Wizardry combat has always needed the most were thoughtful defensive mechanics and to provide the player with more information. Helen's Mysterious Castle and Labyrinth of Touhou are two examples of these principles creating better gameplay, and Potato Flowers excels for those same reasons.

You always get to see exactly what the enemy is planning to do before you input your commands, which lets you make better-informed decisions on how to defend and counterattack. I knew I was playing a good game when, in the tutorial, I saw that the enemy was about to focus fire on my ranger, but that he had the option to do an iframe dodge roll through all of their attacks. It's necessary to pay attention to what the enemy is doing because even a knight in heavy armor regularly will go down in one to three hits from most enemies. The basic guard action reduces incoming damage to 1/4, and most classes have their own defensive abilities that are even better. Another important ingredient is the stamina system. Both your characters and your enemies have stamina meters that deplete as you perform actions, and you can rest for a turn to completely refill it. There's a bit of interesting risk/reward with deciding when to rest, because you can do more damage by attacking until exhausted, but usually it's better to save a bit of stamina, because being attacked while exhausted usually means death. That also means that every enemy will have semi-predictable openings for attack. When their stamina gets low you know they'll have to rest soon, which is a great opportunity for an all out attack, but it's also a good time to regain your own stamina, or heal, or begin casting a multi-turn spell. There's more substance to the tutorial in Potato Flowers than there is in the final boss battles of most RPGs.

I liked it so much that I've already done multiple playthroughs to take every class through the entire game at least once, though one of the great things about Potato Flowers is that it uses extreme level scaling for EXP gains, so you always have the option to make a new character from a different class and get them caught up to the rest of the team in <5 minutes if you want to try a different approach. You can respec your skill points in exchange for a lot of money, but I've found it to be more efficient to just make a new character of the same class instead. Character building is nice and quick, you've got decisions that matter but it doesn't waste your time by constantly asking you to make trivial decisions like assigning points in STR to your fighter and INT to your wizard.

Wizard is SSS tier, bring one if you want an easier game. Their damage output is too high and they're the best class in the game at skipping enemy turns. They're even good melee fighters with the right equipment. They're fun to use but they trivialize a lot of problems. I like putting a ranger in my back row instead because they've got good damage, can heal, can revive, have useful debuffs and lots of versatility overall, but generally don't completely overwhelm the enemy like wizards do. Rogues are something like melee rangers. They have the best evasion in the game and can do well as front row dodge tanks. Warrior and knight are great additions to your team because they both have the ability to take damage in place of one ally (while still receiving the 3/4 damage reduction for defending). I feel like warrior is a bit more useful overall but the two are mostly interchangeable. Cleric and shaman are mostly support/healer characters and it's worth mentioning that neither is necessary. Damage mitigation is more important than healing. Sorcerer is just a bad wizard, but not really in a way that makes the game better balanced. Against enemies vulnerable to fire, sorcerers are almost as overwhelming as wizards are, but against enemies that resist fire and don't count as living, such as demons or animated weapons, sorcerers have extremely limited options and are almost dead weight. Fortunately every class can use all weapons and armor competently, so in those situations you can just give your sorcerer a two handed hammer and they'll still be useful, just not as good as any other class would be.

The dungeon design is good and some of the upgrades you acquire throughout the game improve your ability to explore rather than your ability to fight, which is cool. For example, early on you can obtain a pair of boots that let you safely jump down from any height, which opens up some new options you didn't have before. It's full of secrets, and often you'll have multiple options on where to explore next. There are a few puzzles, but they're pretty easy.

The worst thing about Potato Flowers is that there's not enough of it. It's fairly short at ~15 to 20 hours for a first playthrough and there there's no hard mode. Still, it's an easy recommendation.
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Sima Tuna
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Sima Tuna »

Roguelikes are my favorite dungeon crawlers (alongside SMT games.) When I say "roguelike" though, I mean real roguelikes. Brogue, Shiren the Wanderer, ADOM, Tales of Maj'Eyal, DoomRL, Cataclysm DDA, Qud, etcetera. I'm not talking about action roguelites. I have played a fair number of other dungeon crawlers, especially Etrian Odyssey, and the difficulty curve usually feels pretty wack and characters unsatisfying to use. For me, anyway. In Etrian, you're so reliant on your characters having their class abilities, but every ability comes from the same MP pool, so your party's usefulness is effectively on a variable timer. I just got fed up with that eventually. Especially since the games are long as fuck. In a game like Yodanji, your abilities are on cooldowns and each step is a turn, so you can definitely use up all your power in a hard fight, but it's never permanent. In Shiren, abilities are largely tied to consumable items, and you can find more as you explore. So it's limited, but you're not SOL like you are in Etrian when your party hits low MP. SMT has a lot of ways you can drain MP, but it still kind of suffers from "party is useless without mp" syndrome. Thank goodness you can have something like 15 party members and swap them out freely.

