This game is a quite fascinating piece. It's got some interesting gameplay, competent story and presentation, and some systems and mechanics that must have been hell to program in RPG Maker 2003. It has its flaws, as I mention later in this review, but they are not enough to kill my interest in the whole thing.

Story:

The intro scene is quite fascinating. It starts with a prologue involving two treasure hunters who accidentally awaken an ancient demon and promptly meet their demise. The prologue got me invested, even though it is a bit on the cliché side of things, and I look forward to finding out how it ties in with the rest of the plot down the line.

The game itself starts ten years later, when a young man sets out on a hunting quest of his own with a friend of his. As they are setting up to depart on their short journey, they notice that things in the kingdom seem to be rather tumultuous, as if the higher authorities of the kingdom expected disaster to strike at any moment. The uneasiness is first felt when we visit the castle town, with a sudden increase in security and paranoia, and the tense feeling is made even more pronounced as the two of them see one of the king's most important captains passing by nervously, as if having to deal with a problem of potentially disastrous consequences.

Very little of the story is told in the short chapter of the game that is already done, but it is competently written, and seems well paced. I look forward to what may come in the next chapter.

Presentation:

The visual presentation relies on a mix of FSM assets and RTP, and it is quite competently made. Mapping is good looking and interesting, presenting competent usage of tilesets, charsets are pretty and varied, and the graphics for most things are cool.

Music is good, too. I just don't like how it fades instead of looping, but that's a minor nitpick.

Gameplay:

The RPG side of the game combines traditional RPG stuff like town exploration, NPC conversations and item shopping with this super cool dungeon exploration stuff that are this game's core mechanics, adapted from the classic computer game it takes its name from, which may or may not have been the grandfather of the "dungeon crawler" genre. The dungeons only mode is, as the name implies, only the dungeons.

In the dungeons, you can access a map that allows you to view the places you've been to, as well as set up camp to rest and save. There are items scattered around to help you out, like arrows and food, and basically the entire thing is set up to put you in a survival and exploration mindset, which I find quite neat. Then there's the battles, and that's where things get really interesting.

In certain parts of dungeons, there will be "monster rooms", as in rooms that contain monsters, and in those rooms, the game becomes kinda like a tactical RPG of sorts, with characters taking turns to move around and attack, and all that. Unlike modern tactical RPGs, this game feels a bit like a board game, with battles being restricted to small square regions, and movement being restricted to one square at a time. Ranged weapons allow you to attack any enemy anywhere in the battle area, and melee weapons allow you to attack only enemies you're adjacent to. In order to escape from battles, you need to move every character in your party out of the playing field, and that is basically it. It's a pretty nifty strategic system, and the game actually demands that you play cleverly to avoid failure.

When you set up a camp in a dungeon, you get a little dialog box where you can eat rations to recover health, talk to your buddies about stuff (still not implemented, unfortunately) and save the game. It's cool enough, but has some flaws (more on that later).

Given that rations are limited, the player's ability to heal between battles also is, meaning strategic resource management and intelligent battle behavior are favored, making for some potentially fascinating survival gameplay. Not only that, the game also throws in some cool classic RPG stuff, like scrolls and potions having unknown effects until you take the risk to use them, and trapped chests that do damage when opened. There's lots of cool stuff here.

Overall, this game is a fascinating dungeon crawling experience mixed with more traditional RPG stuff and an interesting battle system. Oh, it'd be remiss of me not to mention there are randomized dungeons here. Randomized dungeons! In an RM2K3 game! And they don't suck! That must have taken a lot of work to make.

There are problems, however, which hold this game back quite a bit:

- Using the map is kind of cumbersome, since it has to teleport us out and then back in, making it quite slow.
- The ration consumption option in the camp menu does not tell us our current HP, nor does it tell us in advance the amount of rations necessary to take our heroes back to full health, making it quite annoying to use sometimes.
- Healing fountains being dependent on luck is a bit of a D-move, if you get what I mean.
- The one dungeon contained in story mode is trivial, not a lot of thinking is necessary for survival. The on-your-toes survival feel only really comes into play in the "dungeons only" mode, which rocks.

Overall:

This game is pretty neat. The amount of work it must have taken to get everything working here is quite cool, and the ideas it works with are pretty cool as well.

The flaws I pointed out are mostly easy to solve, and hopefully they will be, so this game can be as good as it has all the right to be. In its current state, I'd give it a 4/5, which could be a 4.5/5 or even a 5/5 depending on how the game develops from here on out.