I've spent some time in Labyrinth of Refrain now. Overall I like it. The biggest problem is that combat is a bit bland. Cast heal when your HP gets low. Defend if the bad guy spends his turn powering up. Use blunt weapons on armored monsters. Not a whole lot of thought involved. The monsters do tend to do a lot of damage, often taking out even your tough characters in 2 hits, which helps make things more exciting. They make it convenient to autofight through battles, which is nice because that's what I'm doing in most of them. If you want one guy to cast heal while everyone else autofights, you can easily do that. One unique feature is that sometimes you get a critical hit that takes a limb off of whatever you hit. This can happen to you as well and there's no way to recover inside the dungeon. You're stuck with a cripple until you go back to town and buy an expensive replacement limb. I like it but it does make the game way more luck based. If you happen to chop a boss's arm off you're in for an easier time, if an important party member gets decapitated you're shit out of luck.
There are tons of things you need to do to prepare for combat. Lots of complicated ways to modify your characters and items. I've never played a Nippon Ichi game before but I'm given to understand this is normal for them. Anyway at the start you have room for 5 dudes in your active party, but over time this will increase up to 15, with room for even more in reserve, ready to be switched in. Your characters are arranged into squads, called covens, which grant various benefits. Different covens allow more or less characters to participate, increase or decrease stats, and grant spells and special abilities. Very few abilities come from classes, if you want a healer or a magic attacker, they need to be in an appropriate coven. I'm not a fan of the system. A lot of the time it asks you to choose between covens that give stat boosts, covens that let you bring a lot of characters, and covens that give you good abilities. 15 stat-boosted fighters with no special abilities isn't an interesting team to play but it does burn through encounters pretty well.
In addition to that you can bet your experience from earlier battles on later battles, getting a bigger payout if you win but losing it all if you wipe or run away. You can choose whether to sharpen or flatten a character's growth rates for their class, eg. give a fighter tons of HP and strength but no magic power, or balance their growths evenly in all stats, and this can be adjusted freely. Seems to me you want double sharp growths on anything with good HP. There's a way to combine multiple equipment items into one super item and an option to reset a high level character back into a super level 1 character and all kinds of things like that.
For the most part you're better off experimenting with that stuff for yourself, but I do have two tips to avoid some nasty trap options during character creation:
Give your characters even lucky numbers for the sake of much faster experience gain in the late game.
Never use moon stance, it brutally tanks your HP. Sun stance is good for people who will never use attack magic, magic attackers should use standard.
I like the exploration. Your party moves very quickly and it feels good just to zip through the dungeon, vacuuming up items as you pass by. All enemies are visible outside of battle. They're very oblivious and most can be easily ambushed. They eventually introduce strong, Etrian FOE-style enemies you're supposed to avoid, but those are even more oblivious and overall they're not handled nearly as well as FOEs are. Anyway the dungeon has most of the things you'd want to see in this type of game. Pits that drop you 3 floors down and instantly kill half your team, obstacles that help or hinder in escaping from enemies, lots of traps and treasure. One cool feature is that you get the ability to destroy walls fairly clearly on. Doing so costs some of your limited magic and it doesn't work everywhere, but it's nice to have the option to bypass things you don't want to deal with, and it's convenient to create your own shortcuts.
There is, unfortunately, very little danger of death by attrition because at any time you can warp back home and then back to where you were in the dungeon. For me, the threat of running out of supplies and being hopelessly stranded miles underground is one the biggest parts of a dungeon crawler's appeal. The dismemberment system I mentioned earlier could have made for some interesting situations if you had to make long excursions, but you don't. Warping back does cost some of the mana you've gathered but it's almost never enough to justify walking all the way back to the entrance.
The story feels even more disconnected from the gameplay than in most dungeon crawlers. You control a party of self-made generics working in the service of the real main characters. There's very little overlap between people who appear in cutscenes on the surface and those you encounter during gameplay in the dungeon. Labyrinth of Refrain also does that JRPG thing where you have to sit through about an hour of cutscenes and dialogue before the game properly starts. Fortunately once you get going the story takes a back seat to dungeon crawling.
It's not bad. Not a must-play but I'd say it's worth playing.
Ruldra wrote:
Is ADOM beatable without a guide/spoilers? I don't mind if it takes a long time and requires lots of notes, but being able to finish it spoiler-free is a must for me. I hear NetHack is outright impossible without guides so I lost interest in playing that.
The normal ending is doable. There are a few gotchas but it's nowhere near Nethack's level. With good roguelike fundamentals and some persistence you can do it. You'll want to go in with an utterly experimentative mindset. Try interacting with all kinds of things in all kinds of ways just to see what it'll do, even if there's no promise of a useful outcome. Even the potion of uselessness is beneficial in one specific situation. The Mad Minstrel's rhymes will give you clues for how to deal with a lot of obscure stuff. Unspoiled ultra endings are a lot less likely but the ultra endings aren't fun so I wouldn't worry about it.
Strictly speaking even Nethack should be beatable through sheer dedication, but we're talking easily 3 digit hours, probably 4 digits of largely brute force trial and error and there's no reason to put yourself through that. There's a cheat option called wizard mode that you could use for easy experimentation. That could speed things up quite a bit. Do wizard mode experiments count as spoilers? That's for you to decide. Yet even Nethack can't compare to the sheer cruelty of the original Rogue, where more than 90% of all characters are doomed to die through no fault of the player whatsoever. Even Rog-O-Matic, the AI created to play at a superhuman level, couldn't win consistently.
Ragnarok is another Nethack-based roguelike that can be beaten unspoiled. I've done it. It has more gotchas than Adom but you never need to figure out anything as obscure as, say, figuring out all the uses of one of Adom's altars. A lot of the trial and error is just like, you get cheapshotted by a monster, so next time you use a scroll of extinction to wipe them out.