Dungeon crawler recomendations

[BryanM]

The first person sections of Warriors of Eternal Sun are cartoonishly unbalanced. The optimal strategy for playing the game is to immediately high-tail it to the "hidden" fire cave and slaughter Fire Giants and Red Dragons to level up.

If you're familiar with Dungeons and Dragons even a little bit, you know that's really not something a level 1 party should be able to do.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Hyakki Castle looks really interesting

It looks like the Switch release is still available at least, even if the PC version's gone from Steam (and DMM Games).

you could always buy a Switch or PS4 ver to support the developer then find a less-than-legal copy of the PC version to use...

[Ghegs]

Hyakki Castle looks really interesting;

But alas, it was delisted without explanation a while after getting a big V2 polish patch

Oh darn, I didn't realize it had been delisted. ;w; I'm sorry, didn't mean to get your hopes up. There's gotta be something else on that list that'll hopefully scratch your itch...?

edit: It looks like the Switch release is still available at least, even if the PC version's gone from Steam.

Got a mini heart attack there. I've had Hyakki Castle on my eShop wishlist for a long time because I've been waiting for it to go on a sale (which it never has yet), since I try to buy digital-only games only when they're discounted. With the recent delisting of other DRPGs I got scared I had missed my chance completely, but luckily it's still there.

Went and picked it up now, just in case. But since my Etrian Odyssey HD collection should be arriving any day now, I probably won't be starting Hyakki Castle up until much later...

[guigui]

The first person sections of Warriors of Eternal Sun are cartoonishly unbalanced. The optimal strategy for playing the game is to immediately high-tail it to the "hidden" fire cave and slaughter Fire Giants and Red Dragons to level up.

If you're familiar with Dungeons and Dragons even a little bit, you know that's really not something a level 1 party should be able to do.

Now you sent me back at 14 years old, my very first custom grinding routine :
* start game with at least a Wizard
* avoid encounters while travel to lizardmen cave
* get entangle spell for Wizard in lizardmen cave, avoid fights if possible
* go to hidden Red Dragon cave
* while at least a member of party is not level 10 yet do :
- enter cave
- entangle Fire Giant (can be ommited later when characters are strong enough)
- kill Fire Giant
- entangle Red Dragon (can be ommited later when characters are strong enough)
- kill Red Dragon
- exit cave
Save just before levelling up in order to maximize HP gained. Reload if not good.

Now you have your perfect team

I loved doing this over and over again. Certainly the reason why I still dont mind grinding for stuff in games today.

[Lander]

Real-time dungeon crawling isn't my cup of tea. Not with a full party anyway. I just lack the brainpower to manage so many spinning plates. Nor do I enjoy the backwards/sidewards dance of "haha I hit you and then I move so you can't hit me." Not very bloody sporting, is it?

Arguably, neither is sidestepping a roundhouse in Tekken so you can sneak in a gut punch while your opponent is in recovery marquis of streetfight rules!

Really, the plate spinning is why I'm after something more direct; hopping the mouse around character portraits under pressure makes it easy to bungle your rotation, but it feels like the discrete space / continuous time setup could go deeper if not balanced via cognitive load.
Though granted, it's a bit of an odd image for a four-man party to be pulling off elaborate dodge rolls and flanks while retaining perfect 2x2 formation

Oh darn, I didn't realize it had been delisted. ;w; I'm sorry, didn't mean to get your hopes up. There's gotta be something else on that list that'll hopefully scratch your itch...?

Is ok, I 4gib u ;w;

And yeah, no doubt - I'll have to have a proper dig through the 111(!) real-time titles and see what I can find.

you could always buy a Switch or PS4 ver to support the developer then find a less-than-legal copy of the PC version to use...

Why, I would never! The medication must have worn off for a moment

[Sima Tuna]

Labyrinth of Zangetsu is a really cool little Wizardry clone. It uses Sumi-E style inkbrash visuals. The core gameplay is as Wizardry as it gets. Right down to classes/races (minus any copyrighted to wizardry itself.)

