Press the A button, or whatever stands for it, on that tile. You get a message telling you you found somebody there. You can then add them to your party.
Ok will give that a go…thanks.
Edit….actually I landed on the tile but had to open the party menu and that explorer was then available to put into my party. Was hoping I could do something to move them to the academy for later hire but didn’t se that option.
I love the naming conventions for spells in the game. Everything starting with “ma” is a magic attack
Every spell with “flux” in the name is dealing random damage from 1 to max. So Malaflux is a random damage spell. And if the spell is ending with “iare” then it will hit all enemies.
So Malare or Malafluxare hit all enemies, the first with fixed damage, the second with potentially higher damage.
Probably obvious to all people playing the game, just wanted to document it here for newcomers to the game.
Yeah it is cool, once you get what the name parts mean you can ‘read’ what spells do by the name.
It’s a fairly common JRPG thing. Most Final Fantasys and the SMT/Persona games use similar naming conventions.
In other games there’s often something in there that indicates tier, or power level, and spell type (like particular elemental damage, or whether something is a buff).
“I should not find out what’s in F9” I told myself repeatedly before giving into curiosity. I was right!
Yeah, F9 is the room 237 of dungeon encounters
I don’t remember anymore, when your party dies, you can continue the game if there are people on floor 00 ? But you have to level up your new party again… that’s like almost permadeath. Is there a way to switch parties without moving all to 00 and replace everybody?
I am now on floor 10, and I fear a party wipe could really make me pause the game for a while. I already did a rescue mission of my KO’ed characters when I was wiped on floor 5. But if you can’t get to your KO’ed party because of enemies, you are kind of out of luck…
If you totally wipe, there’s the option to restart but retain your character levels.
One of my favorite parts of the game is discovering and unlocking new gameplay mechanics as I go, so two big caveats: that might make giving advice less fun for you, and more importantly, everything I’m telling you as someone ahead of you in the game might be different/irrelevant by the time you’re further than I am.
But up to where I am on level 24, with four or five party wipes, it’s not been difficult to rescue my party, but it is sometimes tedious.
So, advice:
- Don’t sell all your unused equipment. Keep some handy to equip a rescue party—maybe not a full set of your top tier stuff, but just don’t be in a hurry to sell off everything. With your rescue party likely lower level than the team you’re trying to save, you may not be able to equip your best stuff anyway, but you can prioritize as necessary. If your team is really uneven, at least give the lowest members the best armor they can equip so they can hopefully survive encounters and gain some XP on the way.
- Traversal options keep opening up. If you’ve made it to level 10, you probably found the two-way teleporter back to level 0 on level nine. It did not surprise me to learn there’s another one on level 19.
- You’ll get some exploration abilities that help traveling around the dungeon (you may already have some, I don’t remember what I found when). It makes it viable to skip a lot of enemy encounters, sometimes all of them on a level.
- When you’re working with a healthy party, remember to go pick up any undiscovered characters who you have coordinates for already in the Composition list. If you really get into a pickle and have cascading failures, more warm bodies at 00 might make a difference. The later characters are all “Wandering” and have to be found in other ways, but there are a handful that have their coordinates known at the start. Just go to that square in the dungeon and press “A” to “discover” them, then they can be added to your party at that space (and yes, that means leaving someone else behind if you’re already at four, so you may want to make a special trip with a partial group when going to find them.
- And speaking of partial groups, if you’re careful with avoiding encounters, you may be able to get a rescue team of just one or two characters to your party to make it easier to relay characters back to where you need them.
All of that with huge grains of salt from someone who’s not too much further!
The game’s also civilized enough to hand you regularly a leveled up character to rescue, in case you find it tedious to maintain extras (which it isn’t, but that’s a whole other branch of discussion)
Pitfalls are dumb. Never fallen into a hidden one, had the pitfall clairvoyance early on, but have I accidentally walked into one I could plainly see? Yes. Are they also a tedious extra step in fully exploring a level requiring at least one leave-and-come-back trip? Yes.
They’re not a fun challenge I overcame, they’re just annoying.
I’m just starting the 80’s now. Other than pitfall complaints, still steady, slow, going.
And just accidentally rolled credits.
Is there a reason to go back and finish exploring the dungeon, or picking up the few characters I never got?
Combat was mostly a pushover by the end for me. Being thorough about exploration along the way meant always having enough points to have the crucial exploration and battle abilities available. When you’re protected against almost all of the tricky status/instant kill attacks, and you also do double damage with anyone who has full HP, and you also have that crazy hidden samurai sword, there’s not much that can slow you down.
I was using the “wait” battle setup though, if you’re using the active time battles I imagine it’s a different kind of challenge.
There are a few hidden bosses, but maybe you killed them unknowingly ;D
This game is 50% off during the Steam sale at $14.99. Edge Magazine put this at #4 on their top 10 games of 2021 list. Perhaps I’ll give it a go!
