While JRPGs have remained the de facto king of the RPG space for the past few decades, one could argue that this popular genre would never have existed without DRPGs. What started in the past with titles like ultimatum and aims to translate the traditional D&D gameplay experience onto screens that have given way to more accessible dungeon crawlers like Etrian Odyssey And Devil’s Eye. In 2018, Nippon Ichi tried his hand at sub-genre with fun Labyrinth Of Refrain: Coven Of Dusk and now it has been selected to follow that experiment with Galleria Labyrinth: Moon Guild. Although it is clearly designed for a relatively narrow audience, there is still a much love the Galleria Maze.
Labyrinth of Galleria puts you in the role of Eureka, a bright-eyed young woman responding to a job posting that suggests she’s visiting a sketchy abandoned manor in the woods. Here she is greeted by the witch Madame Marta, who quickly bonds her with a cute green ghost that Eureka names ‘Fantie’ and prompts her to use her spooky new friend to Explore the vast labyrinth beneath the Galleria Manor in search of powerful magical artifacts. the mysterious owner of the desired manor. No human can enter the labyrinth and return unharmed, so Marta teaches her how to use Fantie’s power to give life to various puppets and guide them to explore dungeons on her behalf. . Thus, Eureka embarks on an indirect quest deep down, while gradually learning more about her eccentric owners.
While it feels like the story isn’t exactly the focus here, the various visual novel-style cutscenes at the major milestones nonetheless help give the Galleria Maze a little bit of appeal. . The writing and voice acting for most of the scenes are engaging without being obtrusive, and there are some really dark and abrupt twists that help elevate the story beyond the simple window decorations for over-the-top action. prison. We’re not going to spoil anything, but suffice it to say that this plot takes place in places you wouldn’t expect and we applaud the developers for their willingness to change the conventions and make people feel better. play must guess.
The gameplay in Labyrinth of Galleria follows a typical DRPG structure, in which you explore mesh dungeons from a first-person perspective. Each step increases the time by one unit, which usually just means that the enemy goes one step further and you gradually fill in a dense but simple map that makes revisiting easier. Along the way, you find treasures to build your team, enemies to overcome, and stairs that take you to other floors filled with everything good and bad. It’s a pretty simple setup, but still fascinating, especially when you use special abilities. For example, you soon get a wall breaking ability that allows you to get through most walls like Kool-Aid Manand this creates all kinds of new strategies to evade enemies or discover new or more convenient routes in dungeons.
Or, in another example, some parts require you to use an ability that allows you to go underwater, where you have to control your air. It always feels like there’s something dangerous in every corner, whether it’s a mighty enemy looking to ruin your day or a snare trap that will paralyze most of your party and this leads to interesting tension as you go deeper.
Every few minutes you’ll be fighting enemies (though you can evade them, if needed), and the combat here takes place in a standard turn-based approach. The main gimmick is the Coven system, which allows you to end up controlling several dozen characters at once by allowing you to slot a small group into each position in your party. Covens act as a sort of formation for a group of characters and require them all to act as if they were one character, and these groups can be adapted and tested to suit a wide range of roles. role and action. Sometimes you’ll want an all-DPS crew, while other times you might want to combine in one or two tanks to add more options and enhance survivability. There’s a lot to grasp, but we feel like this unusual expansion team building adds a lot to the way the combat is memorized.
In fact, once you start to really dig into this, it’s easy to see Disgaea affect Galleria’s Labyrinth extremely In-depth character customization. Every character you create is drawn from the same extended family of base classes, but they can be distinguished by changing things like their ‘stance’ or ‘nature’ to change their parameters. numbers like XP gain or specific stats. From there, they can be assigned to a Coven, which in turn can be assigned a Pact that will determine active skills they can use and level up independently of them, much like a Coven. word job The Last Illusion Game.
Therefore, building an effective team is a matter of using trial and error to find the niche you want each character to fulfill. And this goes beyond the usual broad decision of whether you want a character to be DPS or Tank, as there are so many different types of DPS or Tank units you can make.
Luckily, most trash mobs don’t really test your party composition too hard, but each boss acts as a preliminary skill test that will happily send you back to the drawing board every time you failure. And while honing can help ease poor planning, it’s not a reliable method of pushing progress like in other RPGs. Labyrinth of Galleria feels most like Disgaea in that its gameplay (if not more) of what you are doing in the menu to build the team as it is. playing game. There are few things more rewarding than seeing an oil team swarming with opponents after countless painstaking efforts to compare scoreboards across devices and weigh the benefits of switching team members and Leagues. convention among Covens, but the flip side to this is those who don’t. Minimizing to the max in an RPG can make you feel a bit left out. Labyrinth of Galleria is a game for people who like to stare at spreadsheets and tweak numbers to see how it affects other numbers; If that’s not you, then this headline might be hard to catch your attention.
Even if you’re used to this more analytical approach to an RPG, we have one major complaint about the game loop that some mechanics and progression-based milestones can slightly opaque. For example, an initial quest requires us to find and retrieve a specific treasure. It doesn’t tell us what floor this treasure is located on, nor does it have any hints or clues to even give us a general idea of where to start the search. After spending an hour or two to go road Too deep into the dungeon for that point in the story, we finally found it, and thanks to an online guide, this guide showed us that the treasure was hidden in a secret room in the back. a completely normal and unmarked wall that we had to overcome.
While we really appreciate that Labyrinth of Galleria is a wonderfully complex and dense game, it’s not uncommon to come across cases like this that we wish it were a little less confusing. . This is the kind of game that requires you to try to break every wall in a dungeon until you find the one that allows you to progress further. Of course, one could argue that the entire first game is in fact the ‘guideline’ for the sequel, but if you’re not prepared and ready to approach it under those terms, you’ll probably felt that the Labyrinth of Galleria was sometimes difficult to use and understand.
In terms of presentation, Labyrinth of Galleria applies Takehito Harada’s signature anime art style to vibrant effect, with every drawn character looking sharp and brightly colored. Plus, in the various cutscenes, the backdrops feature gorgeous, detailed painted locations that often give them a perfect otherworldly spooky feel to them. And while the 3D dungeons have a slight drop in terms of excellent visuals, they still do a great job of creating an oppressive and timeless kind of presence to the player, adding to the mystery and appeal. their leads.
The soundtrack matches these images perfectly with a special brand of goofy Halloween-style track that helps create an effective tune. It’s scary without being scary; silly but not stupid. And while it may seem like some of these tracks can be a bit repetitive given how long you spend crawling in some of the dungeons, we felt that the music overall nailed what it was about.
Conclusion
Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society does a great job of providing a dense and brutal journey deep into the dungeons, though it sometimes comes at the expense of accessibility. An engaging art style, extensive team building options and a truly surprising story all combine to make this game worth recommending, but with a big caveat that a lot of much of its appeal is lost if you don’t get the most out of RPGs or don’t have the patience to digest and absorb its entire system. However, if that sounds right to you, then the Labyrinth of Galleria is totally worth your time and money.