When I'm going to be in a dungeon for a very long time, I don't want the game to take me out of that experience by folding its hands and demanding I Escape Rope outta there. I want to be in. Win or lose, I shouldn't be removed from the dungeon arbitrarily by character batteries hitting zero. In Baldur's Gate, you can "rest" in dungeons to restore health and spell charges, at the risk of being ambushed. Every step you take in a traditional Roguelike usually heals you and abilities go off cooldowns. So if you can survive, you can keep making progress.

Persona 4 is another example of a dungeon crawl that will fold its hands and defiantly proclaim "thou shalt not adventure any more today, go and do more annoying school bullshit instead!" Oh, you wanted to grind more? Well, you can either pay a prohibitively high price to restore your mp, which is a huge waste of money, or you can fuck off and come back later.

I guess maybe some might prefer to have limited resources. Like some survival horror kinda shit. But I think that works in survival horror because they don't have random battles and it's possible to succeed an encounter without spending resources. That shit is incredibly rare in, say, Etrian Odyssey, when facing same or similar level mobs.
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BryanM
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

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lol, Persona 3 and 4 are about as anti-dungeon crawler as you can get. Which I always found ironic, since they literally have a solitary designated dungeon zone with randomly generated dungeons. But the dungeons are just empty hallways with mooks and chests tossed around; along with my own jRPG prototype random dungeon failure, really made me appreciate how much work you have to put in into making large interesting dungeon chunks, if you're going the lego dungeon route. Frankly good random dungeons require more work, not less. Which is what the Persona/Lufia GB teams were going for: just a fast way to churn out dungeons to walk through. Nothing is free, sadly. (Which is why GANs are like witchcraft, they're seriously sorcery guys.)

... MP systems are usually implemented in a lame way, yeah. Nothing's more fun than... not using your skills... One solution is to have the game restore some of it when you win a fight. So it's possible to run dry, but refilling is accessible. The Persona Q games at least give you an MP buffer. Beats... beats my strategy of refilling in P4's early game by spending turns on weak monsters as it regenerates.
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Ghegs
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Ghegs »

Vanguard wrote:Dark Elf-chan waves to you as you depart and return from your excursions.
Yeah, I loved that. The low-poly aesthetics don't hold the character(s) back from being appealing and filled with personality.
The worst thing about Potato Flowers is that there's not enough of it. It's fairly short at ~15 to 20 hours for a first playthrough and there there's no hard mode.
Kind of agree, though I prefer it when a game is too short as opposed to being too long. If it was 40+ hours I'd probably never play it again even if I wanted to test out different party builds. Being short is more inviting for repeat plays.

One small con I forgot to mention earlier - the NPCs you find and occasionally rescue in the dungeons scatter around a bit between the dungeons and their floors. So you have to remember where they are when you want to take advantage of their wares or services (though they are also visible on the map). It'd have been nice if the NPCs had come back into town with you to put up their own shop, or to the homebase. I was actually surprised they didn't, considering the game is big about player convenience. But it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
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Vanguard
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

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Sima Tuna wrote:When I'm going to be in a dungeon for a very long time, I don't want the game to take me out of that experience by folding its hands and demanding I Escape Rope outta there. I want to be in. Win or lose, I shouldn't be removed from the dungeon arbitrarily by character batteries hitting zero.
The problem isn't that your resources are dwindling, but that you have an easy way out with the escape rope. Though I do prefer it when standard attacks aren't totally worthless.
Sima Tuna wrote:In Baldur's Gate, you can "rest" in dungeons to restore health and spell charges, at the risk of being ambushed.
That's bad too if there isn't a hunger clock or similar to keep the pressure up.
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Sima Tuna
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Sima Tuna »

Vanguard wrote:
Sima Tuna wrote:When I'm going to be in a dungeon for a very long time, I don't want the game to take me out of that experience by folding its hands and demanding I Escape Rope outta there. I want to be in. Win or lose, I shouldn't be removed from the dungeon arbitrarily by character batteries hitting zero.
The problem isn't that your resources are dwindling, but that you have an easy way out with the escape rope. Though I do prefer it when standard attacks aren't totally worthless.
Sima Tuna wrote:In Baldur's Gate, you can "rest" in dungeons to restore health and spell charges, at the risk of being ambushed.
That's bad too if there isn't a hunger clock or similar to keep the pressure up.
There are a lot of difference clocks going in baldur's gate, but they're not mp-gating you to force you to leave.

You could run out of magic charges.

You could have a character die, which in BG1 cannot be fixed except by leaving and walking to a shrine.

