Squeenix New Crawler "Dungeon Encounters" by Square Enix, budget lower than the rpgcodex server costs

[Lord of Riva]

The only new games were Disgaea's and other second rate shovelware. How many SRPGs are upcoming now? Saying that Awakening had a negative impact is delusion.

I did not say that, in the least.

"While awakening revived the Series"

I am in agreement that awakening revived the Series (because it was a good effort to breath new live into the series) i stated that I believe that Fates clearly was a decline, mostly narrative wise actually, i liked some systems.

But what I disagreed with most was your position that Three Houses had a good impact on the series, I do not think that this is the case at all. It sold more, yes because of the bigger market and it had hype build around that but it was also casualized and did not even pander to those who would think awakening was a good game. The Story was also a lot more animified, with the school setting et al.

Some decent characters does not make a great game and if they follow the three houses route going further I hold that the interest will be waning in the long run.

 

[Falksi]

Are we in a new golden age of jap blobbers? This year alone 5 or 6 games of medium to good range of quality have come out. We have two alone this month, this game and the yomi western release.

Honestly? We are in the beginning of a new JRPG Golden Age in general.

Since 2016:
Persona 5 showed that the traditional turn based JRPG can still make tons of money.
Atlus advances from a niche developer to a genre staple.
Shin Megami Tensei returns on a home console and Persona 4 gets a PC port.

The Switch becomes a successfull platform where medium budget JRPG platforms can sell way above their budget again.
Octopath Traveller is the first game to capitalise on that, showing that not even turn based JRPGs are still in demand, but even ultra traditional SNES style JRPGs.
This kickstarts a niche genre rennaissance, with the blobber soaring to be as popular as it has ever been.

Square Enix gets their fucking shit together!
They return to a formula where they allow their talents to make low budget arthousy projects inbetween to not burn out, and game quality rises across the board.
Nier becomes fucking mainstream., Yoko Taro becomes a household name on the scale of Kojima.
Old Dragon Quests get sensible ports to English for the first time in who knows how long, ending the decade break the series has been on in the West since DQ IX.
They even revive SaGa from God knows where, a series that hasn't seen the light in who knows how many years.
We even got Kingdom Hearts III, although that could have been better.

Some Bonus Rounds:
Fire Emblem Awakening single handedly revives the Fire Emblem IP, Fates almost kills it, 3 Houses revives it AGAIN, this time greater than ever.
Xenoblade is becoming a god damn AAA JRPG IP, with Monolith Soft games selling better and better, and by their fans with no loss of quality.
Tales of Arise and Atelier Ryza suddenly boom in success, setting those two series up to make the next jump from niche to AA.
Falcom is god knows how still around, and is getting more successfull with every game through a loyal fanbase.
Level-5 gets revived at the eleventh hour by the Ni No Kuni IP becoming really popular in Korea.

The JRPG era since 2016, defined by the late PS4, Switch and the buddings of the Japanese trusting in the PC, has the potential to go down as one of the greatest of the genre, on par with SNES, PSX, PS2.
There is so much amazing shit in the genre happening lately that even this wall of text probably misses half the good stuff, like Rune Factory and Neo TWEWY.

Nice. Tales of Berseria got a fair few folk interested in the genre too with it's accessibility.

You part of this group dude?.....

(15) JRPG Fans Only (Japanese Role Playing Games) | Facebook

 

[Thac0]

But what I disagreed with most was your position that Three Houses had a good impact on the series, I do not think that this is the case at all. It sold more, yes because of the bigger market and it had hype build around that but it was also casualized and did not even pander to those who would think awakening was a good game. The Story was also a lot more animified, with the school setting et al.

Some decent characters does not make a great game and if they follow the three houses route going further I hold that the interest will be waning in the long run.

Ah so it is about the Persona elements that Three Houses injected into the series specifically. Yeah if those become a series mainstay I can see why some long term fan jimmies are rustled. I kind of assume it is more of a gimmick for this game specifically.
Triangle Strategy will then show wether SRPGs can sell on the Switch without gimmicks like that. I see three houses success as a massive flare that an SRPG can move 3 million copies, and a large reason we have two different SRPGs at TGS alone.

You part of this group dude?.....

