Foreword / Disclaimer
I recorded a couple hours of gameplay footage for demonstrative purposes. Unfortunately, when the game client is changed to Fullscreen, it is no longer considered part of the designated display in OBS / Windows, so my recordings only captured audio along with a âfrozenâ image of the Options menu. This also means I wonât be able to provide specific details (including screenshots) of certain things I will be referring to in the write-up.
While I imagine this is an engine issue â though I am unsure which specific game engine this is built in â Iâd consider it a reasonably high priority to fix, to ensure LP-ers and streamers donât run into the same problem. I imagine a workaround to this would be to manually resize the game window instead of using the fullscreen option, but I just simply didnât anticipate that being necessary. On a related note, the game client hijacks all mouse functionality when in Fullscreen mode, which results in a few extra steps when trying to exit out of the game.
Visuals
The general visual style of the maps and windows is appealing. Character portraits look very old-school and some of the parts vary quite a bit in terms of quality. Enemy sprites I am not a fan of stylistically, though they are competently drawn and align with the gameâs dark / dungeon crawler aesthetic.
The lack of attack and spell animations is somewhat disconcerting, and icons are somewhat awkwardly placed and hard to differentiate during battle. I get that many early PC and console dungeon crawlers didnât use animations (or reserved them for very special effects, like the original Phantasy Star did IIRC), but this is one aspect of the retro aesthetic I could do without; it makes it more difficult to parse what is happening in battle, and takes away the âimpactâ from certain skills. Particularly with how âsquishyâ most player characters are, I would like to be able to more easily see who is getting attacked, and by what. Since a lot of offensive skills (the majority Iâd wager?) inflict status ailments, I found myself wishing for more digestible ways to see what states each actor and enemy have, as well as what those states do.
Iâm not a fan of back row enemies being partially obscured by the front row. I get why this is done in a front-view / first person system, but it just makes the game interface and combat targeting feel awkward. (more about this when I get to controls)
I am not keen on how NPCs are just regular âsearch hereâ icons on the map rather than being full sprites â it doesnât feel like an homage to old school technical limitations but rather more like a series of placeholders. It also makes the base map initially more confusing than it needs to be (though after a bunch of return trips you start to memorize the layout).
Audio
The map music is ambient and not particularly memorable. Itâs not bad per se either, though the Subway track might be more interesting than the Hospital track, and you spend a lot of time in the Hospital stumbling through the map since thereâs a very big jump in terms of complexity from the prologue to the first ârealâ dungeon, so it can get repetitive. I think the Base music is fine â it is very reminiscent of TES: Arena for some reason, possibly the samples used?
Iâd like the sound design to be a bit more dynamic overall. What music is present adds some mood / tension but could go a lot further to enhance the experience; for example, I donât remember if there is no regular battle music or if itâs just extremely subtle. Sound effects seemed generally in line with what Iâd expect from a retro game.
Story
The world building seems fairly extensive, and I think the twists on both magical girls and magic-as-science are well done. I had a feeling that the Hate was named as a sort of socio-political commentary, and this was sort of evidenced further by one characterâs dialog about how trans persons had been poorly treated historically. I am not sure if the magical girl transformations are intended as allegorical to other transitional experiences, but perhaps that is explored more later.
The dialog is competently constructed (I didnât spot a single grammatical error or typo) but I feel like we only scratched the surface of having a full plot structure. That is OK, mind you â for a dungeon crawler, just having a justification to jump into the dungeon is fine, provided we uncover more lore / backstory / etc. later. I also felt like there was a bit of a lack of character voice â I donât think I would be able to differentiate each NPCâs personality from one anotherâs without the context of A) what their job is, or B) what other characters have said about that person in their various dialog options.
Thereâs a few points where it is just a tiny bit too close to âwall of textâ, which I think would be partially mitigated by having NPC sprites that had simple animations or something.
Gameplay
I love the create-a-character system. Party building is one of the most fun parts of CRPGs in my opinion, though occasionally that leads to a misfire like Drakken where building the team is more satisfying than actually going on the adventure with that team. While that wasnât the case here, I did come away feeling like the game really wanted you to start with the default party, at least on a first run, as there wasnât as much detailed game information as I would have liked to understand the choices I was making during char gen. So while the party builder is a highlight, it could also frustrate players that end up making sub-optimal choices (which seemed very easy to do, by the way, given how some of the Class and passive ability combinations had little to no synergy).
