Rpgsaurus Rex
Guest
It's a mighty well made Dungeon Crawler. Lots of grind, but it feels rewarding since it's spiced with great exploration - huge dungeon (35 levels, 45x45 to 90x90 in size with lots of unique locations and 3 dimension - spells like magical flight are essential, and amphibious breathing for underwater exploration), item hunting (every item is unique, no "Flaming Sword of Striking +3" - and there are a LOT of items to choose from with strategic variety) and just seeing numbers go up.
Very well balanced - lots of classes and race combos, every one of them interesting and having a use. An "Explorer", for example, might sound exotic but is tremendously useful to have - although you can do away without one as well, of course. You can single-guild (e.g. take pure Warrior to sky-high level), or you can multi-class (recommended). You can play as 1, or up to a party of 4.
12 (!) years of balancing, ffs.
It's brutal as hell sometimes, you can run into mobs that can *permanently* drain your HP's for instance if you're not ready for them (you need to level up to regain HPs, but that's slow). Mobs that drain your ability stats (as early as say level 6 of the dungeon). Mobs that turn you into a statue a la Medusa (as early as 5). Mobs that behead. Mobs that *age* you (yes, you can die of old age - but that's very unlikely unless you're very stupid).
It has flaws, too, like rage-inducing "random quests", having to micro-manage your party to get similar shares of XP, and backward interface (e.g. having a bank with limited slots for storing items, at the same time as being able to create infinite mules) but they're compensated by the good things.
Some consider "real-time combat" to be a flaw (it's actually phase-based, like that same mode in Wiz8), but in my mind it's a tremendous advantage for this type of game. It's *fast* and if you wanna do something unusual (like cast a fire spell to kill a slime, or a mass destruction spell to get rid of a group of mobs), it's easy to do.
Overall I've spent ~300 or more hours on this game and I don't remember having that much fun with any RPG crawler game for a long while. And there is still a *lot* to do if I want to finish the game.
Very well balanced - lots of classes and race combos, every one of them interesting and having a use. An "Explorer", for example, might sound exotic but is tremendously useful to have - although you can do away without one as well, of course. You can single-guild (e.g. take pure Warrior to sky-high level), or you can multi-class (recommended). You can play as 1, or up to a party of 4.
12 (!) years of balancing, ffs.
It's brutal as hell sometimes, you can run into mobs that can *permanently* drain your HP's for instance if you're not ready for them (you need to level up to regain HPs, but that's slow). Mobs that drain your ability stats (as early as say level 6 of the dungeon). Mobs that turn you into a statue a la Medusa (as early as 5). Mobs that behead. Mobs that *age* you (yes, you can die of old age - but that's very unlikely unless you're very stupid).
It has flaws, too, like rage-inducing "random quests", having to micro-manage your party to get similar shares of XP, and backward interface (e.g. having a bank with limited slots for storing items, at the same time as being able to create infinite mules) but they're compensated by the good things.
Some consider "real-time combat" to be a flaw (it's actually phase-based, like that same mode in Wiz8), but in my mind it's a tremendous advantage for this type of game. It's *fast* and if you wanna do something unusual (like cast a fire spell to kill a slime, or a mass destruction spell to get rid of a group of mobs), it's easy to do.
Overall I've spent ~300 or more hours on this game and I don't remember having that much fun with any RPG crawler game for a long while. And there is still a *lot* to do if I want to finish the game.
