Dungeon Dispatch Review (One Long Life)
Unrelated to the gameplay I have now developed a dislike of .rar files.
Thanks for helping me open the game XD.
First Impressions:
Very Classic Pixel Art JRPG both in style and sound design.
Straightforward gameplay and theme. Pixel JRPG comfort food.
Mini Essay:
The gameplay is exactly how it looks. When I only saw screenshots I was
concerned with the layout of the rooms being too square and samey, however
the variety of paths made to these little square rooms instead transforms to a solid stylistic choice. The color management is also well done. All the colors in the art have a subtle warm tone giving the game an uplifting and hopeful vibe.
The storyline is a bit more on the rough side. Due to the font choice my eyes kept going out of focus when reading the opening scrolling dialogue. While this is a classic JRPG tool for exposition dumps, large bodies of scrolling text are also a very heavy way to start a game. Especially with a font that has even slightly lower readability.
That said the little god voice introduction to the central idea of Dungeon Dispatch is both light hearted and well executed. The new map blurbs go a long way.
I don’t know if it’s common in old style RPGs to have no item description, still have no idea what half of the consumables do.
The combat system is both slow and fast at the same time. The art and animations are super solid and cohesive. The mechanics are .~*clean*~. and easy to understand. Your mastery of level design is praiseworthy.
My only gripe is more with the genre than this game in particular, enemies often feel quite “grindy” when it can take 10 or more rounds for a single instance of combat. Although I can’t remeber the specific person or blog I read this advice from, early game enemies are better off taking around 2 rounds of combat to defeat at most.
Monsters guarding some of the chests are a nice touch but many of the chests appear to either be empty or don’t show thier drops. This can be an easy fix if you turn “Chest Rewards” in to a common event in RPGMaker, either eventing a drop table or making multiple CE so you don’t have to change the text and rewards of several dozen chests manually. Overleveled to the point of 0 player damage by the second environment, I started zoming out in combat and just spamming attack. If/When you update this game maybe reduce the duration of combat encounters, they really drag on. Also floor doors dissapear during combat. Plus the 3rd boss walks into a wall and locks the game (game end?)
Great Game. 10/10 would play again.