Dungeon Dreams 2

[BrotherFrank]

Been playing this for the past few days, good game and feel it deserves more attention whilst being of relevant interest to monocled codexers into jrpgs.

Anyone remember Azure Dreams from ps1? Probably not, for whatever reason that game never took off and remains a ps1 hidden gem.
But Dungeon Dreams walks in its steps so I guess i'll have to explain a bit what that's about: it was jrpg "life sim" where your protag bounces between the main plot of exploring an rng dungeon to get to its final level, and getting up to antics in town with events and npcs. Azure dreams was fairly linear though and the amount of roleplaying you could do was limited to do/not do something and maybe the odd dialogue choice or action that could piss someone off or lock off some story segments. The town-dungeon dynamic was what made it different to other jrpgs of the time and can be considered its own subgenre.
If anyone ever played the Rune Factory series you might know what i'm talking about since that's also an offshoot of Azure Dreams albeit way more focused on resource gathering to craft things and somehow being even more linear then Azure dreams.
The other comparison I can make is...And Allah forgive me for uttering this name, is Dragon Age 2 in the sense it revolved around a single location and story centering around the player's actions, except DD2 is good.

Dungeon dreams 1 thought got it right from the start when it came to the lifesim and town aspect by having more choices and event variety that made a bunch of different playthroughs feel different, and had a bigger focus on companions and their motivations, it was possible for example in dd1 to see your party implode into massive drama if you picked two certain chicks who really hated each other and were trying to fight over the MC's attention until it resulted in an ultimatum of you having to side with one, or end up pissing both of them off. Think bg2 party drama except less likely to result in dead drows rightfully maced to death by angry paladins, admittedly a sorely missed feature.
Azure dreams was a good game but it was linear af and rune factory games are also linear except with the only choices being who you pick as a love interest if memory serves, so yeah this was Dungeon dream's strength from the start.

Reason I'm shilling the 2nd game (other then it just got released and is shiny and new) and not the 1st is because the 1st had a fair few issues (first game had a painful grind where you kept fighting the same few enemies for a dozen floors) that makes it hard to recommend unless you already know what to expect and are willing to overlook the bad (the repetitive grind and very standard combat) to get to the good (the life sim elements and the town events).
Dev worked to iron out most of the 1st game's issues (dungeon much less repetitive, combat system is still nothing crazy but a lot better now) so now can safely recommend DD2 to a larger audience who might not have played this style of jrpg before.

Hiccups that i've seen mentioned that i will mention here:
-uses a lot of default rpg maker assets. Personally didn't bother me but seen enough people mention it as a negative figured would mention it too
-Body type 1 and 2 and asking for pronouns during character creation. Ouch >_< Yeah no comment, it isn't like the game is "woke" and dev from what i've seen on discord is a cool guy/gal but this might give off the wrong impression.

So yeah i been having good fun with this, is an unironic contender for my choice of codex rpg GOTY.

 

[deama]

Anyone played this as well? Any reviews?
I played 1st one and remember liking it.
I might try this and give a quick review.

 

[deama]

Been playing it for 2-3 hours.
So far it's pretty decent. I would say so far is better than 1st one as it's harder in the beginning.
From my browsing there could have been more skills for each class, but there's a sizeable class selection, each main class has like 5-6 sub-classes you can choose from, so not too bad.

I'm wondering if there's gonna be a new game+ ?