I can't believe I paid $30 for this.

$15-20? That seems feasible. But this game, from the design to the translation to the sheer grindiness of it, feel so clunky & rough I suspect this is the developers' first game. NIS America asking $40 full price for this game seems ludicrous, but I was so hungry for more games from NIS I bought it on a whim to try it out.

So what is it? It's basically a Wizardry first-person dungeon-crawler clone from Japan. (The Wizardry series was originally developed in America, but became a cult classic in Japan.) You create your own characters, form a party with them, and delve into dungeons to fight monsters and gather loot. I bought it because the premise sounded interesting (modern-day vehicles disappear into fantasy land, survivors become adventurers) and I wanted a turn-based game to play during streams.

It starts out with you surviving a plane crash and waking up in a dungeon. (The logic of surviving a plane crash and waking up underground is the least of this game's problems.) You immediately enter the Character Creation for your Main Character before you have a chance to fight or test out the battle system; in it, you have to set your stats and class before you actually know what they do. The most frustrating of these was your Age, which determines your starting Life Points and Bonus Points. What do Life Points & Bonus Points actually do? Game doesn't tell you until later, and when it does, surprise! Life Points are utterly meaningless for your Main Character. The optimal strategy is to set your Main Character's age to 70+ years so you get 10 Bonus Points and only 1 Life Point. Your age otherwise doesn't matter at all.

This bent towards min-maxing continues throughout the start. There are 8 classes, and their abilities are so narrow there's an obvious Optimal Attribute Build for them. There are 5 races which just boil down to attributes, which means that every class has an obvious Optimal Race. This gets extremely noticeable when your party members get killed: it takes them several hours of gameplay to recover, which means you need to replace them with another character... which will probably be the same class/race/build. The mere act of making varied characters means half of them aren't optimal, which wouldn't be an issue if the game wasn't so punishing.

It's not consistently difficult, like the Dark Souls series, but this game is in love with the Random Number Generator. Certain spots on the map are Guaranteed Fights, which can either be a laughably easy fight or a brutal, nigh-impossible test based on what's rolled up. If you get the latter, the best response is to Run Away and try again, hoping it rolls up an easier fight. The randomization occurs in the fights as well; everyone's hit chances seem to hover around 30-50%, but when they hit, they often hit hard. Some monsters use multi-attacks, which thanks to the hit rates will either leave a character unscratched or bleeding out on the pavement. Others spend most of their turns barely doing anything, but occasionally unleash a spell that takes out over half your character's health. If he gets unlucky enough to be hit by two simultaneously, down he goes.

The strange spikes in difficulty, from Laughably Easy to Gutwrenchingly Hard, wouldn't be so frustrating if it didn't take your party members several hours to recover. Every time a party member is revived, he loses a Life Point; if he loses all his Life Points, he vanishes forever. You can recover Life Points, but it requires putting them on the bench for several hours of gameplay. Two of my earliest party members immediately got killed down to 1 Life Point on my first trip to a dungeon; they finished recovering their lost Life Points 8 hours later. One of them got killed again while I was doing a test run of a harder dungeon; I won't be able to risk her for another 8 hours. This constant rotation of cookie-cutter characters in and out of the infirmary is infuriating for someone who wants to make a party of unique characters, especially when I've seen it work well in Darkest Dungeon.

Still, there are some interesting aspects of the game. Most of your loot, for instance, comes from marked Ambush Zones, where you choose which caravan to ambush based on the monsters guarding it and the treasure it's carrying, which provides a bit more choice than the usual grind of "kill everything". There's also implied multiple endings, where you can choose powers from each faction and the faction you choose the most powers from determines your ending.

But I find everything else in this game almost too irritating to keep playing it, namely because it hints at some great ideas but utterly falls short in its execution.