I've heard it's not a very long game. I'm at the second major dungeon (past the first major boss) and my character level is around 9 for everyone. You can multiclass whenever you want and you keep skills you've learned. So, unlike Labyrinth of Yomi, there is reason to multiclass. My party is: Samurai, Warrior, Monk, Cleric, Mage, Thief. Starting as Samurai probably wasn't the best move though. My Warrior has 30+ more hp and performs about the same. I suppose things will even out when I cross-class them into each others' classes.

You do have an automap and minimap, but character facing is not displayed. This is fine imo. There is a spell to allow you to see your character facing but it's not a big deal. You can figure it out very quickly by referencing your movements on the minimap.

I'm not sure if Zangetsu is worth the asking price considering how cheap games in this genre tend to be, but if you like dungeon crawlers then you might as well try it out. It's like a new Wizardry game was made but without the license. It's faithful to that style of dungeon crawling. I do find the gameplay overall deeper and more rewarding than Labyrinth of Yomi so far.

Yomi is a fun game, but it's becoming harder to play as I get deeper into the game. Strategies for combat feel extremely simple and spammy (spamming your highest-damage skills and party heal with Overcharge every 2nd turn), characters of a same or similar class feel the same and obtaining new gear doesn't proffer as profound a character upgrade as I would hope. The class upgrade system is rather poor imo. You can't upgrade a character until you obtain Promotion Argent. This item is a rare drop gated by story progress and some lategame grinding. I complained about Valkyria Chronicles 2 doing a similar thing by gating promotions behind collecting items. What this means in practice is you are likely to play a large portion of the game with only a few promotion argent available. So you will spend a majority of the game with Basic classes and only promoting a couple of your MVPs. Perhaps this could add strategy in a different game, but it doesn't add much. Other than a few essential spells like buff block (which you have to look up in advance to know which promoted classes gain this,) your strategies will Basic classes work just as well. Spamming Helm Splitter with Fencer works just as well as spamming Vampiric Slash. Vampiric Slash just costs a shitload more mp. Oh and on that note... I'm kinda not a fan of tanks and physical damage dealers needing MP just as much as mages. Yomi circumvents this flawed system (where your main damage dealer can only use their main damage skills a couple times before running dry on MP,) by providing the insanely overpowered Overcharge boost ability-which disables mp cost for the entire party. This has the opposite effect of making combat too easy most of the time, since you can use Overcharge every 2nd(!) turn if you want. All of the boost abilities are pretty broken tbh.

I'm not saying Yomi is bad. Just that its gameplay is simple to a fault and rather easy for this genre. I beat most bosses on my first attempt, which is just sad. Yomi is absolutely gorgeous though, features QoL out the ass and it has a fantastic soundtrack.

[Ghegs]

Finished Etrian Odyssey 1 HD, or reached the Normal End anyway, at 57 hours.

My party of Landsknecht, Protector, Dark Hunter, Alchemist, and Medic got through the normal game pretty confidently. It was only in the beginning when the characters had wooden sticks for weapons and paper mache for armor that it was rough, but after the first biome it was pretty smooth sailing, even killed all the non-optional bosses on my first try, and managed to beat a handful of the optional bosses too in the course of my playtime. Protector doing a Protect/Parry, Alchemist firing off spells that were then comboed into by Landsknecht, with Dark Hunter trying to seal off the enemy's worst attacks with her whip, worked like a well-oiled machine.

I first tried playing the game with the automapping turned completely off, but making the map manually just slowed down the game so much, and the user interface is a bit clunky, even after 50 hours I was still pressing the wrong buttons occasionally when I wanted to switch to the map-editing mode and add a door or something to it. I also tried playing the game on handheld mode and poke at the map with a touch pen, but it wasn't all that comfortable either. So in the end I just had as much as automapping on as possible, which basically means I only had to put in door/chest/resource harvesting locations and the occasional note. At that point I kind of wish the automapping would just add in the former automatically.

