MASTER OF THE MONSTER LAIR

I'll admit I find "Master of the Monster Lair" to be a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, I really like being able to build my own dungeon. On the other hand, the turn-based battles in this game tend to be bit on the tediously long side due to the game zooming on your targets when you attack them. I really wish you could turn this effect off since it would probably cut the length of battles in half. To make matters worse the game gives you a rather useless character in the form of Gloop, a mimic slime. On the plus side Gloop can learn every spell in the game. On the downside he can only copy parts from regular monsters as far as I'm aware until after you've beaten all of the post game content. So Gloop's only real use for much of the game is as party healer and a potential meat shield for your enemies to slam against. This issue is only exacerbated by the fact that Owen and Kate grow stronger by eating food gained by killing monsters. And while they can only consume one meal a day. The game doesn't put any sort of strict deadline on the player for clearing out floors. So you can simply run in and exit the dungeon as many times as you need to in order to consume all of your food stores. As a result you can usually cleave a lot of the early bosses in a few turns. Especially if you get caught up in designing the perfect floor. Though, I tend to leave a clear path to the boss in order to save on time during my Let's Plays. After all, if I build a floor that requires you to basically pass through every point on the floor it will take over 2 hours to beat the 2nd floor due to how many monsters I can put in my way. And dealing with hordes of regular enemies isn't all that fun. Even if I can readily beat them into the ground with a single hit.

Thankfully, Kate speeds the process of grinding up a bit by learning naughty magic that can take down entire enemy parties. Yeah, the game refers to healing and support spells as nice magic and offensive spells as naughty magic. I'm guessing this was meant to be a joke for older players considering the girl gets naughty magic while the boy gets nice magic. Albeit, the only spell that's effective against the undead is part of the nice set.