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chuckroEveryone Velan loved was gleefully murdered by Imperial soldiers when they attacked the Miden Tower ten years ago. Varen has dedicated himself to learning magic and killing as many soldiers as possible in retaliation. When he gets himself into trouble, he reads some magic writing and accidentally summons a living, shapeshifting wall to be his bodyguard. They’re joined by a 100-year-old sage who looks 14 and a gruff tough guy; and they endeavor to take back their magical tower that contains a dozen different mini-worlds.
I didn’t think I’d say this, but there is just too much damn stuff to this system: You gain skills like achievements (or like the “treasure” items in Monster Viator) for doing all sorts of things including using your skills and advancing the plot. You can gain magic skills from scrolls and then gain levels in them with XP to unlock new spells. There are “fruits” for IAP currency (that you gain every few battles and as prizes for various missions), but also Tickets you can use to play a prize-box game for extra weapons. There’s a weapon-enhancement system to use up all of those excess weapons. Your wall-based teammate has a separate upgrade system based on equipping bricks in her. There’s the main story quest (which the system keeps good track of, to be fair); and 15 subquests you pick up from people in town; and once you get a ways in, you unlock Guild Quests that are daily (real time) "kill lots of monsters" quests. There are also several slates of bonus general Missions with rewards that slowly unlock. There’s a screen of real-time alchemy pots that upgrade your equipment and consumables in a semi-random way. (I never managed to get useful armor out of them, but putting in a stat-up herb will get you back either several of them or an upgraded stat “extract” that gives a bigger bonus.) There's a battle arena where you earn "bear coins" you can trade for... something. More stuff!
There’s a grid setup for battle that determines hit areas but also provides you with places to summon “golems” to help during individual fights. Oh, and you do combo attacks at random, but doing them increases the associated skills so you do them more. There are bigger, smaller and metal versions of monsters that can randomly appear and give special rewards; and also eggs and statues that give random rewards if you kill them with special items before the battle ends (or they flee). Battles can have "mana fields" with random effects. Health refills after every battle, which is nice for going all-out.
There are statues in each dungeon that let you increase or decrease the encounter rate or just summon a three-battle batch. (I really do like this feature, actually!) You also have the option to instant-win weak battles (it’s a toggle) but still get the rewards.
What REALLY breaks the game is the “Metal Area” you can access by talking to a sheep in one of the houses in the second town about halfway through the game. Every enemy there is a massive-XP-bonus metal creature, and there’s an Earth spell that gives good odds of crits to mental enemies. With the help of a few XP Bottles—easily enhanced from S to M in the alchemy pot—you can jump your characters 100 levels without much fuss.
And really, you can ignore half of these if you want to, especially since you can play on Easy mode and autobattle will destroy 90% of encounters easily.
All of that said, there’s some decent worldbuilding going on here and the game itself is a pretty breezy, pleasant experience. Each area is a “floor” of the tower, magically created to hold a specific biome but of a contained size. Which means that none of the dungeons are stupidly large, but none are too small, either. And because they weren’t chained to a world map design, they could just put the plot beats in a sensible order and not worry about whether you were on an island or a volcano on the map. The closest thing to a world map is the fast-travel system between floors, which is super-convenient.
The “anime” tropes we’ve come to expect from EXE-Create are there (in the art style as much as anything else!) but it feels more cartoony and less fetishistic than a bunch of the other games, so credit there. The contrast between one character being a goofy cartoon wall who turns into a pink-haired anime girl, and another being a tortured vampire-looking trauma-magnet who just wants to murder is…well, it’s very Japanese, is what it is. The backdrop of the entire story is the horrors of war. Several named characters die senseless, mourned deaths. Valen’s arc is being convinced not to continue a cycle of death and revenge. And Leila makes tea that’s so bad it can dissolve magic barriers!
(And oddly, that kinda works?)
SPOILERS: The normal ending sees the Emperor defeated and the tower reconnected with the outside world. Valen goes out to see the world, but the child of a slain soldier attacks him. He opts to break the cycle of death by dying. But then there’s a post-game that picks up right before they leave, where the High Sage reveals he engineered the whole mess to channel the energy of the dead into an ultimate spell, summoning a Dark Lord. The party then needs to face the ghosts of various dead characters and settle their emotional turmoil. The final-final dungeon is kinda space-filling cut-and-paste nonsense, but it’s postgame, so whatever. Then when they leave the tower, Valen has advanced enough to bring a projection of Leila with him, who stops the stabby kid and allows for a better resolution.