Not sure if the game loses anything by not fully making your map like in the DS original. The map layouts are quite superb here anyhow. Not that big a fan of the biomes though, when it's just a forest...then a jungle forest...then a different kind of jungle forest...then a deserty forest...

Spoiler

And then I reached the 5th Stratum, that hit me like a ton of bricks. Really cool surprise.

Could still have done with a dungeon-like dungeon in there.

Five is kind of a weird max. amount of characters for a party to have, but it's balanced well, all of the classes have some skills that would be good to have. And I appreciate that there's no class changing/taking skills from other classes.

A small thing, but I like how all of the bosses (at least the ones I fought) only got one action during their turn. Not like in Experience's titles, where a boss could do several different attacks, buffs/debuffs, healing, etc. all in a single turn. Felt more fair and consistent.

The game's just so well-designed overall, I'm having a hard time finding anything to really complain about. I guess I didn't really like how I needed to spend a few skill points for resource gathering (or alternatively raise up a completely separate party just for that purpose, which didn't sound like a fun use of my time). I think I'd have preferred if that part was removed completely, with all the resources just being drops from enemies. And to be fair, many of the drops from resource points can also be acquired from enemies.

I did do some reading afterwards and the post-game seems MUCH harsher and more strict on your characters' builds. The normal game wasn't bad at all (played it all on Expert), I guess the game's reputation for difficulty either comes from the post-game, or how it was originally released during a time when DRPGs of this kind weren't that common (as I understand, the game was made in hopes that it'd inspire more people to create DRPGs again), so most people naturally compared it to whatever JRPG's were popular at the time.

While I did like the game, I don't think I'm gonna go for the post-game, I'm feeling a bit burnt out. After Demon Gaze Extra, I actually played Undead Darlings: No Cure For Love while waiting for my Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection to arrive, so I've basically played three DRPG's in a row now. I really need a little break from the genre. But I'm looking forward to starting EO2HD later on.

(Undead Darlings is pretty bad, though. I only played it for around 10 hours but it felt much longer, and not in the good way. Annoying map layouts, weapons have durability like they're in a recent Zelda game...I don't think I can stomach finishing it)

[BryanM]

Heh, spoilers on a fifty year old game~ That trope is a classic one lots of the Wizardry games had. Ultima too, for that matter. More variety's always a goal.

Just out of curiosity, is there a HUD setting where the 1st person crawling view isn't offset into the corner like some kind of animal? The whole "cram two DS screens into one" setup was always my unfavorite compared to screen flipping/inserting the hud elements as a normal smol HUD overlay like in a normal game. One thing I've always hated about this genre is how easy it is to just stare at the autonap in certain games instead of the POV, which always killed immersion for me... (flashbacks to NES Pool of Radiance. Each zone (except one) gives you the entire map, but the maps in that game don't display doors, they look like walls. I have pretty a huge number of the door locations in that game memorized. Just burned into my brain.)

Giant awkward UI's that display unnecessary information (gotta know what your static unchanging STR stat is at all times!) is a classic design aesthetic of old retro computer games.

... hm, you guys ever think about how with modern computer power, it's actually rather easy to design these games without them needing a "map" at all? Rooms and walls can actually look different now. Eh, I'm just very anti-map in general.

[Ghegs]

Just out of curiosity, is there a HUD setting where the 1st person crawling view isn't offset into the corner like some kind of animal? The whole "cram two DS screens into one" setup was always my unfavorite compared to screen flipping/inserting the hud elements as a normal smol HUD overlay like in a normal game.

Yeah, there's a full screen mode where the first-person view takes up the whole screen, with a minimap in the upper right corner like in most contemporary DRPGs. You just switch between that and the "map mode" with the press of a button whenever you want.

Navigating solely via the map is certainly a thing, and it's not as fun as playing in first-person POV, but often it's just necessary when the dungeon cranks the maziness up to 11, and the environment has no discerning features. When all corners are in 90-degree angles, you always move on a grid, and you can only see 2-4 squares ahead of you, it's kind of hard to get around map-playing being more efficient. Some games try to discourage map usage by locking the map behind MP or consumable items, but I don't think that's a perfect solution either.

