Then I walked through the game…in retrospect nice to be OP, but I ended up fast forwarding through basically all the random encounters afterwards. Indeed, as someone stated on a forum, if you grind the rest of the game will be boring, and the stat growth is well-balanced enough that you can just play the game and the difficulty will scale with you. Besides that, my main pet peeve was the limited inventory space. I’m the kind of person who hoards everything, and at the end of the game I ended up throwing out all non-recovery consumables. How come the FF1 remake had unlimited inventory??? Also, the amount of casts required to level up spells – getting Basuna and Esuna to level 6 so I could heal ailments was……a time.

But the good stuff!

• rotating cast of characters! Even if the people in your party die after like 30 min! Except Leila and Gordon, who left the party before they could die!

• the dungeons look really good IMO. Jade Passage was amazing. Also, they were very nice about dead ends – those wouldn’t transport you all the way back to the beginning or something as annoying.

• I think the pacing was very fair, and I never felt stuck – the game made it clear that I could talk to Hilda, Gordon, and that one old dude who tells you how to get to places by being like “I bet you can’t get to Paloom because you need a canoe!!!” to figure out what to do next. I actually wish I had to do more talking, though that probably would have made the game more confusing.

• The game was clearly meant to be played several times – for example, by not telling you which magic is black and which is white, it’s probably better if you take notes and then do a second playthrough. Turns out Ultima is a white spell but I gave it to my black mage (Maria), so she didn’t make full use of it.

You’ll spend a lot of time running away from battles until the end. (Sometimes, you HAVE to run away from a boss to advance past it temporarily to get to an item you need to beat it.) For many battles, especially at first, you’ll just use the appropriate “magic” item (which uses up your HP...) because your sword does no damage. Also, having only 9 items at once is really hard to juggle. How do you know if an item is going to be used later? You just discard it and pray XD Also for weapons — you can carry 3 weapons at a time and they’re not counted in your inventory, but you have to drop a weapon to add another.

It plays, well, like any old RPG, but set in Greece. Hades has kidnapped Aphrodite and is unleashing monsters onto Greece, which is NOT a torus! It has edges! Everyone either tells you nothing of substance (Hello!) or a hint. Most of the world is inaccessible at the start because you don’t have a ship, monsters are too hard, etc. So I think it was straightforward in the sense that you dindn’t have too many options. The loop is like go to town –> learn about XYZ to go to or advance –> go to a dungeon and find an item –> helps you get to next town.

The end credits imply a sequel, since Hades is not permanently defeated...

You play as a prison guard trying to escape the outbreak, so the enemies and zones are the same as in CP. You have a gun (initially pretty much a shotgun), a baton (or other melee prison weapon), a GRP, and a kick (I pretty much never used the latter two because why would you use your GRP when you can shoot or dash). Rooms give you either one of the 3000 currencies in the game or 3 upgrades with the same theme, of which you can choose 1. (The theme is known when you enter the room.) The music and art are great. I like the comics theme and how the game takes itself much less seriously than CP. I also like that the framework is you being observed by a security camera (doubtless if I keep playing I’ll have to confront the observer) and that every run is with a different security guard, who can fight their predecessor if they choose.

Unlike Hades, there’s not that much story besides your interactions with other escapees, since you presumably you’ve already played CP. However, there’s enforced time pressure because there’s only one escape pod, so you have to race and occasionally fight the other escapees, and the game can introduce random hazards by saying that the other escapees are hindering you. One of my main complaints about the game is that fighting the escapees is so different in rhythm than regular monsters — one enemy who spends all their time dashing around like a maniac and occasionally tries to shoot you in a big cone, and there’s no environmental hazards you can exploit.

The roguelite aspect is that you can upgrade your skills and get new weapons, etc., but for some reason every kind of upgrade has a different kind of currency, so you have to keep making choices between getting like 5 of one currency and 5 of another...there’s also credits for buying things within runs...it seems really unnecessary. I’ve just been choosing contraband unless I’m working towards a suit upgrade.