(15) JRPG Fans Only (Japanese Role Playing Games) | Facebook

Nah, havn't had a Facebook account in years.

 

[Grauken]

The JRPG era since 2016, defined by the late PS4, Switch and the buddings of the Japanese trusting in the PC, has the potential to go down as one of the greatest of the genre, on par with SNES, PSX, PS2.
There is so much amazing shit in the genre happening lately that even this wall of text probably misses half the good stuff, like Rune Factory and Neo TWEWY.

I haven't followed new jRPGs in ages, you should make a thread and introduce some of those you deem part of the new golden age, would be interesting to see what has come out and what makes you think makes them so great

Edit: Oh, you mean the ones you mentioned in your post, I've played some of them, nothing really golden age material. I thought I was overlooking some great ones

 

[Lord of Riva]

Triangle Strategy will then show wether SRPGs can sell on the Switch without gimmicks like that. I see three houses success as a massive flare that an SRPG can move 3 million copies, and a large reason we have two different SRPGs at TGS alone.

Yeah, exactly. Triangle Strategy had a good showing with it's demo. I am looking forward to it, let's hope for the best.

 

[Thac0]

The JRPG era since 2016, defined by the late PS4, Switch and the buddings of the Japanese trusting in the PC, has the potential to go down as one of the greatest of the genre, on par with SNES, PSX, PS2.
There is so much amazing shit in the genre happening lately that even this wall of text probably misses half the good stuff, like Rune Factory and Neo TWEWY.

I haven't followed new jRPGs in ages, you should make a thread and introduce some of those you deem part of the new golden age, would be interesting to see what has come out and what makes you think makes them so great

Edit: Oh, you mean the ones you mentioned in your post, I've played some of them, nothing really golden age material. I thought I was overlooking some great ones

Time is of the essence. One of my favourite discoveries recently were the earliest rpgcodex year in review post series where all of Troika's games got shredded as 7.5/10 which will quickly be forgotten. Classics can only be seen in restrospect.
If you want some recommendations ask less snarkily, although a lot of my observation is speculation (beginning of a golden age) as I got no strong feelings for Falcom, Monolith Soft and Yoko Taro.

 

[Grauken]

snark is part of the air I breathe, I can't abandon it

 

[Grauken]

I realized also one of the things I didn't like about the recent jRPG book is that it sorts the games by series and not all in chronological order like the cRPG book did, which makes it hard to get a feeling for how the landscape of jRPGs developed.

I'm particular to the 8/16-bit era and everything that came afterwords just sort of melts together in a big blog of games, and I wish the book had been better at showing how that developed through the PSX-PS2-PS3-PS4 eras (and the other consoles that happened in those time frame)

 

[LESS T_T]

Soo this is out now.

 

[vonAchdorf]

I like the aesthetics and the premise / setting (here is a town and there's a huge dungeon. Go inside.).

 

[Abu Antar]

I hope to share impressions, either tomorrow or Saturday.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

I hope to share impressions, either tomorrow or Saturday.

Nice of you to take one for the team like that, but if you told us how awful it was without giving Squeenix your money, no one would hold it against you.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Soo this is out now.

$30 regular price? This definitely looks like a $5 game to me.

 

[Abu Antar]

I hope to share impressions, either tomorrow or Saturday.

Nice of you to take one for the team like that, but if you told us how awful it was without giving Squeenix your money, no one would hold it against you.

Look at this man.

Look at him.

I would never pirate a game of his.

 

[lametta]

Review:
Graphics - Yes
Characters - Yes
Combat - Yes
Story - No
Monsters -Yes

Summary: The game is as barebones and useless as my review.

 

[Reinhardt]

10/10?

 

[Viata]

3/10
It could be a 8, but I was too tired to finish that number and stopped halfway, just like the game.

 

[Thac0]

I am having a great time with it. Extremely fast dungeon crawler with a strange amount of verticality. You learn to zap up and down the dungeon, as you can teleport unto tiles directly above or below you for a very low cost. As such what comes off as an endless waste of nothingness and random encounters becomes your playground fast as you warp across dozens of floors in mere seconds as soon as you get the hang of it.