[Vanguard]

I'm playing Dungeon Travelers 2. Despite being a really cheesy ecchi game it's also surprisingly a solid dungeon crawler. I'd rate its quality just a touch below Etrian Odyssey's level, and Dungeon Travelers 2 has like 3x as much content as one of those does. The character and party building are fun and give you tons of options, and you can respec without penalty at experience levels 15, 30, 50, and 90. The combat is standard JRPG stuff but good class designs and a moderately high difficulty level keep it engaging. It also feels a bit CRPGish which is interesting for a Japanese game. You can save wherever you want. The dungeons are pretty hostile and deliberately waste your time in a bunch of ways, not unlike what you might expect to see in a classic Wizardry game. Well usually it's not quite that mean. You can also exploit the maid class's generous heart ability by running away from fights to trivially restore your party's HP and TP in the dungeon, costing only a bit of tedium, which also feels like the kind of exploit I'd expect to see in a CRPG. Give it a try if you can tolerate (or enjoy) a DRPG where like 90% of the enemies in the game are anime girls with cat ears or other minor monster parts like that.

[cj iwakura]

Etrian Odyssey 1's plot twist is so good that the others don't even bother trying. It felt like they were going all out, knowing they wouldn't get another shot, so they may as well go full crazy... so after that, they just stuck to generic fantasy and stayed there.

[BryanM]

It's as old as computer games, almost. From the very first Ultima game over forty years ago, at the very least. Richard Garriott was a lucky ducky to have no competition back then.

I wouldn't classify all the cthulhu and scifi stuff that "generic" anyway. What else is there to do? The well's not that deep.

You can get to the bottom of the [s]horror mystery[/s] labyrinth, and what's left that would be surprising? The TV set of some Barney/Together with Maman children's show?

You'd be like "saw it coming" a mile away. That's the problem with becoming genre savvy. The shocking twist these days is when there is no thematic shift!

"Ah, so the town I was in was actually a kind of purgatory and everyone trapped within it was some kind of murderous sinner. Yeah, I was getting that vibe from the start, really..."

[FunktionJCB]

Digital Eclipse just released on Early Access a 3D remake of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, the first game in the series:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2518 ... _Overlord/
https://www.gog.com/en/game/wizardry_pr ... d_overlord

[Sima Tuna]

On the one hand, it's Wizardry and that's pretty cool.

On the other hand, I fucking hate Digital Eclipse for pumping out so many dogshit ports with 8+ frames of input lag and broken graphics/sound.

[Ghegs]

The game definitely deserves a remake, being the classic that it is, and making some quality of life -improvements is a good thing.

But I'm not a fan of Early Access, and I'm kind of hoping for a console port which the devs mention might be in the cards after Early Access ends, so I'm not sure I'm actually going to buy it yet...

Also, Mon-Yu is releasing next week and I'm looking forward to it.

[Vanguard]

Forgot to mention something important earlier: the only place you can legally buy the pc versions of Dungeon Travelers 2 and its sequel 2-2 are on a dubious website called johren that only gives you a limited number of installs after buying the game. If you run out, you can buy it again, so unfortunately it's yet another game where the pirates get the best version.

[Klatrymadon]

The heavily SMT1-inspired Touhou Artificial Dream in Arcadia is out later today! I'm extremely excited about it, despite having very little experience with the main Touhou series, its world and characters or its fandom. It just looks fantastic.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2248 ... n_Arcadia/

[Lethe]

The heavily SMT1-inspired Touhou Artificial Dream in Arcadia is out later today! I'm extremely excited about it, despite having very little experience with the main series, its world and characters or its fantom. It just looks fantastic.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2248 ... n_Arcadia/

I've played this for a little bit now, midway in the second major(?) dungeon. Its biggest divergence from SMT2 is in the SP gauge. This is a shared resource that persists between battles, is built efficiently by hitting enemy weaknesses, and can be spent on three things:
1. unique special attacks found on some characters. Sometimes these are inheritable but it seems to be on a case-by-case basis.
2. commands, which are usable once per turn cycle, are character-agnostic and do not consume an action. Most powerfully, these include party buffs, taking stress off someone always needing access to those spells.
3. hijack (recruitment). No negotiation, you do a danmaku pattern instead and if you survive you get the character. If the opponent is damaged first, the pattern gets easier. Initially this costs 50% of the bar but you'll soon be able to lower it to 25%. There are no limitations on using it besides being able to pay the SP.

