I’m playing Dungeonmans, and even if it has some addicting quality at first, as you kill & loot shit, it isn’t convincing me:
-Supposing you aren’t killed early and play conservatively, the first 5 hours of a run are a bit boring, too easy.
-Runs are indeed too long, given you mostly juggle the same 3-4 abilities usually in a single run. As part of that, you level too slowly from level 6 onwards, and the gameplay gets stale because of that. The game should be shorter and you should level up a bit faster, so you always get new skills every x time to play around.
-I dislike games where 85% of the combat is ‘filler’, most of the time in ‘adventurous’ dungeons I don’t bother see what type of enemies I’m hitting or what abilities do they have, I just advance and kill everything, letting the auto-target select whatever enemy.
-I dislike games with this resting system, there is no penalty for using it, it’s basically the turn-based equivalent of health-regeneration. Advance a bit, kill 3-4 enemies, rest, rinse, repeat. Sometimes you are interrupted but it’s a single monster so you kill it without problems and rest again.
-You may say at this point I should go to a harder dungeon or raise the difficulty, but it’s hard to skip dungeons that have valuable xp, and the difficulty balance is tricky: bosses are much harder than the rest of the game, so if I raise the difficulty, the moment I will reach a boss the game will be too hard, not too easy.
-Ironically this doesn’t mean I don’t die, some of my deaths (outside bosses) came because the game trains me to fall in a zen-like status of advancing and killing shit without looking at numbers or even using most abilities, and then a special enemy kills me or poisoner gets me without me noticing the poison drain 80% of my health. Even if I had dozens of consumables to avoid my death. It’s a type of game design that would be more appropriate with a quicksave system, instead of the roguelike (one and done). A small thing, but having the health bar tucked to the right corner also affects me, increasing this dumb mistakes I make.
-There are some cheap kills like the top of the towers where you fight a boss, unlike any other dungeons before, the stairs magically disappear so you cannot retreat when you see that floor level is too high for you.
-95% of the loot is crap, garbage fated to be sold or be scrapped in the academy. I also dislike this kind of ‘looting’ model. I don’t even bother looking at what I’m picking from the ground, I just clear up two or three dungeons in a row and then go back to identify everything in one go, favorite a pair of pieces maybe, and the throw everything else.
-The overworld map lacks info, the number system is crap to see what is a town and what a dungeon (why not use small icons?) so you have to use the filters enabling and disable them. To show level of dungeon is, and what level of town is (merchandise level, like 4/6) would also a good idea.
-The inventory system is crap: no way to order by rating, gold, number of items (for consumables) or any other way.
More or less “recent” since it’s from 2015. I thought there was some recent work to port it to C++, but they were messing directly with the game, for example by removing alchemy.
The version I have should be just bugfixes over the original.
I’m trying Tangledeep and I’m liking it better than Dungeonmans. It has a old JRPG vibe in the artwhich didn’t convince me at first, I don’t have nostalgia for those games, but in the end It fixes most of my complaints I wrote ibefore:
-It has a few more classes than Dungeonmans, 12, and they are more original, they aren’t the typical warrior/archer/wizard, so it’s more in my style (Floramancer, Edge Thane, Soulkeeper…). Like Dungeonmans, you can mix them up.
-The classes, apart from more interesting, are more ‘active’, with more active and interesting abilities, one unique passive, and you gain the skills way faster (at least, I have 7 after 70 minutes)
-Balance wise it’s way too early to say anything, but the difficulty seems smoother, without strange ups and downs, while at the same time not being brainless because the next point.
-It doesn’t use the rest system from Dungeonmans, but traditional food/health potions. They are fountains that give you extra health recharges to the health potion, and an interesting powerup system, where fallen enemies may drop orb that give you a bit of stamina or energy. In addition between floors there can be a small map with a side quest or a fire camp, you can use the camp once to refill your stats or to cook a recipe.
-It has a convenient ‘summon town portal’, needs 8 turns to charge. It also can be used to return to the start of the floor.
-It has several sorting methods for the inventory.
-Itemization is also better, it doesn’t flood the player with garbage loot. I have a dozen items and 13 consumables, not 120.
