I love Japanese wizardry clones. I caught Etrian Odyssey fever back in 2007, and it's only intensified since then.
Demon Gaze was my personal GOTY for 2014, and consequently Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy was my most anticipated game of 2015. I started my playthrough of Operation Abyss the same way I started my playthrough of Demon Gaze: spending several hours combing through a Japanese wiki and staring at spreadsheets. Then I booted the game for the first time, and spent another several hours building my party. I played through the first tutorial dungeon with them, and leveled them up for the first time, which was another ordeal which required spending time studying spreadsheets and wikis to determine the optimal stat distribution. At this point, it was getting pretty late, so I decided to call it a night and put the game on hold until I could dedicate a more sizable chunk of time to actually exploring a dungeon or two.
Then, something horrible happened. Something awful. I came back to the game, and realized that the pages and pages of handwritten preparatory notes I'd assembled were nowhere to be found. I booted the game, looked at my party members, and said to each of them, "I don't know who you are anymore!"
You see, hidden within the cyberpunk aesthetic of New Tokyo Legacy is a deep aversion to anything resembling conventional notation. The stat screen is a list of abbreviations and numbers, and incredibly, some stats have multiple integers associated with them. Characters have "classes," like wizard, warrior, knight, samurai, archer, and so on. The game's manual even gives you advice like, "warriors should be the front and wizards should be in the back." But you'll never see any of these words on a character's stat screen. Instead, you go to a separate tab on the character info screen to view their "blood type," and find something like "K - Brunhilde" or "W - Tomoe." The game manual doesn't tell you want any of this means, so you find a guide on the internet and find that "Brunhild is a blood code that was created using the genome of the French heroine Jeanne d'Arc," who was a knight, meaning that your character is a knight. I still don't know what that additional letter means.
Right now I am looking at my party of level 2 adventurers. I had such grand plans for them. Such wonderful, grand plans! But those plans have been lost, somewhere in a stack of papers somewhere in my apartment (maybe they've been taken out with the trash by now). Perhaps some day I will muster the wherewithal to recreate that which was lost.
Bought this game the day it came out on Steam, and I've loved every minute of the fifteen hours I've spent with it so far--I'm currently on the middle of my third playthrough, chasing achievements, some of which are quite challenging and really force you to play the game differently.
Though tongue-in-cheek, I think that Vinny is spot-on with his comparisons to fascist dictatorships--this definitely seems to be an intentional theme of the game, though it's hard to explain much beyond that without getting into spoiler territory. I think that a lot of people (myself among them) wanted Long Live the Queen to be a more procedural, randomized experience (rather than simple based on memorizing pre-determined stat checks), and Black Closet seems to be exactly the game that those people wanted.
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