A character could be "chunked." When a character dies to overkill damage, they have a chance of exploding into gore and being unrecoverable. It's a permanent kill.

You could run out of healing.

Now, you can recover health and magic charges by (successfully) resting, but that means...

You could get ambushed trying to rest, and maybe that doesn't sound so bad. Believe me, ambushes can be brutal. A bad ambush is basically an automatic reload. "Ambush" means a group of enemies spawn somewhere in line of sight. Usually in the worst possible place. You could get six ghasts spawning right next to your mage. Instant fucking death. Even if the game spawns the weakest enemies possible in for your ambush and you kill them easily, getting an ambush is equivalent to failing a rest check. So you do not get your spell charges back and any hp regain is minimal. There are many rooms in BG1 and BG2 where you 100% cannot rest. Every time you try, it will spawn an ambush. So trying to rest is a risk-reward system. You have to find a place that seems safe and hope that it actually is.

Another limitation on your ability to dungeon dive is inventory space. If you never go back to sell your spoils, you'll eventually have too much shit you don't need. And characters have weight limits, past which they suffer penalties in combat. Hoovering up all the loot isn't a mindless task. Any item of +1 quality or better starts out as Unidentified and can only be identified by either a store owner, a character with abnormally high Lore stat (such characters are rare), or a mage using the Identify spell (which takes a spell charge to use and slots in your book.) If you can't identify items, then you can't use them without risking being cursed. Curses in BG are very creative, and include such things as transforming you into a zombie, placing you in permanent berserk and even changing your alignment or gender to its opposite.

I don't mind limitations on dungeon diving if they make sense and are reasonable. Ideally, the game shouldn't punish you for trying to engage with its content. I just wrapped up Durlag's Tower for the second time and it was a blast. You can spend hours in there, crawling forward one step at a time, desperately checking everywhere for traps, facing down the strongest monsters in the game and praying you get a chance to refresh yourself between ball-busting encounters. :lol:
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Vanguard
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by Vanguard »

None of those things give Baldur's Gate anything analogous to a proper roguelike time limit. Furthermore, Baldur's Gate is a savescumming RNG-fest so permanent consequences don't really matter.
Ghegs wrote:Kind of agree, though I prefer it when a game is too short as opposed to being too long. If it was 40+ hours I'd probably never play it again even if I wanted to test out different party builds. Being short is more inviting for repeat plays.
For sure, but it could still benefit from another floor or two. It's got such a nice combat system, it's a shame there's no deadly postgame floor for those who have mastered it, though maybe that'd just encourage multi-wizard parties. The current difficulty level is still pretty good, challenging enough that you have to take it seriously, not so hard that you have to use optimal parties.
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

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Vanguard wrote:For sure, but it could still benefit from another floor or two. It's got such a nice combat system, it's a shame there's no deadly postgame floor for those who have mastered it, though maybe that'd just encourage multi-wizard parties.
Yeah, like I said in my own post earlier, I wish there was just a bit more to explore. A separate post-game dungeon with a harder difficulty level would've been nice, though one of the dungeons (I forget the name, the one-floor dungeon with skeletons and rodents and everybody's wearing heavy armor) is somewhat like this already, since at least for me it was considerably harder, some good equipment can be found there, and I believe it's completely optional.

I do hope we see some DLC or a continuation in some other way, as the ending screen hints at this pretty heavily.


---

I was feeling curious and industrious so I went and looked up every blobber-dungeon crawler available on the Switch I could find, might as well collate the data here in case anybody else finds it useful:

R=Name&Physical version available&Other info R=Conglomerate 451: Overloaded&No&Some roguelike elements. R=Demon Gaze Extra&Yes&English available only for Asia version physically, not on cart but available via patch. R=Drawngeon: Dungeons of Ink and Paper&No& R=Dungeon Encounters&Yes&Has no inside view of the dungeon from the character’s POV, but looks to be a standard DRPG otherwise. R=Haunted Dungeons: Hyakki Castle&No& R=Heroes of the Monkey Tavern&No& R=KonoSuba: God’s Blessing on this Wonderful World! Labyrinth of Hope and the Gathering of Adventurers! Plus&Yes&Only available in Japanese in any form R=Kowloon High-School Chronicle&Yes& R=Labyrinth of Galleria: Coven of Dusk&Yes&Only available in Japanese in any form R=Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk&Yes& R=Legends of Amberland: The Forgotten Crown&No& R=Mary Skelter 2&Yes&Includes sort-of-remake of the first game. R=Mary Skelter Finale&Yes& R=Moero Chronicle Hyper&Yes& R=Moero Crystal H&Yes& R=Monster wo Taoshite Tsuyoi Ken ya Yoroi wo Te ni Shinasai. Yuusha Tai ga Maou wo Taosu Sono Hi wo Shinjiteimasu&Yes&Only available in Japanese in any form. Western release in 2023. R=Moonshades&No& R=Operencia: The Stolen Sun&No& R=Potato Flowers in Full Bloom&No& R=Saviors of Sapphire Wings / Stranger of Sword City Revisited&Yes& R=Severed&No&Touch-screen only. R=The Keep&No& R=The Lost Child&Yes& R=Undernauts: Labyrinth of Yomi&Yes&


