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.

There's several types of items in the shop that can auto-revive your characters, and when doing so you won't lose any life points. You just need to have them in your inventory for them to work.The ones that say "chance of item loss increase" or something like that can work multiple times and have a chance of breaking. I found the whole life-point recovery system to be ridiculous as well, but after the first time I had to do it I just loaded up on auto-revives and I never had to deal with it again.

@jmdoane: You mean like the Merlin Doll & Poiney Doll? Or does the Phoenix Feather revive them without losing Life Points as well?

Also, did I mention how much the hate the vague explanations/translations in this game?

Yes, I believe those are the ones. And no, unfortunately the phoenix feather doesn't prevent the life point loss. I agree the item translations are terrible. Like those items that give you "escape resistance"?! What the heck does that even mean? As it turns out you should buy lots of those too, it prevents a special move many bosses have where they "kidnap" one of your party members and temporarily take them out of the fight.

I don't disagree with most of your points, however once I figured out how to game the whole life point system I enjoyed my experience with it. I think the developers wanted to encourage you to swap different team members in and out and try different combinations, but I absolutely hate doing that in a RPG, so I'm glad there was a way to get around it.

@jmdoane: If different combinations was their intent, they did a poor job of it. Out of 8 classes in the game, only 1 heals and only 1 casts attack spells. Everyone else has variations of physical defenses or physical attacks. They get 1 active skill around Level 5, which takes about 8 hours of in-game play. You can multiclass them, but the game recommends you wait to do that until Level 13, which will probably take 30 hours of play at my rate. That's on par with how long it took the infamous FF13 to get going. Darkest Dungeon does a much better job of encouraging/forcing you to rotate characters and try different combinations, and I vaguely remember Etrian Odyssey doing this better, too. This is just disappointing when the general plot & aesthetic looked good, especially with a $40 asking price.

Great write up and thanks for the warning on it. I might have looked at it if it was ported to PS4 but not now. The life points sound brutal. Trying to work my way through The Witch and the Hundred Knights and boy, that game has issues.

@sparky_buzzsaw: From previous experience, NIS's games miss the mark a lot more often than Atlus's games. Pity.

The translation isn't too hot, and I'm not quite feeling the weight put on the Ambush system, but note how this is much further along the path of dungeon crawlers than most relatively high-profile dungeon crawlers lately. There will be miss strings. There will be one-shots. There will be permadeath. There will need to be backup members. There will be under-geared, under-skilled, under-leveled (and underweared!) units. There will be a ton of responsibility on our shoulders to grok the systems.

I've always found the whole subgenre of Japanese-developed Dungeon Crawlers to be super hit-and-miss for my tastes. Sometimes they take the wrong parts of old-school Wizardry and are just grindy, punishing slogs without much reward. This seems like it's one of those?

@arbitrarywater: Perhaps? I just feel Darkest Dungeon did the whole party-rotation & backup members style better. Even the permadeath. Its combat system is better, too. I should write an article on how Darkest Dungeon's complete shunning of attributes (like Str & Dex) in favor of Abilities & Quirks makes its builds leaner and more varied.

About the only thing Stranger of Sword City beats Darkest Dungeon at is item variety, and most of the variance there is weapon type & bonus value. It's not a Diablo or Borderlands, which is a bit of a shame when one of the main mechanics is ambushing loot pinatas.

@mikelemmer: Darkest Dungeon lost me when it started getting into "RNG Nightmare Funtime" territory on a regular basis, but yeah, I see what you're getting at. The party rotation stuff in that game is a vital part of it and it seems like Stranger of Sword City is trying to combine that with more traditional grindy dungeon crawling and that doesn't work out.

@arbitrarywater: Not only that, but Stranger of Sword City also has "RNG Nightmare Funtime" elements. To give you an idea of how wildly the encounters can vary, the fixed encounters in the first dungeon (during the tutorial mission) ranged anywhere from 2 easy Lvl. 10 enemies to a knock-down drag-out fight against 5 Lvl. 20 casters and a Lvl. 18 fighter who summons more enemies, each of which can summon more enemies, ad infinitum. Each of the casters is also either a pushover or capable of taking out one of your heroes in 2 hits, depending on whether they cast spells or spend all their time defending.

Luckily, the game provides an Auto-Escape ability using a resource (Morale) that regenerates in combat, so they go from a game-ender to an honestly intriguing system of weighing whether to fight or flee from each encounter. Well, it would be intriguing if the enemies' level was a good indication of their actual power; I've killed Lvl. 20s with ease and had my ass handed to me by Lvl. 13s.

(Also, there's plenty of ways to reduce physical damage, but very few to reduce magical damage, which makes enemy magic spells feel overpowered.)

I am not minding Stranger of Sword City much (but I've been bouncing around a lot of games recently, so I'm not terribly far in it), but the best Experience Inc. gridder we've seen on Vita is still Demon Gaze. It's still mean-difficult, but you have more options for customization and survivability once you get past the initial hump. So much so that it's a game you can play without a healing class, and still survive while still being challenged. Experience Inc. does good stuff, in my opinion, but they definitely have more of a shotgun blast approach to their ideas in these games, rather than precision strikes. Demon Gaze managed to do a lot of stuff right regardless, but Stranger of Sword City (and especially Operation Abyss) make one thing it was partially by chance.

The ambush points are cool, though, and I like the special upgrade trees. Life Points are pretty infuriating though, one of those mechanics that feel like they exist just for you to have to thwart.

You sound like you're describing early Wizardry games, which absolutely had groups of enemies who would fuck you sideways if you didn't know that they were trouble right off the bat. Also, resurrection has ALWAYS been a chancy proposition in Wizardry and Wizardry clones. The existence of a possible-permadeath style system is keeping in line with that, as are min-maxed optimal race/class/stat setups. I don't like the style of dungeon crawler that mimics Wizardry to the letter, but maybe there's nothing wrong with the game's design, and it just wasn't designed for people like you or me.

One question though. Did you have to roll dice for an hour to get the stats you wanted, OP? Was there an infinitesimally small chance of receiving an absurd number of stat points that kept you rerolling again and again, and did you accidentally hit the reroll button every time you managed to get it? If not, this sounds leagues ahead of a number of other Wizardry clones, many of which I quite liked.

Anyhow, thanks for the write up. Guess I'll stick to Etrian Odyssey, SMT, and Class of Heroes (or maybe check out that Star Crawlers game) before I drop money on this.

Kind of? For stats, you get a pool of points that you distribute as you see fit. However, you also roll for how many bonus points you get. Your minimum bonus points is also determined by your character's age: the older he is, the more points he gets. It's supposed to be traded off with how many Life Points he has (a character over 70, for instance, has 10 bonus skill points but only has 1 Life Point, which means any death is permanent), but since your main character never loses Life Points, the optimal age for your main character is 70+. Between that and there being an age range (40-69) with the same number of Life Points but more Skill Points than an earlier age range (20-39) makes the age and Life Point / Bonus Skill Point systems feel tacked on.

@mikelemmer said:

It sounds like it might be a little like Class of Heroes, then. I remember that game providing certain races with larger pools of bonus points naturally, but in addition to that, you could just plain roll for bonus stat points, like in most Wizardry type dungeon crawlers. I remember that I had a Celestian who got like 60 bonus stat points on my very first roll, and she utterly broke the game. It was p. funny, but I rolled with it, since the game had sort of a bell curve where characters could lose stat points in certain ways, and the higher they were, the more at risk the character was to losing them