Analysis of Dungeon Encounters

A nonlinear video game presents the player challenges that can be completed in a number of different sequences. While a linear video game will face the player with a fixed series of challenges, a less linear game will grant much more freedom to the player. For example, a non-linear video game can allow multiple sequences to finalize the game, an election between roads to victory, or optional missions and secondary arguments. Some games have both elements of linearity and non-linearity; And some games offer a sandbox mode that leaves players explore the videogame environment regardless of the main objectives of the game. A game that is notably non-linear will sometimes be described as an open end [citation needed] Some non-linear games can be considered as providers of emerging gameplay - complex subsuring that arises from the interaction of relatively simple gaming mechanics. [1]

Excellent as Dungeon Crawler, Dungeon Encounters weighs too much a design approach that feels like own from another time.

Role games have changed significantly from their origins. Where in principle focused on exploration and combats by introducing or selecting commands, slowly they went away from that, putting more weight in history, the characters, and in relatively recent times, in combats in real time. This has made the fans of the most classic forms of the genre feel ignored, with nothing more than a handful of niche games that throwing into their mouths; Generally independent titles that mimic classical aesthetics in the West and small productions of consolidated studies of anime aesthetics in the East.

Basic information

Developer: Square Enix Editor: Square Enix Platforms: PS4, Switch, PC Proven version: PS4 Availability: 10/14/2021

This has not changed or has visos to change. Classical RPG, focused on numbers, exploration and classical fantasy environments will not return even a short or medium term. But that does not mean that Square Enix has decided to take a bone to all the fans of this way of understanding the video game, and the RPG in particular, with Dungeon Encounters.

Directed by Ito Hiroyuki - known for being the director of Final Fantasy VI, IX and XII, in addition to Active Time Battle system designer - Dungeon Encounters is a game that wants to return to the essence of classic RPGs. One who wants to focus on what, for some, is the most important of a videogame: his mechanics.

Input, this translates into extreme minimalism in all artistic aspects of the game. The map are boxes with coordinates, where numbers tell us what kind of encounters we are going to find in each of them. Music are versions of classical music songs with electric guitar arrangements. The fighting are exclusively the portraits of our characters and those of our enemies, with a bar that tells us how much it is so that each of them can undertake their action. And if someone expects to find here history, development of characters or something that looks remotely to the narrative, to be forgotten: Grants two paragraphs to each character, one in history, and there ends all the narrative of the game, because Dungeon Encounters It has no interest for anything that is not working as a Swiss watch.

Fortunately, the game fulfills what it promises and its mechanical design is absolutely superb. Rightning attention to the mana bar, it is exclusively with three parameters to take into account during combat: physical defense, magic defense and life points. Exhausting the points of life makes the character die, but in order to affect the points of life first we have to exhaust the kind of defenses with which we are attacking. In this way, if our character does physical damage, the physical defense of the enemy will first have to exhaust, and only then and only when he is doing physical damage, the enemy s life bar will be exhausted, and the same happens with magical damage. This, applicable both enemies and playable characters, is enhanced by the fact that each bar is independent, making it know when to attack, how and with whom it is a determining to carry the game to good port.

This simplification of the accessory elements in favor of making the bases more complex is something that develops at all levels of the mechanical system. All the characters are the same, so their stats only change for the team that we put, causing the minimax the most determining, if it is not the only important thing, when choosing or equipping our characters. Our weapons can do linear damage (always make the same amount fixed of damage) or variable damage (they can make up to a maximum damage much higher than the weapons of linear damage from their own level, but also any amount between that maximum and a unique point), forcing us to consider also when it benefits us more stability over random or vice versa, in addition to, of course, having more than several tens of altered states that we should manage through the passive skills we can find Exploring the whole of the dungeon.

Although it may sound hard, the essential elements of the game are learned without problems during their first hour. But, of course, dominate their particularities, with all the surpluses and secrets that it can take many more hours than we would normally devote to the combat system of an RPG, because after that first hour, the trip becomes arduous, difficult And, sometimes, deseperating.

After all, this is a classic RPG; An dungeon crawler of all life, and that implies that his difficulty is in line with the expectations of his audience. In this case, the peaks of difficulty, both in particular meetings and between floors, can become quite absurd; The existence of ninety-nine floors, with teleports at the base only after ten, complicates any attempt to manage something that is not descending or ascending the next instant floor; and the need for backtracking \ - since our characters, by dying or suffering a permanent altered state, stay in the box where combat happened, forcing us to return with the survivors or, in the worst case, with a new team Of characters that follow on the first floor - it can end up being too overwhelming for a modern player accustomed to certain design decisions based entirely on the quality of life.

Of course, just as for many people this will sound like a nightmare, for others it will sound like a dream come true. And the truth is that, even though it is difficult to justify its design decisions in terms of marketing, nothing in the game feels badly designed as well as designed with extreme cruelty in mind. A mentality that many people will declare as outdated, but that despite being unpopular today does not mean that it is necessarily bad.

Unfortunately, the same can not be said about the other aspects of the game. Visually it is beautiful, but the limited of its board game style is terminated unjustifialy hollow. In musical terms, it is a cargo and, sometimes, an authentic aberration that sooner ends ends up running out of the constant repeat of the same little handful of songs. At least, with regard to narrative, it can not be said that it intends to cheat anyone: the pair of narrative paragraphs that it offers us does not intend to tell us a story, beyond concrete ourselves that, indeed, our purpose is to reach the end of This immense tower. Nothing more.

Because at the end of the day that is the Dungeon Encounters clve. For those who wait for an dungeon crawler classic, a fantasy finish where the mechanics have been adjusted obsessively and has been dispensed with everything that is not mathematical justice, even the fact that it feels fair, Dungeon Encounters is the game that has been waiting for years without knowing it. For all the others it is a hospital, cruel, repetitive and very difficult game to justify in its design decisions, which are tied to a way of understanding the video game that in 2021, although they are not bad, it is true that they feel Anchored in a formula that seems totally outdated.