My other main complaint is that the effects in the game feel very similar and I don’t see the potential for crazy synergies that rely on doing more damage/debuffs based on existing effects. What’s the point of having shock and ignite and rot and ...? I can see myself getting more powerful via grinding out more contraband and suit upgrades and stuff, but not by getting lucky during a run. (I did quite like the assault rifle full automatic mode.)

Finally, it’s really hard to heal in this game...which is bad for me because I tend to be cavalier about damage until I’m on the wire, and then I magically get through like 5 rooms without damage. You can heal only from health boosters and shops that maybe give you the opportunity to buy healing, which come quite infrequently imo. You don’t heal up after fighting past selves, bosses, or other escapees, which really reduces my desire to do any of those.I feel like the game relies much more on upgrades than other roguelites I’ve played.

OK update: later skills include the ability to get more HP from completing rooms and upgrades. Also, eventually you’re supposed to unredact all the information for each person (this takes many trips to the computer rooms), then kill them to get their fingerprint, then escape. Full disclosure I did not read anyone’s file, I just hit unredact, exited, and ran to the door. If you do it for everyone, then you can play as the watcher, who unlocks the vault and finds another vial with the virus. Then you can choose whether to be the watcher or the guard, and whoever wins that fight escapes with the vial. Again, it’s clear this game is very much about grinding through many runs...I don’t intend on doing that, but I suppose it was fun while it lasted.

Incidentally, on the bosses: the first boss has a charge, ground slam, projectiles, and the thing where he hits the ground and then a wave comes at you. The second boss can vanish underground; in my opinion it’s by far the easiest, since it’s easy to dodge its tentacles. It does have a move where it sets up a cage and you have to break out, but again, that just takes time. The third boss is a crane being controlled by one of the zombies; it has one arm that rotates in a big circle around it, one laser pointer that follows you, and two of the sides of the crane are replaced by rollers (so avoid them) and change over time. Also, sometimes it spews out the vision-blocking smoke and sometimes it launches a barrage of missiles. It’s kind of frantic, but for me the easiest strategy was to hit one of the unprotected sides, dash away from the laser pointer, and also escape to the edge of the map during the missile barrage. For these three bosses I think it’s pretty clear how to take minimal damage. Now the last boss...this guy starts out not too bad — first with lots of laser fire that you can’t just use your melee weapon to clear. If you get too close to him, he’ll melee you. He will also sometimes boomerang his baton and send out these floating lightning balls. Also, one strip of the floor will electrify periodically, which thankfully you can fix by hitting a control at the end of the strip. Now the real issue is what happens at lower health — he’ll use his version of the atom beam, which is like 12 radial copies of an extremely wide beam that he will rotate and move around...also, he’ll use a big kinetic hammer to smash the floor (fine) and set down lightning fields which will send out a wave with staggered timing (not fine). Also, he will send out pulses of these really big circular orbs that you thankfully can cancel with a melee weapon, but boy, those things are big and I always get hit by them. I guess that they designed the boss so you have to facetank him, since he is the last boss, but...really guys???

I was initially skeptical of the slower weapons but I have to say that the kinetic hammer is actually great because of how wide and aggressive it is. Likewise the mortar backpack seems hard to control, but it damages everyone, even enemies with shields, and the damage is so high that you really can just fire huge projectiles and then relax as you reload because enemies will die after eating only 1 or 2 of them. I also didn’t use the GRP at first, but after a run where I got shred on it, I realized that it is very useful for preventing enemies from retaliating as you aggress them + it can toss enemies over ledges.

