Nippon Ichi software knows how to change the recipe of a genre, whether it’s an SRPG or a first-person dungeon crawler. It sets this up with Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk in 2018. The game was completely under the radar when it came out, me included. It would be a shame if the same thing happened to its sequel, Galleria Labyrinth: Moon Guildbecause the game has really interesting twists on first person dungeon crawler recipe.
Galleria Labyrinth follows Eureka de Soleil, a cheerful girl who takes a job at Galleria Manor. Eureka is tasked with assisting Madame Marta, a witch under her command, by the Earl of Bismont, the manor owner. Eureka and Marta summon Fantie, a spirit associated with Lanterne de Fantasmagorie, and the role the player assumes. Your mission as Fantie is to collect nine Curios d’arts from the labyrinth beneath the Galleria Manor, these are nine extremely rare magical artifacts. This is where the twist comes in. Humans cannot enter the Maze, as the entrance is the Cannibal Wardrobe that kills anyone who dares to try to leave. The solution is very simple. Create magical puppet soldiers, called Manania, that will explore and fight for you.
Character creation can be as easy or complex as you want. The game initially offers six different classes or Aspects, such as Aster Crow, Shinomashira, Theatrical Star, Peer Fortress, Wonder Corsair, or Rapid Venator, but these options expand as you play. Each Aspect fulfills a specific role like DPS, stun, support, tank or trigger all trades. You can only create three characters at first, and you’ll be stuck with a party of up to five for about the first ten hours of the game. Having your options limited early on can be intimidating! However, the game does a great job of introducing many important tutorials that can be reviewed from the pause menu. I find this very relevant, as the early hours of the game can be tough if you’re going where you shouldn’t, something that’s most likely to happen due to the open nature of the maze.
On the subject of exploration, the maze and its subplots work as you’d expect, with corridors, rooms, and forking paths that can lead to treasure or ambushes, and eventually progress. deeper down below. Sometimes you’ll come across a specific area with gimmicks, such as unbreakable walls or underwater areas where you need to control your oxygen levels to keep your party not drowned. Enemies appear in the maze as floating spheres that you can contact to initiate combat.
Battles can hit or miss, as you’ll often default to simple attack or auto-fight for regular encounters. The boss is the main highlight. A balanced team and the use of Donums, the game’s equivalent of magic or skill, are key to solving these encounters. At about 10 o’clock, the game introduces the Treaties. These are specific rosters that allow multiple team members to join Coven, with up to five Coven slots. This means you can end up with a team of up to fifteen characters, three per Coven. However, to achieve a balanced team, the average team will have about ten characters with different roles and different Pacts.
Donum is an interesting twist to the spell or skill system. They’re not very straightforward, in terms of skill, as they depend on the Pact that Coven is using. This means you have to be very careful when putting your magic users in a Pact with its corresponding magical Donum, and your tanks in a Pact with Donum increase the likelihood defense and create aggression. Eventually, you’ll be able to transfer Donum between Treaties, adding even more decisions to the mix. Unleash skills are special Donum that unleash special abilities only available in the Pact and they can really save your neck when you really need them.
However, if you want to avoid fighting HP sponge-like enemies or are re-visiting areas for presents, there are easy ways to avoid combat. The game offers a variety of tools to deal with both enemies and the environment in the form of Fantasy Abilities, from lures and traps to lure enemies, to skills that allow you to break walls or scatter illusions. I especially like the ability Fog Veil allows you to become invisible to encounters. This is especially useful when dealing with strong enemies that will chase you relentlessly.
The maze is a great playground filled with treasures. Immediately after unlocking the Wall Breaker ability, I was eager to explore all the new abilities the game had to offer. Other notable move skills include Long Jump and High Jump, which can be difficult! The points where you can use them are not obvious unless you use Shine Light to see the usable points on the map.
At this point, I feel the game is a bit clunky with systems and mechanics. Sometimes, Galleria Labyrinth became too interested in teaching me new systems that I never had the time to fully use or learn. Instead of committing to a handful of these and exploring to their full potential, the game keeps throwing you new stuff, which adds nuance to decision making in combat and exploration, But it can be distracting. I had a particularly hard time trying to get through the main story shortly after being introduced to High Jump, as I forgot that I could use Shine Light to see which parts of the map had been cleared. open.
After overcoming certain obstacles or when completing important objectives, the game offers a short prelude to developing the plot. The story is told through short visual novels. These are very light and easy to follow, and a great way to alternate exploration and maze combat with character building, world, and unraveling the mystery of Galleria Manor. . The character designs come from the hands of Takehito Harada, famous for his illustrations for the Disgaea series, and together with the beautiful background illustrations provide the perfect atmosphere for these interludes. There are a lot of great quality of life options in these sections. Arrows indicating which character is speaking on screen, one-button voice playback, text logs, and skipping options are some of these additions.
In terms of accessibility, the game offers a robust and complete settings menu with lots of options. These include a variety of sound options, ranging from the usual BGM, sound effects, to activating or deactivating the puppet soldier’s voice, battle speed options, and settings for the visual novel parts. Both the Japanese and English dubbing are great, but I find the direction of the English dub particularly captivating. Eureka is really sweet and full of energy, while Madame Marta is a cunning and seductive witch with many sassy tricks, and the Earl of Bismont is a very unapproachable and unlikable aristocrat.
Galleria Labyrinth: Moon Guild scratch a particular itch that I’ve had for a while. While the game starts off as standard fare for the genre, it quickly shows that there are plenty of tricks up the sleeve, mostly exploration and workarounds when diving into the maze. There was a time when I felt like I was playing a puzzle game while exploring the maze, only to suddenly remember that this is an RPG with a deep combat system, all wrapped and wrapped in a bizarre and sometimes terrifying story, not unlike that of the classic fable.
Galleria Labyrinth: Moon Guild will launch on February 14, 2023 in North America and February 17 in Europe for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Switch and PC through steam.