This third use has led to the game feeling a little easy so far - not unengaging, but going in with a reasonable understanding of SMT I've been progressing at a good clip and I've only died once. Very few of the patterns I've seen have been threatening at full enemy HP (they'd be even easier if they were the correct way up...), success ends the fight immediately and duplicate summons can be converted into money, making hijacking an extremely efficient encounter skip that takes the onus off optimizing your party for each zone. Each character has one pattern so doing them repeatedly at ~10-15 seconds each gets repetitive. Generic unnamed enemies cannot be hijacked and are thus potentially dangerous, but given how many resources you're otherwise saving, you can just vomit expensive attacks at them and get your SP back up in the process.

The only real way I can see out of this problem are if the full-HP patterns get unreasonably hard later. Promisingly, the game has unlockable mutators/cheats/difficulties which may provide an option to mitigate this later on.

Anyway, it's been fun so far.

[Klatrymadon]

Absolutely. I think it's probably the best SMT game in a decade, but I'll have to talk about it another time. For now I just wanted to share a couple of really exciting English translations that have been released: Dungeon Master Nexus for Saturn and Ultima Underworld on PS1. The former feels like a big Christmas present to me - I've been dying to play it for years, as a King's Field fan with an interest in other free-roaming 3D DRPGs, and it presents a good use for my Satiator, which I haven't used nearly enough to justify buying...

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Its biggest divergence from SMT2 is in the SP gauge. This is a shared resource that persists between battles, is built efficiently by hitting enemy weaknesses, and can be spent on three things

Interesting, it sounds a bit like the meter from the Persona Q games that functions the same where your support partner can spend meter you've built up to provide buffs, albeit with more functionality here.

The turning animation is really well done assuming it's actually using 2D for the main viewscreen.

[Lethe]

I've been seeing it as a Press Turns-lite: a good offense results in occasional extra turns, which can be banked, but can only be spent on a preset selection of things. (And there's no chance of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory a la the SMT3 classic.) While it's a really good addition by itself, I feel its significance is hamstrung by how open-ended the team building is, which I'll get to below.

The hijacking problem became more self-correcting than I thought. Unlike summons which have sacrifice, there's no way to turbo-level Sumireko. You want to ease off and start taking more fights before a deficit starts limiting your fusion/sacrifice leapfrog. In fact, if you're not scumming for resources or fodder, it may be better to avoid hijack as much as possible to expedite your XP.

The biggest issue I'm having now is, ironically, how convenient everything is. Skills can be transferred onto anyone arbitrarily and I have excessive amounts of money for database recalling. With a party max of 20 and 8 skills per character, it's trivial to make a boring generic omnipotent A-team, plus simultaneous nigh-identikit B-, C- and D-teams. This isn't helped by how nearly every boss I've seen is encountered in its recruitable form first - meaning you'll be going in knowing how to steamroll them without even a wasted SP action on Analyze, let alone significant compromise. I'm very tempted to restart and gimp myself by allowing skill transfer via fusion inheritance only; see how long a more purist style can hold up before progression gets too tedious.

[m.sniffles.esq]

Relevant to thread's interests:

Islands of the Caliph

It drops Questron and Alternate Reality in the description which gets both my attention AND interest

[Sima Tuna]

Relevant to thread's interests:

Islands of the Caliph

It drops Questron and Alternate Reality in the description which gets both my attention AND interest

I LOVE Arabian Nights/middle eastern fantasy themed games and I wish we had way more of them.

[m.sniffles.esq]

I LOVE Arabian Nights/middle eastern fantasy themed games and I wish we had way more of them.