• you wake up as an amnesiac. After talking to like 3 people, a bunch of holes to the underworld open up and you fall into the underworld. but you don’t die, and the people you were just talking to turn into pixies and drag you back to the surface world. Apparently you’re immortal, and you have a recurring dream in a strange place where someone tells you they are descendants of Atlas. Are we a Titan???
• With a flock of pixies following you, you head to the nearby village of Gortyn because Knossos is closed to you. To enter Knossos, you disguise yourself as a girl using the dress of a dead girl — her parents want to get rid of her belongings and literally tell you to steal the dress. Then you go the local slave trader and he brings you as a slave to Knossos, where there are all these other girls who are going to be sacrificed to the Dark One, some terrible sea monster. You help them escape. Also at Knossos, you meet another person who can jump from very tall heights and survive, Reion. He’s the local circus attraction. To leave this island, you have to borrow the innkeeper’s ship; the innkeeper allows it if you’ll do a “private showing” of the suicide jump for you.
• Sadly for him, his ship gets eaten up by the Dark One. You navigate its guts to leave and wash up at the town of Laconia. Reion goes to Athens.
• Laconia is being occupied by Spartan soldiers trying to deal with the monster incursion, but their captain’s dead. They say they’ll appoint a very courageous person as their captain. You can demonstrate your courage by...jumping from a very tall height. You do that and now you have 9 Spartans following you around. Maybe 10. You lead them back to Sparta, which has been badly damaged in a monster attack. A monster blocks the north gate of the city, so you go in with your soldiers and defeat it. Also, people in Sparta say the Athenians treat their slaves VERY POORLY.
• Athens refuses to let you enter the actual city. Instead you have to go to the dirty and cramped slave quarters. You try to sneak into the “free” part by...jumping from the wall dividing the two, but get arrested. You meet your old immortal friend Reion, who says that when he sees a tall height, he feels the urge to jump...you ask around and the old beggar in the corner of the slave quarters is actually the Athenian king, who wanted to know if the slaves were really treated as poorly as rumored (yes) and can’t get back to his castle because no one believes he’s the king. He takes you through an underground passage to the free part. There people say they are now friends with Troy (lol) and to go to the town of Therma, which is having trouble producing travel wings. Also, Heracles interrupts a theater production to declare that they should all be trying to save the world, not putting on plays, and gets dragged out. We talk to him and he joins our party.
• At Therma, the problem is that monsters are blocking the way to the Temple of Hermes. Daedalus tried to go but cannot fight the monsters; after we deal with the Naga in the cave, we find that the travel wings have reverted to normal prices.
• On the way to Troy, we first pass through Drisko, a trading town that’s seen a recent resurgence because people must use the land route between Athens and Troy now that the Dark One is busy eating all the ships. It’s also super hot. The residents speak of an immortal in a cave who spends all his time working on a statue instead of eating or sleeping. At that cave, the rumored immortal is someone we saw in our dream! His name is Themisios and his statue is a replica of what we’ve been dreaming of. His maid Stemia also wants to accompnay us on our journey. Our dream changes — the people there are now petrified — and we leave the dream before we are able to talk to the one unpetrified person.
• We go through a mountain pass to get to Troy. There, some mountain debris falls on us and...Themisios dies! Turns out Stemia was the immortal one.
• We finally get to Troy. The king tells us that the Dark One is the cause of all our problems and instaed of a ship, we can use the Trojan Horse, which is very sturdy, to confront the Dark One. It works and we defeat it, but the horse sinks. A centaur yeets out of the Dark One, and a ship takes us back to Troy. The centaur wants help getting home, which is just...somewhere in the mountains. We haven’t seen any villages in the mountains yet, so we take a ship (the seas are now safe) to a new destination, Bengaji.
• At Bengaji, the centaur Kurin is kidnapped because there’s a legend that eating centaur meat will make you immortal, so the king of Persia is offering a ton of money for centaurs. We go to Persia, but can’t go to the prison or enter the castle. At the centaur village, the elder Keron thinks that we had a hand in Kurin’s kidnapping (we don’t get the time to defend oursevles) and turns us into centaurs. Perfect, a Trojan Horse-style infiltration. We get immediately apprehended and thrown into the dungeon with Kurin, and have to sneak out of the dungeon back to the world map and return him to the centaur village. Unfortunately, Keron thanks us and then tells us to gtfo because humans suck. However, the Persian castle is now open to us. We try to tell the king that eating centaurs does not an immortal make. We prove our own immortality by...jumping off the castle balcony. But since we can’t tell the king how to become immortal, he locks us up. x_x Then monsters attack and the king forces us to go fight them because we’re immortal and he has hostages. So we do that and return, and he is very very sorry. Also, the sun is becoming weirder and weirder — Persia is now stuck in night or something — and he tells us to talk to the king of Athens and the sages who live beneath Mt. Olympus.
