Nintendo Switch User Reviews

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.]

Mediocre. Full of intentionally obnoxious mechanics (petrify) to pass as difficult. Not worth 5 dollars, when there are so many games that are better and respect the player's time.

I wanted to write a review as this game is under reviewed and it is hard to understand what you are getting into with it. I wanted to help people decide if this is the game for them (and it really could be your next gem!) This is a dungeon "blobber"/dungeon crawler-type game, very much in the vein of Wizardry, but even though it is a JRPG, it is really a different evolutionary path than most other JRPGs. Essentially, this is a camping/hiking simulator, but instead of being outdoors, all of your hiking is a massive 100 level deep dungeon. You will plan, you will consult maps and your guide book. You will delight as your log book fills in with more and more facts and info that help you make fewer mistakes in the future. -Supremely high exploration focus. You get a robust set of mix-and-match party-wide abilities and your options expand through exploring the dungeon. You find specific skills in the dungeon -Supremely high level of abstraction. Your brain shades in the narrative even more than in a Saga-style game. You'll never "see" the dungeon. There isn't even descriptions of environments or narrative justification of the events. -Very low emphasis on luck or really any randomization. More emphasis on problem solving situations and decision making. -Emphasis on simple easy to understand rules with many permutations and options. -Characters essentially have 2 "abilities" which are equipment/weapons. Some armor gives a passive (like a chance to evade). Combat is much like a game like Fire Emblem in that all the math is very obvious and simple to calculate in your head. e.g. Your weapon does exactly 300 damage and the enemies HP is 301, so you know it will take exactly two hits to eliminate. Weapons either do magic or physical damage (in fixed or random amounts and either to one or all enemies). Magic and physical defense is basically a separate HP pool that is depleted first before true HP can be damaged. -Character basically grow in how fancy their equipment can be and total HP, but there are still a ton of decisions to make and ways to differentiate your party. But sadly, it kinda means new characters are really only about what equipment they have or their level.

Game is overly grindy. 99 Levels plus battles that you can’t possibly win when you first hit. Can’t run even with skill, forced to start all over. Basically forced hardcore. 99 levels is already grindy, why oh why add more things to force more grinding?

This is the most boring and uninteresting game I've ever played! I have no words to describe how dull and empty this game is. It's a sheer disappointment that people who made FF series + FFT, DQ Series, Mana series, Nier series, PE series, Vagrant Story and many other good games, now make this nonsense.