Wait, this is the masochistic game that does not respect your time.
No it’s just a funny little dungeon crawling thing with a couple of weird ideas.
That’s going to be a bit subjective, as I can see how it could feel that way but I have a pretty low tolerance for games that don’t respect your time, and I enjoyed this.
I did the full 100% on this one in around 25 hours, for a JRPG that’s almost a model citizen of respecting your time!
I am posting this in here because I have been introduced to an even better game that is highly reminiscent of Dungeon Encounters, but with some of the best combat mechanics, or overall design, I’ve met.
The name of the game is QUESTER. It is available at some places, notably on Steam, but it is Japanese only for the moment. The devs have launched a sort of bullshitish kickstarter for the English version (I suspect the game is gonna be released in English no matter what. Probably in broken English?), so I feel safe to advertise it.
Anyway, this is a very rough looking top-down RPG. It can be played not only with the keyboard but with a joypad, a scheme that works excessively well. It is set in sort of Megami Tensei post apocalyptic Tokyo. There is a scenario that unveils slowly, and seems both heavily Corona influenced and heavily handed, so I wouldn’t play it for that aspect.
You explore a hand crafted map with a party of 5. Your goal is to bring back a certain amount of food ressource every week. To do so, you can move or dig around the map, which uses energy, which you got a fixed daily amount of. If you fail to amass the food you need, the game won’t end: you will simply loss all of the currency sort of scrap you gather.
While this isn’t a big deal in the beginning, where everything is free or cheap, it becomes an issue a few hours in, when money starts to be an issue, and I guess it can be crushing later on.
Battles happen with foes seen on the map. The battle are turn based, and the game tells you roughly what each of the enemies are going to do (hit all your party for a force 10 attack, hit one of your member for 30 force attack… that sort of thing). They all got peculiarities and skills which you’ll learn quickly, which adds some wackyness to this formula
On your side, each of your characters can perform a maximum of 3 actions per battle turn. Those actions are limited further by the action points they require, thus you can choose to perform a few lesser actions, like trying to attract the monster’s attention, or a single very consuming one, like piloting a drone around the battlefield.
The enemies will always attack the person who got the most attraction (called “hate” in game) first. Different action attracts less or more hate: trying to get the monster to attack you obviously will raise it big, attacking a monster will raise it by the amount of damage you inflict, healing another party member will hardly do anything. When a monster attacks you, it lowers your hate by that amount of damage, which means that during a single turn, the monsters may switch target if lots of party members hold a close amount of hate.
Conversely, if a single member got all the hate, they will only attack her.
This is the first mechanic that got me big, because while it may look easy to just have the local paladin attract attention and buff it out, the monsters deal massive damage, and no shielder will hardly ever survive such an onslaught. So very soon, begins a game of balance, where you try to get your shielder to take a few hits, then have some stronger party member take the rest, while avoiding your weakest members from being killed. This mechanic is so freaking smart, I just am orgasming thinking about it.
But this doesn’t end here!
When one of your party member dies, he will be resurrected. You will never lose someone. But there is a catch: resurrecting him will take 30 energy units away from your very precious exploration energy stash, making you explore quite less. Die a lot inconsiderably, and you might just not gather enough food even!
The energy can also be used in combat to gather combat ressources by special actions of your party members. Ah yes, there are a few combats ressources (medicine, tools, bullets, powder and whatever else). Those get refilled every combat and are used by some skills or attacks. That’s another thing to balance in combat.
To get more ressources, you equip gear that give it, as well as combat skills. The varying skills and ressource of piece of gears will make you elaborate some pretty nifty combos on some characters. I do a poor job of describing it, but again, another really smart system, and with only 3 gear slots / character, O so many hard decisions!
This is an incredibly addictive game, and it could be easy to go in autopilot mode by powering through with a party, excepting the maxium level is limited by a dynamic cap, and you will find new recruits of much lower levels which needs to be “broken”. It makes for some quite challenging battles, especially if you care about not dying.
It probably will ease itself up as the game progress, as is often the case of Japanese RPGs. I will report when it does.
QUESTER (all caps) rocks!
And I didn’t read over this post. Sorry!
Sounds intriguing, and I’m especially intrigued by your enthusiasm! But from looking at the Steam page, images like this…
…make me think there’s no point playing unless you can read Japanese, right?
I haven’t had any experience with foreign language releases on Steam, but it seems odd that the page is written entirely in English despite a disclaimer that “English is not supported”. The first few screenshots made me think, “ah, well, it’s just numbers and icons, so who needs English?”, but that’s clearly not the case for many of the screens. So I guess you’re saying it’s only for folks who can read Japanese right now, but there’s a good chance it’ll be playable for everyone else in the future. Basically, you’re posting a sort of early access PSA? :)