• Athens is mostly empty except some kids! They’ve all left for “New Athens” south of the Temple of Zeus. Also, a ton of the adults are gone because they died fighting monsters. The king directs us to the sages beneath Mt. Olympus. We go through the mountains to the sages of Logosis, and they tell us that the sun has stopped because Helios usually pulls it in his chariot, but there must be something wrong with either him or the chariot, so the sun is stuck in place. They also tell us that to get to Olympus we need a silk ribbon to summon Pegasus (see earlier games). No one knows where the silk ribbon is, but someone tells us that Daedalus is trying to make a kite that can fly to Olympus instead. Yay for the ingenuity of mankind.
• Daedalus needs an aleph wing to make his kite, but all the alephs are long dead and he needs a wing from a live or recently dead aleph. We check out the aleph cave and there is one recently dead one, presumably killed by the boss monster in the cave, Barock. After defeating Barock we bury the aleph and bring its wings to Daedalus. He makes us a kite.
• To use the kite we must...jump off a tall structure. Jumping off the one in Troy gets us to the clouds of Mt. Olympus. There we encounter Phaethon, who says that it’s his job now to carry the sun around, but Uranos stole the chariot horses and placed a bunch of lookalikes there. We also see Heracles, who is trying to find the real horses. We eventually find the real horses and return them to Phaethon. Heracles accompanies him for protection. Yay! Before we leave, Heracles tells us to beware of Zeus. Uranos appears and tells us he’s not our enemy; he had a plan to defeat the monsters and stealing the horses was part of this plan (oops) but it was going to work out. He gives us a “Sky Caller” we can use to get to Olympus. I think either him or Phaethon gives us the key to the temple of Zeus. Then Zeus zaps both him and our kite with lightning bolts. With our kite gone we plummet to the ground, where we’re rescued by local villagers who think we’re deities.
• We use the key to open the temple of zeus’ gate. At Olympus, we have to pass some puzzle sections to enter heaven. We can talk to all of the gods, but they are almost all critical of humans and the damage they’re doing to the world. Apparently Zeus has ordered humans to be killed. We also learn that Prometheus gave us our immortality, so Zeus locked him up in a tower. Hephaestus is still on our side and gives us the key to the tower. At the top of the tower, Prometheus tells us that he intended to make all humans immortal, but he only had the power to do 3 of us and Zeus objected. We lost our memories because he wanted to prove that humans could make the right choices, whatever that means. Then we get yeeted off the top of the tower.
• In New Athens, the king of Athens is going to meet with the king of Trantia to the west at Logosis. Logosis has been partly destroyed (I think by Trantian soldiers). Albion, the King of Trantia says that Uranos has a plan for getting rid of monsters, which is to fill up all the holes to the underworld...They need a ton of labor for that, and Athens can either ally with Trantia or be enslaved. The king of Athens is not very enthused by this, but has no choice but to accept. Then a giant earthquake happens and we all fall into the underworld.
• In the underworld, we meet another immortal amnesiac human, which is weird because Prometheus says he only gave 3 of us immortality. We trek out and make it back to the surface near the town of Renz, one of Trantia’s towns. We realize that the architecture looks like the one from our dream! At Trantia, the king has survived and observes that the hole-filling plan is working. However, the giant hole near Renz can’t really be filled by human effort, and people think that if Atlas could be un-petrified (why is he petrified?) he could help; there is a town of Atlas’s descendants to the south. Trantia is pretty expansionist. But he can’t go anywhere because his ship is broken but the ship artisans in the southern town of Labat are on strike.
• On the way south to Labat, we go through a narrow land passage where we see a little Dark One and the Dark One and are very confused about how the Dark One could possibly have kids. At Labat, we learn that the strike is because Trantia’s previous king’s advisor, Baor, used a ship to disrupt the natural order of things by creating that narrow passage and blocking the sea from flowing. All the shipbuilders are hiding out in the forest. Some of them think it wouldn’t be so bad to repair the king’s ship, and we take a ship shaft back to the ship. When we repair it the king allows us to use it.
• We sail south to the Atlas descendant town, Atlasia. It’s...the town of our dreams!!! We see a strange vision of a beautiful woman. The town said there used to be realistic statues of an old man and child, but they saw two people carrying the statues to a nearby cave. That cave has a TON of statues and we can somehow understand them. They say that Baor turned them to stone. Also, we can unpetrify Atlas if we collect the blood of the 3 gorgon sisters. So we go around to do that.
• On one of our stops, we go to Baor’s hometown Eus, paradise on earth. His parents said that he was too greedy and ambitious and used his power for ill, while his son left to find Baor but never returned. We pick up Baor’s journal.
