Name: Dungeon Crawler, Party of Four

Developer: Gredge109



Story: The village of Normand needs a hero, and there are plenty signing up; so many, it's become something of a tourist trade. Unfortunately, the only weapons they have for adventurers are the cheapest garbage available...just like a real tourist gift shop! Now that you're (barely) equipped, it's time to explore the dungeon. Why? You got me, but everybody else is doing it so why not? You have to guide Elsa, Sally, Harry, and Dorn through the dungeon and survive. Because apparently a lot of people die in this dungeon, and it hasn't even attracted any government safety inspections or zoning reviews. "Sir, do you know you're operating a type B dungeon in an area clearly restricted for type A?"

Gameplay: This is a bog standard dungeon crawler. Is it made in RPG Maker VX Ace? No doubts there. The procedure is simple. Begin the game, go through the first level of the dungeon. Go through it again. Go through it again. Keep going through it until you're confident you're at a high enough level to explore deeper without getting wrecked. The enemies will get gradually harder, then you'll reach an area where they're so hard, you feel like you're back at level 1. When that happens, grind in this area. Just keep grinding until you feel strong enough to move on.

The only real changes to the basic system are the Yanfly scripts that give you greater control over equipment and abilities. What the developer does is give you all basic characters that you can customize any way you like, letting decide essentially the type of party. If you want only fighters, or only mages, you can do that. Of course, you'll have a tough time if your team is only mages because MP is unnecessarily scarce given the limited nature of your powers fairly early in the game. You start with 9 MP, and you don't get any more until you've reached level 7 and even then, you only get one extra MP. You have staves that each have a basic elemental attack: ice, fire, or thunder. These attacks are basic, though if you hit an enemy weak to it, it'll increase the damage. Given the MP limits, simply making the basic elemental attacks for the wizard weapons MP free would likely have negligible impact on the gameplay while giving much wanted relief to the resource burden.

Yes, resource burden. The focus on this game is grind, baby grind. You can buy 99 health potions, 99 bagged lunches, 99 spirits, and it won't matter. You'll use them all and have to come back to town to buy more. That's not a big issue. A lot of games use this formula. My issue is with your wizard. Because a character designated wizard has such a dearth of MP, he adds an extra burden to your resources, which are already heavily compromised by standard grind elements of the game. If your wizard runs out of MP, he is useless, while everyone else remains functional. Spirits give you MP, but they're twice as much as potions, and if you have a wizard, you're going to have to use them four times as much. Obviously, this is impractical, and can be a bit frustrating for a player. One of the following has to happen: 1)raise the base MP of each player so a potential wizard has more to begin with, 2)give MP a reasonable growth rate so that when your characters reach level 6, your player isn't pulling his hair out saying, "Jesus H. Christ! How the fuck do you get more MP in this game?" 3) Have your weapons come with a basic magical attack that doesn't cost anything so that your wizard isn't such a leech on the rest of your team's finances. The developer needs to balance these abilities out so that the team isn't feeling the pinch of a member's ineptitude.



Creature encounters, not to bad. It is a random encounter system, which I have come to despise, but these aren't too annoying. The encounter rate is reasonable. If the player doesn't like REs, s/he/they won't be too put out. Still, this is a grind based game. REs are basically the only way to go. The enemies are fairly garden variety and combat is very nicely balanced, though a little on the easy side. I don't see too much of a challenge. Unfortunately, your method for fighting monsters are going to be pretty much the same. It's not as button mashy as some button mashers, but it definitely is one. Fights get repetitive and the game starts to quickly feel like a chore. As long as the MP problem persists, I don't see there being a suitable fix for the repetitive combat problem. If the MP problem does get fixed, then the first thing I would do is make elemental based enemies strong against physical attacks. That way, you can't take them down by hitting them as easily and then you could rely a bit more on your mage to take them out.

State rates really need to be adjusted. This is where the heaviest resource burden is. States. Always. Hit. Always. Every single hit from a snake poisons. Every time an imp tries to blind you, it always hits. If you have to use a restorative item after EVERY. SINGLE. BATTLE. you've got broken item balance. What is the hit rate on these states? The developer could at least drop them to 50 percent. People, think of every game you've ever played where poison, blind, sleep, and silence was a thing. Were they such an occurrence that you came to feel that your antidotes were the most important item in your inventory? They are here. In fact, you will be running back to town to replenish your antidotes every 10 to 15 minutes. It's one thing to make states a necessary part of the game mechanics but if the player is actually forgoing buying health potions so that s/he/they can buy antidotes, this is a problem, and it exists in this game.

VX Ace's jacked up hit/miss ratio is also a thing in this game, so watch out for that. In fact, it feels like everyone misses quite a bit more than they do in a typical VX Ace game. If the developer custom adjusted these numbers, I suggest unadjusting them, because they're already bad enough in VX Ace without making them worse. In fact, in my games, I've strongly considered just setting all hit rates to 100 percent because of VXA's incompetent hit/miss rates. If there's a script for it, I haven't found it, and I have been looking, looking, looking.



Overall item balance...I don't think you'll ever have enough items. The whole emphasis on this game is "can you make it to the end and back?" and that concept pretty much implies that you're going to be depending greatly on resources. The good thing here is that if you run out, there's always plenty of money to buy more. The enemies don't drop money, unless you count the money purses from lost adventurers. What enemies do is drop tradeable items you can sell and buy what you need with; things like rotten teeth and broken scales. There are plenty of them and they really bring some good money at the shop in Normand. Also, once you reach basement 3, spell rings start to become available and those really help to take some of the burden off of restoration, though they do add to the MP resource burden.

By the time, you reach basement 2, you start to wonder how you'll get back to Normand as you go increasingly deeper into the dungeon, but not to worry. At basement three, you discover that the developer has included teleports that bring you back to the main level. Once you've unlocked a teleport, simply activating the teleport on level one will bring you back to the last dungeon level you were on. The game also includes a very basic, optional tutorial. It simply covers the very basic RPG Maker stuff and how the game works. You won't need it unless you've never played an RPG Maker game, but you can get a few items from it, so it's worth going through.



Graphics: Everything is basic RTP except the faces. The face chips for the main characters are hand drawn in cartoon. Really, I have to say that this game looks like a demo game for VX Ace. The walls are all one tile high. The mapping makes full use of all of the RTP assets. There's really not a whole lot I can say about it.

Music: Mostly RTP, but the developer wrote four pieces that fit the game quite well. It's very impressive work. I like hearing the rooster at the inn.

Conclusion: This game could be a good way to waste your time. It's my opinion that there are quirks that are annoying enough that a lot of people will put this game down, but those that can get past that will probably enjoy this game for what it is.