Dungeon Encounters Review (Switch eShop)

We all love luxury sound and light of today’s games. Battles engulf us with explosive imagery, lavish cut scenes frame each encounter, and voice artists declaim stories to tear our hearts apart. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing, then, if all of this were shown to be a sham? If a game came to create plus sexy action, plus meaningful encounters and a plus heartwarming story, but without any of that baroque disguise. Wouldn’t it surprise us all, gaping at sweaty warriors, dressed in rags and lightning strokes, with their pants down and / or their skirts up? Metaphorically? Well, Dungeon Encounters is that game.

Immediately surprising is the confidence with which Dungeon Encounters carries out its mission. There is no accident in his spartan approach to RPG. The slightest of excuses for a story, for example, is delivered unashamedly: it is immediately stated in a little box labeled “Story.” (Summary: there was a city; a maze appeared). The save list is titled “Expedition Chronicles” as if it were a thematic artifact of the setting and not a functional artifact of the game. A fairly common idea, yes, but in most games, it’s a way of trying to maintain the illusion while hiding some housework from video games – here, it’s about 50% of the world’s build. Dungeon Encounters, even in its name, is proudly basic, but deceptively meaty.

Looking at some of the Square Enix names behind this game, there is no cheek in their rebellion against JRPG canon. Are from canon and it could hardly be more: Hiroyuki Ito, Hiroaki Kato, Ryoma Ito, and Nobuo Uematsu – each have worked on multiple Final Fantasy titles. This list explains why a game so simple in concept is so sumptuously rich in practice.

On paper, the game is extremely simple: you take a group of four and lead them through the levels of the maze. You can see the design as you explore, numbers that indicate monster encounters, events, or locations. These are not random and in many cases could be identified by simple icons. The audacity of this refusal to elaborate on the underlying mechanics goes straight to the spirit of Dungeon Encounters. There is not even a map. If you’ve heard of people hand-drawing game maps on graph paper in ancient times and wondered what it would be like, this is your chance to find out.

In battle, you can choose physical or magical attacks, and characters have both physical and magical defense stats. When a defense reaches zero, HP can be reduced using the same attack type. So if a creature has no magic defense left, magic attacks will now reduce its HP. The encounters use the Active Time Battle system that Hiroyuki Ito created for Final Fantasy IV in 1991, where combatants take turns based on their own timers rather than in a strict sequence, an old mechanic that has still been shown to be highly effective. .

That’s the core of Dungeon Encounters summed up, but the devs squeeze each Last delicious abandonment of the formula, overlaying enough audiovisual decoration to enhance the experience but not mask it. Is it a glorified spreadsheet? Maybe, but it’s really good.

The music is, with absolute respect, in the genre “video game music”. The main theme of Dungeon Encounters is that the basics of video games are very useful. The Uematsu soundtrack works when needed and settles in between. The wailing of the retro-rock guitar goes back to the founding days of video games and contributes to an almost comical reductionism, in which Dungeon Encounters clearly looks like a game that could have been created in the 1980s. The music and effects Together they do an incredible amount of work, transforming what you see in these absurdly simplistic screenshots into something palpable and prosperous.

Graphical simplicity does not mean there is no work to be done. The elements of the game must be clear and easy to analyze; all of those numbers should be legible on the Switch’s handheld screen. In both cases, Dungeon Encounters does the job. It’s more evidence of how deliberately and precisely the developers have made their design decisions. There are no corner cutouts, the hard work has only gone into more than just the big monster models and voiced dialogue.

Despite the generally parsimonious approach, the graphics are neither cruelly spartan nor disrespectful to gamers for the simple sake of making a point – the game looks beautiful. The texture of the dungeon board is sumptuous and the colors of the different stages are harmonious and attractive. Animated flourishes like windswept blades of grass bring the scene to life.

Despite all the focus on functionality, the character images and flavorful text, while brief, is of the highest caliber. The dungeons have evocative, elegant and varied portraits on the menus and elegant models on the board. Fleeting text bios are efficient and generously provide quirky emotional hooks in exchange for seconds spent reading.

Screenshots never capture enough of a game, but they are especially unsuitable for Dungeon Encounters. Aside from the sound, the sense of movement, and the feel of the controls, there’s the aesthetic experience of the systems behind the numbers. The numbers here take on great importance beyond their logical values, acquiring an emotional weight. Early in the game, we are taught that the impact of 10 points is substantial, when a single point is often the deciding factor in a match. In no time, your attacks exceed 100 points at a time and it feels powerful. That’s when you can take a look at the store of items described in the hundreds of thousands and start to nervously wonder what exactly is at level 99 of the maze.

This, of course, is the classic JRPG statistics system. Imbue the numbers with meaning through their effect in battle, then increase the numbers and you can feel how far you’ve come. You can see how much your achievements overshadow your beginnings. It’s not the epic view that puts you on top of the world, it’s the climbing.

Dungeon Encounters takes full advantage of this. You will worry about your classmates and their absurdly truncated backstories because you will have felt what they have been through. Small snippets of style text come into prominence throughout the long journey. A fallen hero is unquestionably restored to grace by fighting deep within the dungeons. A vengeful sister calms down with the catharsis of useless exhaustion. Repentance turns into redemption, loss of company, defeat into victory, poverty into wealth. Not bad for a glorified spreadsheet.

conclusion

Dungeon Encounters is a masterstroke of game design, character, and storytelling – it’s storytelling in the way that only games can be. It teaches what scale feels like in a game and teaches, through its absence, the roles of rich imagery and detailed storytelling. The next time we play an RPG with baroque graphics and forests of text, we’ll understand a little more deeply where the atmosphere of a game really comes from.