• On another stop, we encounter Daedalus, who gives us a ship he’s made that can ram and destroy rocks. We use this to free the dolphins and bring them back to Triton. Triton gives us a key to Oceanus’ palace. There, we encounter a strange shadow of Stemia. She regains her memories — she was a priestess in the temple of Oceanus, and Oceanus vanished. Then there was a light (Prometheus granting her immortality). When she woke up again she was with Themisios. Sorry, I clicked through this really fast. Her real name is Stella. She prays to Oceanus and it’s revealed that he’s the Dark One, and he’s now super wounded. We get the silk ribbon by going inside him again and can now summon Pegasus to fly around. Also, Heracles realizes that if he can find other “shadows”, we can also regain our memories!
• With all 3 gorgon sister blood items, we return to Atlasia. The king of Trantia has unblocked the landslide between Atlasia and Mt. Atlas, and together we climb the mountain. At the top, we defeat Baor, then offer the 3 bloods to Atlas, but then Prometheus appears and tells us that we WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO DO THAT and we made the wrong choices. Albion tries to attack him with the power of Uranos, but Prometheus says that both he and Uranos wanted to save the humans, and both methods didn’t work, and now Zeus is going to send a flood to destroy the earth. We get yeeted from the mountain. Heracles shows up with our 3 shadows in tow, but then the flood happens and we wash up at Eus. The shadows got lost in the flood. Reion is especially furious and says that getting our memories back doesn’t even matter because everyone else is dead. We get on Pegasus and fly around but there’s literally nothing except the sea and mountains remaining. Then we hear Hades calling Baor to the underworld and somehow we end up there.
• The underworld has the spirits of everyone we’ve met so far. People are still selling things, somehow...they tell us that Hades’ castle is in the north. After defeating Cerberus and Orthrus, we meet Hades; the rest of our party is not allowed to come. But he calls us Baor and asks us why we failed to do our assigned task of destroying humanity with monsters after he granted us immortality (so we are the one Prometheus didn’t grant immortailty to). The gods were basically using humans as proxies in a contest to see who could deal with the “humans ruining Gaia” problem, and we failed in our monster invasion, so Hades lost and Zeus kept his throne. He transforms us into Baor’s monster form and throws us into Tartarus. There, we push around some blocks until we go into the one entrance. Chronos, the lord of time, says that he’s been watching us and we will be trapped in time — he rewinds time and puts us in Mt. Atlas! We are the person our own party fought! The beautiful woman appears again and tells us that if we defend ourselves we can still communicate with our companions. During the battle, we don’t attack, and eventually the party realizes that we’re trying to communicate something. But Albion doesn’t understan why they’re empathizing with a monster and calls on Uranos’ power. Now all 5 of us (including my past and future self) fight Albion and defeat him
• Because we never gave the blood to Atlas, Zeus doesn’t send the flood. So Heracles is able to reunite us with our shadows! We are Baor; he left his village with Medusa’s head because they pushed him out for being too greedy and ambitious. He advised the king of Trantia and became famous there, but he wanted to do something even more memorable, like linking the continents. So he plotted to petrify Oceanus (so the Dark One is actually Oceanus’ wife) by injuring Oceanus’ son to lure him to the channel between Trantia and Labat; this worked. He then got wind of the Atlas descendants trying to use the gorgons’ blood to revive Oceanus, so he petrified them all as well. Eventually, being mortal, he died and was supposed to spend a lot of time in the underworld atoning for his sins. But Hades summoned him, gave him a younger body, made him immortal, and told him to lead the monster invasion. But right as he entered the surface Prometheus zapped him and he lost all his memories — this is the beginning of the game. Nils is his son. Reion is a descendant of Heracles.
• So to finish, we have to right our wrong and unpetrify Oceanus. We go to that area, fall down a cavern, and end up inside petrified Oceanus (I think). At the end of the cavern, Albion summons Uranos’ power again to fight us, but we defeat him. Uranos doesn’t understand why Gaia (she is the beautiful woman!) is defending us, but accepts it. We make “the right choice” and unpetrify Oceanus. Then Pegasus brings us to heaven, where Prometheus praises us. Either he or Gaia admits that no one knows if we made the right or wrong choice, but the map zooms out to the Earth continent map. Gaia says that we will have to spend more time atoning for our sins, but she hopes we can be reborn in a place that is totally green.
• Reion goes off to tell people the truth about what happened and Stemia accompanies him. Nils decides to accompany us — he had made it his mission to kill his father, but now that that’s us, we journey together. The credits scene shows us atoning in the underworld by pushing around a boulder and stuff, but eventually Hades has us reborn into a young girl’s body and we indeed live out another life in a verdant place with lots of plants and pigs and friends.