Could I have used the shortened form "Mon-Yu" for "Monster wo Taoshite Tsuyoi Ken ya Yoroi wo Te ni Shinasai. Yuusha Tai ga Maou wo Taosu Sono Hi wo Shinjiteimasu"? Yes.
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LichbannMejolaro
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Re: Dungeon crawler recomendations

Post by LichbannMejolaro »

Sima Tuna wrote:Roguelikes are my favorite dungeon crawlers (alongside SMT games.) When I say "roguelike" though, I mean real roguelikes. Brogue, Shiren the Wanderer, ADOM, Tales of Maj'Eyal, DoomRL, Cataclysm DDA, Qud, etcetera. I'm not talking about action roguelites. I have played a fair number of other dungeon crawlers, especially Etrian Odyssey, and the difficulty curve usually feels pretty wack and characters unsatisfying to use. For me, anyway. In Etrian, you're so reliant on your characters having their class abilities, but every ability comes from the same MP pool, so your party's usefulness is effectively on a variable timer. I just got fed up with that eventually. Especially since the games are long as fuck. In a game like Yodanji, your abilities are on cooldowns and each step is a turn, so you can definitely use up all your power in a hard fight, but it's never permanent. In Shiren, abilities are largely tied to consumable items, and you can find more as you explore. So it's limited, but you're not SOL like you are in Etrian when your party hits low MP. SMT has a lot of ways you can drain MP, but it still kind of suffers from "party is useless without mp" syndrome. Thank goodness you can have something like 15 party members and swap them out freely.

When I'm going to be in a dungeon for a very long time, I don't want the game to take me out of that experience by folding its hands and demanding I Escape Rope outta there. I want to be in. Win or lose, I shouldn't be removed from the dungeon arbitrarily by character batteries hitting zero. In Baldur's Gate, you can "rest" in dungeons to restore health and spell charges, at the risk of being ambushed. Every step you take in a traditional Roguelike usually heals you and abilities go off cooldowns. So if you can survive, you can keep making progress.

Persona 4 is another example of a dungeon crawl that will fold its hands and defiantly proclaim "thou shalt not adventure any more today, go and do more annoying school bullshit instead!" Oh, you wanted to grind more? Well, you can either pay a prohibitively high price to restore your mp, which is a huge waste of money, or you can fuck off and come back later.

I guess maybe some might prefer to have limited resources. Like some survival horror kinda shit. But I think that works in survival horror because they don't have random battles and it's possible to succeed an encounter without spending resources. That shit is incredibly rare in, say, Etrian Odyssey, when facing same or similar level mobs.
I'm with you on this one. I wouldn't say roguelikes are my favorite genre because the 2d platformers exist, but roguelikes are the closest I get to like turn based combat. Even more because in this genre of games, the world never "stops" when you enter a combat. Each extra turn you take on a particular fight might make allow another enemy to get dangerously close to you, which can be your demise. But I love the fact that they offer a "pure" dungeon crawling experience. I once played a wizardry-inspired game called Elminage and it's quite impressive how much the game forces you to NOT explore the dungeon, since at every corner you can find an enemy that 1 shot your entire party and or give them nasty status. Combine this with the fact that if your character dies he a) is dead for good or b) forces you to expend a pornographic amount of money to revive him, and then you have it: the game is a pure RNG/reset/save-state abuse stuff.

The only gripe I have with roguelikes, mainly with the classic ones like Nethack, Adom, Angband and others is that the game is huge to the point that it's almost a waste. I mean, a winning run in Nethack takes 40+ hours. Considering that you have to spend this amount of time making no mistakes is kinda harsh. Happily for me, modern roguelikes are offering very well made adventures in which the main quest can be beaten in no more than 10 hours (things like Cogmind, Rift Wizard, Golden Krone Hotel, Jupiter Hell) with optional extra harder quests and dungeons that takes a lot more to complete.

Since you mentioned action roguelikes, it's kinda sad that they are developed in a way where the difficulty curve is always descending, since at the start the game is hard but after a few runs you get so much permanent upgrades that it's almost boring to finish. The only action roguelike that I feel that plays like a roguelike is Spelunky/Spelunky 2.
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