It's weird, the '70s took a hard turn towards European fantasy (wizards and elves) and sort of left the "Sinbad shit" (as my friend used to refer to it as) behind. And I've been waiting for the pendulum to swing back for awhile now, but it seems to never get there.

I was once in a party conversation where someone pontificated that people were afraid of Sinbad shit nowadays, because no one wanted to be accused of racism or whatever. Which struck me as crazy if true, because the fantastical and the offensive realms are pretty goddamn far apart. And if you can't tell the difference maybe you should find a new gig.

[Sima Tuna]

I LOVE Arabian Nights/middle eastern fantasy themed games and I wish we had way more of them.

It's weird, the '70s took a hard turn towards European fantasy (wizards and elves) and sort of left the "Sinbad shit" (as my friend used to refer to it as) behind. And I've been waiting for the pendulum to swing back for awhile now, but it seems to never get there.

I was once in a party conversation where someone pontificated that people were afraid of Sinbad shit nowadays, because no one wanted to be accused of racism or whatever. Which struck me as crazy if true, because the fantastical and the offensive realms are pretty goddamn far apart. And if you can't tell the difference maybe you should find a new gig.

Yeah, I don't understand it myself. I don't see how it's racist if fantasy fiction has a flavor of another culture or country. Japan and China have their own fantasy subgenres/mythos to draw upon. That's what Wuxia and Xianxia are. Japan has anime and manga, to say nothing of more traditionalist storytelling like the films Kuroneko, Onibaba, Kwaidan and Ugetsu. (And the stories that inspired those movies.)

I love Arabian fantasy, and who says it has to be racist anyway? Just don't make it racist! Djinni, lamps, the desert, camels, treasure, slaves, palaces filled with servants, craggy mountains with secret caves... These things don't make a story racist! And how does "it contains brown people" make it racist either?

I'm currently reading Desert of Souls, which is an unapologetic sword and sorcery romp through an arabian fantasy setting. It's entirely respectful of the religions of the era in which it's set.

The 1001 Nights is a story about stories and the love of storytelling. I want that love for telling stories to come back into our media. I think a lot of companies just decided to move away from anything remotely Islam/Middle East after 9/11, and then they probably came up with the "racist" excuse later, as a reason to never return to the genre. But I've never thought of Thief of Bagdad or Golden Voyage of Sinbad as "racist." They are beautiful adventure movies. Made using british actors sometimes, yeah. It would have been better if the entire cast were local to the areas the stories are set, but those are pretty old movies. If they were made today, that historical inaccuracy could be corrected easily.

[m.sniffles.esq]

I love Arabian fantasy, and who says it has to be racist anyway? Just don't make it racist!

Which is what I was saying, when this was brought up. And kind/sorta thought the whole thing held no water, until about a year ago I go to see this movie Three Thousand Years of Longing which I found imaginative, charming, etc and was shocked/confused/confounded to discover the official White Person Problematic Police™ had rated the film "P" for "problematic" due the the fact

Spoiler

a WHITE woman fucks a djinn. Therefore, reinforcing stereotypes that Muslim, brown-skinned, mythical beings exist only to sexually satisfy their white-skinned Christian betters

Seriously

I saw a couple of these deem the film "racist trash" over this 'issue'.
It's like a MadTV sketch, except not only were these people dead serious, the makers of the film actually had to respond to the accusations (other than laughing in the accusers faces).
Suddenly, I thought back to that party conversation and was like "Maybe dude had a point, after all..."

Anyway, back to the game:
I haven't got a chance to check it out, as it's keyboard only (I only have a trackball/controller currently hooked up to the cpu I play things on), so I can't speak to overall quality. But, I noticed it's real-time combat, which I just saw you specifically mention you didn't care for.

[BryanM]

Sex and violence are as fundamental to fantasy worlds as they are to being freakin' alive. Some people really won't be happy until we're all bloodless miserable rocks or something. Not everything is meant for everyone - I don't personally have a ton of interest in all those books where guys can't keep their shirts on for some reason for example.