• linear exploration (but with upgrades) 

• boots that let you fly everywhere (as my brother said, some programmer was like “what if we turned off collision detection”)

• you don’t need special items to reveal caves (mostly), not like Zelda where you would have to bomb everything. 

• the enemies are quite aggressive. There are some maps where you can use this against them and force them to only come at you in one direction, but often there’s a lot of them making strange movements quickly towards you.

• The side scrolling sections where you can’t go back….without a map I would definitely have gotten stuck on the caves leading to the boss fights. I'm not sure these really added to my game experience, but I suppose it's a good change of pace.

Also, the game looks way cuter than Zelda.

I will admit that the fairies giving advice was really annoying XD You work so hard to find a cave and then the fairy is like “Hi”.

Personally I found the graphics bland and dark. You can upgrade your weapon (unlimited uses), magic (limited uses), and armor with money, so you can stop and grind if struggling. I found the limited inventory space combined with having to buy keys to unlock doors quite annoying — different doors require different kinds of keys, but you don't actually know which keys are needed until you actually interact with the door, so without a map(through) you would have to either buy more keys than needed or keep backtracking after finding each door. You also can't sell a key to a shopkeeper unless they can sell that key to you, so at some point I wasted all the money I spent buying a key.

Instead of a straightforward platformer relying on skill, in Castlevania II you level up and explore an “open” world with lots of secrets before confronting Dracula when you feel appropriately powered up. There’s an added soft time limit, where you have to navigate the overworld efficiently lest you take too long to kill Dracula and die immediately afterwards in the ending. (I think the biggest obstacle to this is the grinding at the beginning, honestly: you need enough money to get the items to access the first mansion, and I took a really long time to do that.) As usual I hate stairs.

I had fun looking for the secrets and dropping garlic in graveyards and the like, though I must note I was playing with a patch that fixed the poor English translation, so the hints were far less confusing. Also, even though there is a time limit, it freezes in the mansions, so you can grind the infinitely respawning enemies there…the developers did stop you from leveling up on weak enemies, though, which was kind of sad XD. The correct strategy for the boss battles is “toss sacred flame at them so they stop moving repeatedly”. If you have enough hearts, guaranteed to work.

I suppose the game was meant to be replayed several times — the first time, you take a really long time trying to figure out where everything is, and on later iterations you can immediately perform some steps while figuring out how to optimize your route or discovering more secrets.