Equipment requirements being âsoftâ, resulting in attribute penalties rather than just being unable to use the item, seemed cool in practice but I donât think I ever utilized that system. Without knowing more about how the various numbers and calculations work and being a risk-averse player in most cases, I didnât feel like taking a chance with -10 Defense to gain +2 Armor, or whatever the case may be. On that note, is Defense just what other game systems call Evade? Or do they both influence incoming damage from physical? In the brief time I hung out on Hythrainâs stream of the game (I ducked out early due to wanting to play this game as âblindâ as feasible), I noticed he had a lot of questions about stat abbreviations; though I was able to intuit what most stat abbreviations meant, I still didnât feel like I knew what the actual effects of said stats were in many cases.
Balance is probably the biggest pain point for me with this game right now. Magic-usersâ regular weapons deal near-insignificant chip damage, and their MP pools are very shallow considering the sheer number of enemies faced and how many hits each one takes to bring down. At the same time, player health pools are balanced on a razorâs edge; if an attack can successfully get through a targetâs mitigation, it hurts a LOT, with magic attacks quickly taking down front row characters and physical skills often two-shotting the back row (thankfully comparatively few seem to have adequate range, but back row members are nonetheless always in danger of being sniped). A single dog-pile turn on any character (except maybe basic physical attacks against a heavy armor user) will result in a KO, which feels really bad when you had just set foot inside the dungeon again, after having left to restore everyone to full.
This leads me to the economy. I like the fact that it isnât money from a narrative standpoint, even though Rem functions as money from a utilitarian sense â however this creates a bit of dissonance to me just because of how difficult it is to build and maintain any reserve of Rem while having to pay out frequent tolls of 30 or 60 bucks (though after a while I started save-scumming to avoid taking full party wipes, to be honest). Healing items cost a staggering amount of money for what they do, incremental upgrades cost about as much as youâd make from an entire dive of the hospital (barring the good fortune of locating a treasure box or two), and the player very quickly runs out of cheap upgrades to enable them to maintain a sense of progression and momentum.
This would not be quite as much of a friction point if not for the slow levelling. In the roughly 2 hours I played Minerva Labyrinth I only leveled up once, and that was from the first boss. It wouldnât surprise me if, despite showing Exp after each fight, the actual level ups were somehow tied to story or exploration milestones, because I spent ages at level 2, only accumulating small upgrades through the occasional item find or shop visit. Encounters simply didnât seem to yield enough experience to matter (and I donât recall being able to see my Exp to next level shown anywhere). I also canât be sure due to the loss of game footage, but it seems like stat increases from level are very small or non-existent. This isnât necessarily a problem, though having that information might influence how a player does their initial party configuration â for example, if we know that END never increases, then we can plan accordingly during character generation, and not (for example) expect for our medium armor wearer to eventually graduate to heavy armor, as they do in many RPGs.
Skill design felt solid to me for the most part, with none of the skills in my chosen party (War, Moon, Earth, Storm, and Hunt) coming across as lacking a use case, though the specific numbers sometimes felt âoffâ. In particular I felt like War â or perhaps just greatsword users in general â dealt substantially more damage than other melee classes, and in fact their basic attacks were about on par with Moon or Huntâs skills. I did like how the Hunt skills were designed around applying and managing debuffs, while the Moon skills worked predominantly with MP recovery; Storm and Earth didnât use mechanical congruence but instead had abilities that felt âon flavorâ for their respective elements, and I felt those were well conceptualized also. I should add that the DoT skill from Storm was very powerful, and it was welcome for the damage proc to occur before an enemy acted, which could sometimes finish them off and thus prevent incoming damage.
UI and Controls
The default enemy targeting scheme feels backwards to me: up / down would intuitively change rows and left / right would intuitively change targets within a row, IMO. This is an opinion / preference thing and in any case, I believe it can be changed but felt worth mentioning since I found myself frequently fumbling when trying to target the back row of an enemy group.
It took me a while to understand the various menu hotkeys (playing on an X Box 360 controller by the way, I should have mentioned that before!) and it seemed easier to just go to the main menu by pressing Start. This may be less of an issue on keyboard, where the default key binds would ideally make sense as a sort of mnemonic device to help the player remember (M for Map, etc.) I didnât think to try that as I eventually got acclimated to the controls well enough anyways.
Map movement itself felt fairly responsive, and the addition of sidestep / strafe keys was quite welcome. Some of the glyphs on the minimap were a tiny bit odd (letters instead of icons for example) but it didnât hurt anything in terms of readability. Just having a minimap is certainly an upgrade from some of the very old-school dungeon crawlers, after all!
Closing Thoughts
I did enjoy my time with this game overall. The core gameplay loop felt satisfying and I think it could end up being quite addictive with some of the details and balancing tuned just a bit more. The cycle of exploring, returning to town to recharge, and upgrading before going on the next dive did remind me a bit of the SNES game Arcana, now that I think about it further. The experience wasnât quite compelling enough for me to clear the entire hospital dungeon, but I am confident audiences looking for a crunchy dungeon crawler will be engaged.