The Youtuber Salari comes to mind. He had a breakout hit with his Talent Belongs to the Beautiful video. He absolutely has many points about what flawed animals are we. But also spends a lot of time effectively repeating the "horny is not allowed" meme, but, in a much more serious manner than its colloquial use. On the scale of problems, considering we're in the pre-apocalypse, it seems a bit excessive to nag people to stop having fun or joy in their imaginations.

As for why certain aesthetics are avoided, people like what they're familiar with. People are used to the perverted things Bay does to Megan Fox, so that's socially acceptable. (I always ponder if there's anything I've ever seen in an anime that's as gross as that one scene of There's Something About Mary.) Superheroes take up a lot of oxygen that could go toward other power fantasy stuff like Xianxia. Every dollar put into those makes them more valuable, and by extension everything else less profitable. It's the same problem as Wizards of the Coast only being able to make one cardgame. Or any corporation getting stuck on one franchise. (Pokemon is almost a parody of that! Biggest franchise on the planet. The people who make the games try to make other games. Lots of other games. Very weakly.)

(Also fantasy tends to be a stone soup kind of deal, where you just chuck in whatever you feel like is cool. Dungeons and Dragons has the monk class solely because martial arts movies were getting hot at the time, and the designers thought they were cool. All myths like fairies and djinn and cowboys just kind of become a subset of the homogeneous blob.)

But yeah, I think it's mostly the disinterest in people who aren't like the viewer or people they know. The cult of celebrity and imaginary friends etc etc. The impossibility of seeing an Asian person in a movie who isn't a scientist or a ninja or a kung fu guy is so ubiquitous we probably have multiple songs about it.

[Lander]

If memory serves, the narrative turned from 'racism' to 'cultural appropriation' at some point, presumably after some collective realization that merely depicting something foreign doesn't qualify intrinsically. Various flavours of How dare you steal this rich history to tell your insipid whitey stories / How dare you presume to depict it better / How dare blah blah blah.

It comes down to the nature of a given depiction, at the end of the day.

Islands of the Caliph looks promising - bit of a Pathways Into Darkness vibe to the art, and the promise of open-world real-time crawling is of interest. It appears to have Rummaging as a stat too, which is up there with +1 Dickerin' for charming nomenclature.
Though I twitch at the combination of multi-resolution pixels, perfect hardware perspective projection, and CRT filter. That, however, isn't a hill worth trying to die on at this point in the throwback cycle.

Oh, and I started Etrian Odyssey 1 HD after getting the urge to draw some maps. First time I've touched a traditional turn-based japanese guild blobber, and it's pressing all the compulsion buttons.

Bloody grindy early game; took about 7 hours of Real Poverty Adventuring to get my team into a stable state and reach the second stratum, which is quite a departure from the consistent forward progress of something like Grimrock, but i'm satisfied in diligently sketching out the map and seeing numbers go up.

I hear later games in the series are a lot more refined - it's admittedly a bit tiresome to do the walk-forward-look-left-look-right pattern down every corridor in search of hidden wall prompts, and some paths feel like they exist solely to be mapped. But, that's only a problem for the first visit to each floor, so less of a big deal once accustomed to seeing each area more than once.

[BryanM]

I hear later games in the series are a lot more refined - it's admittedly a bit tiresome to do the walk-forward-look-left-look-right pattern down every corridor in search of hidden wall prompts,

That's a mainstay in the first three games. More-so in the third iirr; the second one has mid-strata savepoints and might have toned down the shortcut routes. I'd have used doors and keys to do them myself, but I guess they didn't want to break the immersion and vibes.

Not sure what the later games are like since I haven't gotten around to them. Backlog bigger than Kansas, etc.

[Ghegs]

Just finished Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters And Gain Strong Weapons And Armor. You May Be Defeated, But Don't Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be A Day When The Heroes Defeat The Devil King, at a bit under 32 hours.