• yay scifi setting! Yay female protagonist! Yay first-person dungeon exploration with an atlas system in case you are lost!
• the consult system is SO HELPFUL. forgot what you were doing after some time not playing? just press L1 and hear Myau be like “it’s time to go to the corona tower!!!!” You still have to write stuff down because consult doesn’t tell you WHERE anything is, just that you have to find it next. Also it’s cute to see the characters banter!
• the difficulty is not too bad, especially with some grinding. However, the encounter rate is ASS. I did do some early leveling on Dezoris when I got the spaceship, but other than that, I naturally leveled up as I was walking around because I would hit an enemy every few steps. Also, as with FF1, once you get the Caduceus, the game gets way easier because you have free healing. Paired with heal crystals for everyone, you end up at full health after most fights. (Admittedly, I did finish the game at level 96, so I was also benefiting from taking less damage. I think the PS Cave walkthrough recommended running from everything in the last few dungeons and then beat the boss at level 60…)
• fights get repetitive. Also, attack animations fairly slow. Before the Caduceus, my strategy for most fights was to spam AoE from Lutz/Myau/Tyrone (w/gun) and Alisa awkwardly hits one enemy. When I ran out of MP, I would teleport back to nearest city, heal up, and try again. After the Caduceus, my strategy for most fights was to just attack with everyone except Lutz and have Lutz heal where necessary. Boss fights become “Myau casts Warla and Mawarla on loop because their effects expire after 3 turns, Lutz heals when needed, Alisa + Tyrone attack” and praying that this is the last turn I have to repeat those actions. I guess if the game were harder, I would have needed more of a brain and that would have its own set of problems, but whatever.
• I never actually use the collabo system because I was too scared of my crystals breaking. Apparently you can use it to cheese some bosses if you buy enough crystals, but w/e
• Because of how damage is calculated, at the end of the game multi-hit weapons are the way to go – you’ll have so much base attack that it pays to attack twice with a weapon with like 90 less attack than the single hit!
• Unsurprisingly, I went from “how am I so poor” at the start to “I am sitting on piles of money with nowhere to spend it” at the end.
• Item management SUCKS. Items DON’T STACK. I just want to keep 99 potions. I was pretty conservative with item use, then I ran out of inventory, so I started using items as soon as I got them to accommodate.
• Music was fairly good, not too repetitive.
• Story was a bit anticlimactic – Baya Malay onwards is fairly linear, you beat La Shiec, and are unceremoniously dropped into a new dungeon with pulsating flesh walls that is entirely linear. Dark Falz has no villain monologue, you just yeet him. I enjoyed the pre-Baya Malay parts way more – getting to talk with all the townspeople and learn about the planets, running around fetching items (the Dezoris sequence especially, adding the liar/truth teller trick was fun). Alisa’s reveal as princess was not really foreshadowed?? You’re just like ah yes, I see she was a royal all along, that doesn’t change anything and beat La Shiec. Kind of annoying that you have to repeatedly talk to people and in the right order to trigger more story events.

We've evolved from the one-man party to a three-man party that are distant descendants of the DQI protagonist. We also encounter the descendant of the DQI villain and can later visit Alefgard, the DQI continent. The gameplay has also evolved! With more allies and monster groups, there's more flexibility in battle. We get to sail around the whole map and teleport.

My main memory of the game is when your team gets to Rhone, the last area of the game, the difficulty spikes tremendously. That's mitigated by a couple hours of grinding, but it was kind of demoralizing XD

First, I want to talk about gacha games in general. I sort of swore off gacha games in graduate school as I realized that I did not want to play live service, microtransaction-based games that relied on FOMO for time-limited events, an endless story that would never actually resolve, and resource-gated grinding. Yes, at the start you have these exciting systems to learn, you get tons of free pulls for cool characters, and you progress fairly quickly, but soon enough you spend most of your time hitting the autobattle button and a little bit of it team-building or trying harder content. Plus, the episodic nature of main story and events means that not only do you forget what happened 4 months ago during the last lore-relevant event, the writers have probably also changed and forgotten about some vaguely foreshadowed story beat. Also, at any point the developers might add some mechanic that invalidates half the meta (and thus whatever you were grinding towards). Getting to play a “finished” game on a private server fixes all these issues and lets you focus on the good parts — it's great! All the story and game mechanics are final, even if the story's coherence is still somewhat doubtful at times. The server devs can set the banners to whatever they want, which in DL's case is either rotating banners or all banners organized by type, so there's no longer pressure to pull because a collab character is super good but vanishing in a week, or something. The community is still there, and more passionate than ever. And both private servers have ways to speed up grinding and progression; for example, one offers a free 10-pull every day, and the other drops the premium currency on every quest. You can really play at your own pace while still enjoying the game with others and getting those dopamine hits from the gacha or from progression.