-Weapons are more interesting, instead of being a simple damage number and a collection of random attributes, they also have a special ability. Daggers do more damage in successive attacks, claymore can counter when parrying, Iron claws have a damage bonus depending of the health lost recently, etc. Weapons also have learn-able unique abilities depending of the weapon type.
On the other hand there seems to be less variety of weapons.
-Enemies are also a bit more interesting, like Dungeonmans they can have abilities, but it feels they have a bit more identity here.
-It has a meta-progression system too.
-It has a good number of starting options (here it’s better to put some screenshots), I think they accommodate everyone:
-A little thing, but I like having some simple animations in this type of game. The ‘idle’ animations of the characters give them much more life than the static sprites of Dungeonmans.
I think he’s winding it down but he seems driven to at least finish the latest version which he says has been lingering at 90% complete for a long time.
Some of the procgen stuff seems hugely ambitious, so I can’t help but be curious.
I’ve been interested in this series for years, but I see a lot of flavors. I have a woefully under-utilized Vita though, is that one a good version to pick up?
Because you played that weird crossover with Etrian Odyssey, I always assumed you had played the series!
Tower of Fortune is, in my opinion, the absolute best of the series, and it is available on the Vita. I liked the DS version so much I was even considering, for a time, buying the Sony console solely for experiencing it on a better screen.
LOL yeah, I almost forgot about that - that was a ton of fun, I still have it in my 3DS collection. Maybe I should get back to that, I only put a few hours into it, meaning to get back to it… Of course, now I have EOV I’m playing.
I see Shiren for Vita is only $21 on Amazon. I think that’s a good candidate for something to bring on a long couple of flights I have coming up this summer. It was going to be EO V but I just couldn’t wait…
Huh, so there’s a new Chocobo Mystery Dungeon coming up this month?
Anyone hear anything about it? The one on Wii was really good, it’s pretty much a Shiren game in disguise with Final Fantasy classes. It was on the easy side of things, at least for a roguelite.
Every… “buddy”, though? Managing NPCs in Shiren on Wii was like herding cats. I sure hope they did that well.
EDIT: Huh, I knew something smelled fishy. It is a remake of the game on Wii. It’s not a bad thing in and of itself, but y’know, I already played the game before.
What about folks such as myself that never played it? I feel like I should, having enjoyed the Etrian Odyssey/Mystery Dungeon on 3DS a few years back. Worth checking out, you think? Did they upgrade the visuals or do any other enhancements?
EDIT: I found a video that shows the game and shows it against the Wii version. Looks like a significant visual upgrade, to say the least.
It’s a short video, so hopefully it will give me an idea of the gameplay as well.
EDIT 2 - Well that video didn’t have a lot of gameplay, but it did look really nice. I found some other videos showing off the game and I forget this was coming to Switch as well. It looks like that might be the platform to go with, and it does seem like a really cool game, so I may have to dive in here in a few weeks.
Oh it’s a lot of fun! Very charming! Chocobo is adorable and he can class change, which gives him different abilities/stats. It’s all classic FF stuff: Black Mage for magic offense, Ninja for high damage/low durability, Scholar can identify items, etc… The White Mage was probably the cream of the crop: excellent defense and healing spells, obviously, and once you got Holy a decent attacker as well. Every single class is begging for a plush toy and, guess what, those toys do exist!
It’s a fairly tame roguelike. Dungeons are separate, so you don’t have to finish it all in one go. You can escape at any stairs. If I remember this right, character levels are permanent and it’s faily easy to not lose equipment on death. You can reforge weapons/armor to get it just the way you want. There’s a fairly large hub town that you can develop a bit with stores, optional minigames, etc. There’s even a collectible card game as a completely optional activity.
There are also “dream” dungeons, which are basically short gimmick dungeons (no food, always at 1 HP, all items are unidentified/cursed, etc.) that require a tailored strategy. Those were my favorite bit.
From what I can gather, this version going to add NPC buddies, hence the title, and some extra classes and stuff that was in the DS “demake” :
I think they added the chocobo Red Mage class, i.e. the hybrid white mage/black mage/knight. It’s the most dapper chocobo ever:
So it’s a very chill roguelike that oozes charm. You know what, I’m convincing myself. I might get it again…