I've found Experience, Inc's DRPG's to be of solid, if somewhat basic dungeon crawlers. You play one, you've played them all, I've heard some say. But there's still been a definite, gradual improvement in their quality over time. So I expected Mon-Yu to be just a bit better than their previous outing Undernauts, which I enjoyed greatly.

Sadly, that is not the case. I'd rank Mon-Yu to be a mid-tier or even a low-tier (but on the upper end of low-tier) dungeon crawler. It was designed to be an entry-level DRPG - and that's perfectly fine in itself - but I feel it lacks an interesting hook to pull players into the genre. It makes away with most of the intricacies of character creation, job class is all that matters. There's no race, or gender, or anything other to select, other than the character's name and portrait (the artstyle is very super-deformed and cutesy, maybe they were going for non-threatening there?) which don't have effect on the character. There are still the classic attributes STR, VIT, AGI, MYS, VIT, LUC to put points to.

To me, the most fun part of a DRPG is the exploration, and the map isn't all that great. My biggest issue is that the game is supposed to take place inside one tower, but you enter different floors from the menu in the "main hub", rather than finding your way organically from one floor to another. Once you defeat the floor boss, the next floor opens up in the menu. I guess maybe the devs felt this wouldn't overwhelm the player, but to me it just made the floors feel like completely separate entities, rather the game world feeling like a real place. In (most) previous Experience, Inc. games, and DRPGs in general, you can make your way from the first starting grid to the final boss without ever leaving the dungeon, and I like that. But that's not possible here. I do appreciate how you gain abilities later in the game that open up new traversal options even in the earlier floors, but they could've done more with that.

The game is extremely forgiving, to the point it even feels like the game doesn't take the player seriously. There is no penalty for party wipe, quite the opposite. It's rewarded. If you wipe, the party is resurrected and all the characters gain a permanent increase to their HP and MP. It's a tiny increase, but still. You can re-distribute your skill points at any point, even in the dungeon, so you can try out different character skills and spells easily, and even switch them on the fly if you know one area of the map has different kinds of enemies than the other. You can also completely re-spec a character in the the main hub, by changing their job class and re-distributing their attribute points. Both of these are completely free to do and without any limitations.

Admittedly, I do appreciate the easy re-speccing options. Finding out you've completely crippled a character due to some decisions early on (and there's no way you could've known better) is not my idea of a fun time. And I even had to make use of re-speccing once for a boss fight, when I wanted to have two Clerics in the party, each with a different skill set, rather than a Mage and a Cleric. But it does make the characters feels interchangeable and just a collection of stats when you can literally take your Warrior, re-spec them into a Cleric, and have them be just as effective in the job as the character who's been a Cleric for the past 30 hours.

Other than the the last boss which did actually kick my butt until I grinded a bit, I think I beat all the bosses in max. three attempts, some on the first go.

The shop is mostly useless. I never sold anything, because I never needed money to buy anything.

Bonus points for the Auto-Move being able to move you even between floors and it understands teleporters as well.

The game was made to be approachable and easy to play, and it certainly is, but I think they could've spent a bit more effort on making it more interesting. Once again I have to mention the superb Potato Flowers in Full Bloom, which was my gateway into the genre and I think it works much better in that task. It's also visually more interesting, I can't believe it's still the only DRPG I've played where the characters are 3D models that I can actually see wearing the gear I've equipped them with. I'd even suggest something like Labyrinth of Zangetsu could be a better entry-level game, because it teaches some important lessons about how the genre usually works without kicking the player in the balls too harshly.

I also keep thinking there's a comparison to be made between Mon-Yu and Dungeon Encounters. One could say the former is simplistic, while the latter is minimalistic. And while Dungeon Encounters is different from the usual DRPG fare, it forces you to get familiar with the DRPG mindset of thinking your actions through before taking them, because there can be nasty consequences.

In the end the game does still feel like an Experience, Inc. game, for better or worse. The majority of the skills are familiar to anyone who's played them before, and I think I even recognized some music from an earlier game. And as a fun homage, you can choose from portraits of characters from previous Experience, Inc. games when you're creating a character. But overall, this feels like a large step back from Undernauts and the like.