In fact, playing DL has made me recall that one of the things I really loved about gacha games which I feel is rarely replicated in single-player games is the way progression works. There's a set of things to do — progressively harder content, new game modes, etc. — and although there is a meta, for the free-to-play player (and really, everyone who isn't a whale) your life is basically trying to optimize your play around your gradually improving personal constraints and basking in slowly hitting progression milestones regardless. Maybe you rerolled for that one broken character, but you still have to cobble together a team around them using whatever else you've got. Sure, eventually you'll get everyone, but for now, there's a lot of satisfaction in managing to put together a jank but workable team that can still challenge hard content. Maybe your fire team only has B and C-tier units, but that doesn't mean they can't synergize into something greater than the sum of their parts. Maybe you finally finished getting the materials for a weapon, and you get to revel in your temporary badassery until you run up against another wall, hence more grinding. Maybe you just do your dailies and one day you pull that character you've really wanted. The almost roguelike nature of how you advance through the game is great because, unlike roguelikes, you don't lose everything when you die, and in theory keeping at it for long enough means you'll be pretty good. In the past, I would always worry that I wasn't doing “enough” with my limited energy or resources, but I realize now that, regardless of all those exhortations to spend just a little more money to get things a little faster, all I should do is show up and play however I want. Modulo end of service, everything will come in time.

OK, now let's talk about Dragalia Lost. First of all, the music is fire. DAOKO has a ton of range and basically all the songs are hits. I got the soundtrack album on my second day of playing. Second, it's very different from Shironeko Project. Yes, the controls are the same, you pay resources to unlock nodes to strengthen your characters, and you construct buildings that boost your stats, but everything else plays quite differently. In no particular order:

• Dragalia Lost is really meant to be played with other people. All the quests have your whole team on the screen attacking and using skills at the same time, and most can be challenged either solo or co-op. The bosses have mechanics that would be familiar from MMOs, such as requiring players to stack on each other to reduce damage, baiting AoE attacks, trapping one of the players in a prison, etc. To mitigate AI failings on mechanically harder quests, AI-controlled characters (which is the norm if you're playing solo) take reduced damage and are actually exempt from some attacks.

• Some aspect of progression comes from pulling stronger characters and dragons, and there are some gacha pulls that are quite broken. However, quite a lot of it is due to weapons and wyrmprints, which are mostly gated behind grinding. The weapon progression is linear and also depends on how much content you clear; generally, you challenge the next tier of content using weapons from the previous tier. Meanwhile, wyrmprints are used to give characters extra passives, and you can equip up to eight (!) on a character, so that's a lot of space to customize and create synergies across your team.

• Skills cannot be spammed. Instead of MP, you charge a skill by attacking enemies, and cannot generally store multiple charges, and there is some care required to time skill usage correctly. Also, in later challenge quests, the dangerous boss attacks cannot be dodged with skills, so you actually have to have some mechanical skill.

• There's some feeling that the storyline is actually relevant to the other content. You unlock more challenge quests that are storyline bosses as you progress, and some story content is locked behind appropriate progression in other areas, such as leveling up the castle and smithy. The story characters get alternate versions that are actually good! And the story actually wrapped up, though this is partially due to the writers trying to do so when end of service was announced.

• The power creep is present, but pretty measured. It's mitigated somewhat by introducing an extra 20 nodes (“mana spiral”) to older units. The main creep is not stats, but just much more utility from later characters, but even older units can hold their own.

I have two main complaints about the game: that having dragons are really important, probably more than good units because units have wyrmprints and you need to pull dupes for dragons, and that Kaleidoscape is way too long for the randomized rewards you get. Seriously — 80 of basically the same set of floors?? Besides that, I am having a lot of fun and would highly recommend!