Curious; what's your favorite dungeon crawler/rpg system? What's your least favorite feature in the one's you've played and the ones that you've loved.
This is actually the toughest question I’ve been asked! In terms of dungeon crawlers, it’d probably have to be Strange Journey (DS/3DS), although that’s a really tough call to make because I also want to mouth off about how much I love Persona Q/Q2 (3DS), the Etrian Odyssey series (DS/3DS), Unchained Blades (PSP), Arcana (SNES) and Phantasy Star 1 (GEN).
Despite this, none of those games are flawless. SJ and PQ especially I feel are very very strong in terms of overall presentation, story, map design, sound design, and character progression systems, but I feel that mechanically the battle systems are quite weak. Going first often allows you to one-turn most encounters without much risk or resource investment, which isn’t very exciting! SJ’s weakness gimmick in particular (Demon Co-op) I find quite uninteresting, as it forces you to use demons that share your alignment, which basically cuts the amount of demons you can use by 2/3rds... until the main game’s final boss which punishes you for not having full parties of each demon alignment. Like, what? Really?? It’s also such a shame that the main character’s customisation is pretty poor, with all skills being locked to your gun and automatic stat distribution.
Persona Q is a bit better in terms of these things - you can at least customise your characters a bit more as everyone can equip a sub-persona. The battle system is also a bit more involved due to rows (thanks, EO!), the dynamics between phys/mag, and the way it treats weakness hits. However, in a sense, weakness hits are even MORE devastating because they can also cause enemies to skip their turn in addition to getting that all-out attack, easily causing either 1 turn wipes or close to. Persona Q also has a much more forgiving MP regeneration mechanic, so taking hits is not as punishing as in SJ as these can be healed off.
I love the maps, puzzles, character classes, and overall aesthetic of the EO games. The battle system is also pretty cool, with nice interactions between different enemies, weakness/strength hits translating into rare drops, and overall difficulty, but the thing I probably find the least fun is character progression. I’m really not a fan of having so many skills, so many ranks in each skill, AND skill prerequisites when you only gain 1 skill point per level up. I know that means various builds for each class, but to me, unless you like grinding it really doesn’t encourage experimentation. Not only that, but often it’s optimal to focus on one skill rather than spread yourself thin, so on most level-ups there’s nothing new or interesting to look forward to. Also, don’t get me started on the gathering skills, it feels really bad (but necessary) to spend points on those. Not really a problem if you are into grinding because you can just make dedicated gatherer characters (hi Farmer)and other characters to build differently, but that’s not really my thing!
Unchained blades I played ages ago, so I don’t remember too many specifics there. I do recall loving the branching stories and having each dungeon’s design and difficulty tailored to the party you were forced to use. I also thought the monster capturing mechanic was cool, but I... don’t remember how exactly it strengthened your party members. Off the top of my memory, I think the things I liked least about that game was that it was generally pretty easy, and the unchaining minigame you had to play every time to capture a monster didn’t add much at all!
Arcana was a kind of obscure dungeon crawler for the SNES by Hal Labs, and was a surprising amount of fun. Again, my memory is hazy on this one but I thought the overall premise was pretty unique, battles were fun, but I remember having trouble figuring out exactly what some moves did. This could have possibly been because it was fan translated (I really do not remember much about it), or because it was being intentionally obtuse.
Finally, Phantasy Star 1 for the Genesis. PSIV is my absolute favourite Genesis game, which is probably why I look back on PS1 fondly. Without a doubt, the worst thing about that game though, was the lack of a mapping feature. And the dungeons all looked the same! Oh my gosh what were they thinking (apart from, there’s not enough space on the cartridge to program this). Nevertheless, scifi + rpg is 100% my jam.
I could go on and on about more of the RPGs I’ve played (I didn’t even go into the more traditional jrpgs, rogue-likes, or arpgs) but tried to limit my focus here to a more relevant subset of the genre. And despite that, there are a ton more dungeon crawlers that I enjoyed like The Dark Spire, Mary Skelter, Class of Heroes, Stranger of Sword City, and so on!