Combat is very swingy, at first every random encounter has a realistic chance of downing or even petrifying a party member. This forces you to memorise ressurection temples and depetrification statues. But what makes exploration tense on the first few times mapping a floor is turned around completely on later visits.

A well geared team chews through random encounters in seconds aswell. I made my team into a firing squad with 4 Brittania guns, which dropped for me from the Golems, which my before magic heavy team could easily dispatch. Brittania Guns deal a high amount of random damage to all enemies. Sometimes 3, sometimes 300, most of the times 150 or so. Enemies have about 150 armor and 150 health at my level. After a full firing line from my team most fights are over, and my team is usually faster than the enemy team. Great fun.

Tinkering around with equipment is great aswell. This game only has a pathetic amount of stats, but it utilises a weight system akin to Bravely Default II. The decision between a magical tome, a sword and a crossbow becomes more interesting when one weighs 7, one 11 and one 15 points of weight, and you can only carry 35, but it goes up on each levelup. I am constantly optimising stuff.

The best thing about this game is that it gets the gameplay flow of a blobber. I spend about 33% of my time in menus, 33% moving through the dungeon and 33% in combat. Even if all systems, while ambitious, are barebones, the high speed and the constant cycling through the systems makes it addicting.

Now a few words of warning at the end: Budget is minimal. Barely any music, no flavor text for weapons, no different tilesets, no dialogue etc. This thing looks cheap.
Also due to the extreme minimalism it might lack long term motivation, hard to tell from day 1.
Apart from those gripes this is exquisite, Square slams their cock on the table of a niche genre, producing a highly ambitious and super fun dungeon crawler with minimal mechanics and presentation.
I hope Voice of the Cards will be as fun as this, great times incoming.

 

[Grauken]

Are the dungeons fixed?

 

[Thac0]

Are the dungeons fixed?

With almost certainty yes, there are mini sidequests like math riddles which give you treasure coordinates and treasure maps. Also some secret rooms can only be entered from above or below. That would be close to impossible with random generation.

 

[Grauken]

Are the dungeons fixed?

With almost certainty yes, there are mini sidequests like math riddles which give you treasure coordinates and treasure maps. Also some secret rooms can only be entered from above or below. That would be close to impossible with random generation.

Maybe I get it when its some % reduced, it does sound somewhat fun

 

[vonAchdorf]

I like the presentation and am a fan of the concept of adventure guilds (here Academy) instead of a single party. The combat system is interesting enough and from the beginning allows / requires some thought and tactical planning. Thac0 describes the minutiae of the later system in more detail. The abilities system is very variable and almost a secondary options / difficulty menu. You can enable an ability, which lets you see battle encounters on the map, or you can leave it off. You can enable the ability to withdraw in battles, or leave it off.

The game retains the craziness of the good old games, like getting attacked by sharks and bears at the same time in a dungeon and the mandatory random difficulty spikes.

In the beginning, you can either grind for drops by switching floors or do the sensible thing, walk back to the stores and buy twice or thrice as powerful weapons, armor and spells for little money.

I dislike the lack of classes or any meaningful distinction between the base characters, but you can specialize them with equipment*. There is no character creation, because a) it would be pointless and b) characters are supposed to be a limited resource.

* Fixed damage vs. random damage. Magic attack and Physical attack or only one type ...

In typical Japanese fashion, the game is expensive for what it offers, but I like that a big publisher releases such an unusual game. If you want more for your money, get Troubleshooters.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[vonAchdorf]

A well geared team chews through random encounters in seconds aswell. I made my team into a firing squad with 4 Brittania guns, which dropped for me from the Golems, which my before magic heavy team could easily dispatch. Brittania Guns deal a high amount of random damage to all enemies. Sometimes 3, sometimes 300, most of the times 150 or so. Enemies have about 150 armor and 150 health at my level. After a full firing line from my team most fights are over, and my team is usually faster than the enemy team. Great fun.

At that level, it's definitely better than the spell version (Maliare (?) magic damage to all enemies) because the wizard enemies reflect spells.

 

[Duraframe300]

Definitely overpriced, definitely fun. As Thac0 pointed out they got the gameplay loop right which is what mattered to me and what I expected from the game.

Still the price, ugh. If they sold it for 10 bucks, it would be an instant hit in certain circles.