Overall: I really enjoyed this one, actually. The setting was something a little different and the plot and characters both had something going for them. The systems were a little overloaded for a 12-15 hour game, but the difficulty is also variable enough that you can ignore half of those systems if you don’t want to deal with them. Upper-tier KEMCO game.
I didn’t think I’d say this, but there is just too much damn stuff to this system: You gain skills like achievements (or like the “treasure” items in Monster Viator) for doing all sorts of things including using your skills and advancing the plot. You can gain magic skills from scrolls and then gain levels in them with XP to unlock new spells. There are “fruits” for IAP currency (that you gain every few battles and as prizes for various missions), but also Tickets you can use to play a prize-box game for extra weapons. There’s a weapon-enhancement system to use up all of those excess weapons. Your wall-based teammate has a separate upgrade system based on equipping bricks in her. There’s the main story quest (which the system keeps good track of, to be fair); and 15 subquests you pick up from people in town; and once you get a ways in, you unlock Guild Quests that are daily (real time) "kill lots of monsters" quests. There are also several slates of bonus general Missions with rewards that slowly unlock. There’s a screen of real-time alchemy pots that upgrade your equipment and consumables in a semi-random way. (I never managed to get useful armor out of them, but putting in a stat-up herb will get you back either several of them or an upgraded stat “extract” that gives a bigger bonus.) There's a battle arena where you earn "bear coins" you can trade for... something. More stuff!
There’s a grid setup for battle that determines hit areas but also provides you with places to summon “golems” to help during individual fights. Oh, and you do combo attacks at random, but doing them increases the associated skills so you do them more. There are bigger, smaller and metal versions of monsters that can randomly appear and give special rewards; and also eggs and statues that give random rewards if you kill them with special items before the battle ends (or they flee). Battles can have "mana fields" with random effects. Health refills after every battle, which is nice for going all-out.
There are statues in each dungeon that let you increase or decrease the encounter rate or just summon a three-battle batch. (I really do like this feature, actually!) You also have the option to instant-win weak battles (it’s a toggle) but still get the rewards.
What REALLY breaks the game is the “Metal Area” you can access by talking to a sheep in one of the houses in the second town about halfway through the game. Every enemy there is a massive-XP-bonus metal creature, and there’s an Earth spell that gives good odds of crits to mental enemies. With the help of a few XP Bottles—easily enhanced from S to M in the alchemy pot—you can jump your characters 100 levels without much fuss.
And really, you can ignore half of these if you want to, especially since you can play on Easy mode and autobattle will destroy 90% of encounters easily.
All of that said, there’s some decent worldbuilding going on here and the game itself is a pretty breezy, pleasant experience. Each area is a “floor” of the tower, magically created to hold a specific biome but of a contained size. Which means that none of the dungeons are stupidly large, but none are too small, either. And because they weren’t chained to a world map design, they could just put the plot beats in a sensible order and not worry about whether you were on an island or a volcano on the map. The closest thing to a world map is the fast-travel system between floors, which is super-convenient.
The “anime” tropes we’ve come to expect from EXE-Create are there (in the art style as much as anything else!) but it feels more cartoony and less fetishistic than a bunch of the other games, so credit there. The contrast between one character being a goofy cartoon wall who turns into a pink-haired anime girl, and another being a tortured vampire-looking trauma-magnet who just wants to murder is…well, it’s very Japanese, is what it is. The backdrop of the entire story is the horrors of war. Several named characters die senseless, mourned deaths. Valen’s arc is being convinced not to continue a cycle of death and revenge. And Leila makes tea that’s so bad it can dissolve magic barriers!
(And oddly, that kinda works?)
SPOILERS: The normal ending sees the Emperor defeated and the tower reconnected with the outside world. Valen goes out to see the world, but the child of a slain soldier attacks him. He opts to break the cycle of death by dying. But then there’s a post-game that picks up right before they leave, where the High Sage reveals he engineered the whole mess to channel the energy of the dead into an ultimate spell, summoning a Dark Lord. The party then needs to face the ghosts of various dead characters and settle their emotional turmoil. The final-final dungeon is kinda space-filling cut-and-paste nonsense, but it’s postgame, so whatever. Then when they leave the tower, Valen has advanced enough to bring a projection of Leila with him, who stops the stabby kid and allows for a better resolution.
Overall: I really enjoyed this one, actually. The setting was something a little different and the plot and characters both had something going for them. The systems were a little overloaded for a 12-15 hour game, but the difficulty is also variable enough that you can ignore half of those systems if you don’t want to deal with them. Upper-tier KEMCO game.
