Just completed Labyrinth of Touhou 2
Here's a pic of the winning team:
The game goes at vsync and assumes 60 HZ so on my 120 HZ monitor it plays especially brisk but also that's why it thinks I took 80 hours to complete. It's not actually that long a game.
I recently started coming up with a criteria for if a game gets the fundamentals right, here's how it fairs:
- Players graded? No. 0
- Absence of load to re-roll? Yes. 1
- >10 minute progress risk? Long boss fights only. 0.5
- Constant risk? No. 0
- Risk is a resource? Yes (e.g. Gambler class). 1
- Brisk movement or interaction? Yes. 1
- Absent, negligible or skippable input interruption? Yes. 1
- Decision dense? Yes, but random encounters stop being interesting once you get Patchouli and Aya. 0.5
- Basic movement can dodge? Yes, if you count formation switching and avoiding FOEs. 1
- Spacing matters? Yes, if you count formation. 1
- Patterned, composed environment? Yes. 1
- Navigational puzzles? Yes. 1
So, it scores pretty well 9/12 or 75% which is p. good for an RPG of any kind.
The game dungeon is completely non-threatening. Characters never permanently die, they don't even die at all (requiring resurrection). They simply go back to town on their own accord under certain conditions and you can find them there again when you go back.
More specifically, the game decoupled HP and MP from dungeon delving attrition by introducing TP. So after every battle, your HP will be completely restored, but not your MP. Also, TP will be decremented for every character who participated in battle. You can elect to rest at any time in the dungeon to convert TP to MP. If TP is 0 on battle conclusion, that character will go back to town but will be automatically added back to your party when you retire from the dungeon. Retiring from the dungeon is just a matter of opening the menu outside of battle and selecting "leave dungeon".
Running out of steam does mean you lose a little progress, specifically from the last teleport point to wherever it is you were in the dungeon, but it's never more than 2 to 3 minutes of play.
So the dungeon just becomes navigational puzzle solving and memory tests with short combat encounter puzzles in between.
Before you get some varied all enemy damage output from e.g. Patchoulli Knowldege, you might have to devise short 4-12 character turn strategies for some random encounters, but by the time you do get varied all enemy damage output, they become trivial. Luckily by then you'll have enough spare skill points on Rumia or some similar character to invest in their encounter rate dropping skill.
The game is pretty aware of this, and you're given a button to make your next step a random encounter for when you actually want an encounter.
In short, the game drops the whole survival aspect of dungeons, which is fine. To be honest, I haven't played any traditional dungeon crawlers with super meaningful survival play (roguelikes have, historically, done a much better job) e.g. Wizardry is a slot machine where a high level party can die to low level enemies and vice versa and you can load to re-roll any encounter, and while something like Shining in the Darkness gets it structurally correct, it's stupidly simple (just "do I keep pressing further now?"), which is why I'm not so upset this aspect of the genre has been ditched entirely.
The navigational puzzles vary from mundane (first 8 floors) to pretty good (13F, 14F and 15F in particular, where you have to navigate using holes between floors and flip what amount to combinatorial switches to open different sets of gates).
The meat of the game is in the bosses. The boss fights are all great, and all require probing their defensive weaknesses and their offensive strengths before returning to them with a party at least partially made to counter them and then doing just that. Even then, the fights easily go on for over 5 minutes (keep in mind there's no long attack animations or anything, it's pretty much speed of thought).
One thing I absolutely
love about this game is there is no (non-humilating) escape hatch on hard mode. Bosses have a challenge level and you can't fight them if anyone in your party is over that level. You're also capped on your stats for money bonuses and other things.
If this sounds like you can lock yourself out of certain boss fights, you can't. Whatever your party's total XP is, that decides the max level for each character. You can choose a character level for each and every character between 1 and that maximum freely at the city. You get to keep the level bonuses from your max, and also any library stats you bought (cap is 1.2 * max level), so going above the boss challenge level still confers some advantage, but much less than without this system.
Even with the challenge level, by the time you reach a boss, you're unlikely to be over it. You can grind levels to meet the level, but it feels very humiliating, as it should. It's also a sign that you should git gud, as with the proper party composition you should be able to beat most bosses well under their cap. I felt horrible getting everyone to level 100 for the last boss, and here the game actually expected you to do it because the enemies in that part of the floor were all super high level single enemies which gave huge XP rewards and rare items.
Now in terms of party reconfiguration, it's obvious the game went through a few iterations of this (as the UI is all over the place). The devs eventually settled for free reconfiguration, except for stats for money bonuses and stat raising items. These can only be refunded for rare, limited number, tomes of reincarnation. It strikes an interesting balance and adds a little bit of whole game strategy and resource management, but the game wouldn't have lost much if characters were fully reconfigurable.
There's a barely noticeable crafting system, and items in general are just something you pick up along the way to your next boss and only notice when you have to reconfigure your party to meet the challenge.
In many ways, if you were to ignore some of the better dungeon floor puzzles, I'd say the game could have been a boss rush with rewards after each boss to use for your next choice of fight, and it would have been much the same game with less dead time.
So, overall, the game is a definite recommend if you like optimizing and reoptimizing your party for specific encounters, some nice dungeon navigation, and decision dense combat that can get pretty exciting and tense cause it goes on for a while.
