This game is an interesting one and surprised me. At first, I thought I made a mistake. Even though it was on sale. But I have it a 60 minute playthrough before fully deciding if I should delete and forget. It wasn't too long before it pulled me in. Dungeon Encounters borrows from older games, using grid-based movement and turn-based combat. It then adds a rouge-lite element and a slightly different take on combat and party building. So, you move around a grid on each floor and accumulate ability points (ab.) Once you walk over a grid, you can no longer gain an ability point for that entire run. But you can still go back over that square, which you may do often. You use these accumulated ap's for global abilities that affect the entire party and the map. Placed randomly around a floor map are encounters represented by numbers. These numbers could be a merchant, treasure or a healing fountain or even a monster encounter. Things like monster encounters respawn if you go to another floor and come back. And encounters such as a healing fountain appear to be unlimited usage. By the way, monster encounters take place on a battle screen using avatars for both the monsters and your party members. Combat is deceptively easy, at first. As your characters earn experience points, they level up as well as earn proficiency points (pp.) PP can be spent on defensive gear, offensive weapons, magic items and buffing charms. There is a great deal of flexibility with this system, allowing the player to configure each character into a single role or something more hybrid. The game is a slow burn. And you will have to grind to build up your characters' experience levels. And that often means backtracking through floors. But at what I thought was a shallow experience turned out to have much more depth the more I played it. The combat became more interesting the more I began to understand how to build a party with gear and pp to survive a dungeon run. This came through trial and error. In two runs, I ran out of recruits from the Academy and had to start over (that's the rouge-lite aspect.) But I was eager to try, again. While initially this title appears to be a too simple and too boring of an experience, 30 minutes later I found myself pulled in by a deceptively more complex system than how it first appears. So, if you're looking for an action rpg, this title won't interest you. But if you're looking for something different in a turn-based rpg, this game is worth a try.

I thought that the stripped-down presentation would belie a novel and interesting combat system or some satisfyingly old-school exploration. I was wrong. This feels decidedly Square-Enix in that way where they will do something different and weird but forget to make it interesting or good. The combat is very simple and mostly consists of whomping each other with one of two item/weapon slots until everybody runs out of either physical or magical HP. These weapon slots are generally distinguished by having either stable or variable damage (deal 900 dmg or 150-1500 dmg), targeting one or all enemies, and dealing physical or magical damage. After more than a dozen hours of play, I think I found only one or two items that did anything other than that. The dungeon is represented by simple graph paper with hexadecimal numbers indicating the shops, treasures, rest stops, and enemy encounters. That's a cute idea, but there's no substance to replace the reduced graphical presentation. The dungeons are sprawling and tedious to navigate -- possibly by design, because the player is awarded Adventure Points for exploring every single tile of a floor, which is not difficult to do so much as time-consuming and boring. I do not know who this game is for. I think I am exactly the kind of RPG sicko that should have liked this game, and I found it very boring and disappointing. If you're looking for a good dungeon to explore, try Potato Flowers in Full Bloom instead.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]