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chuckroWhen he’s killed in modern-day Japan, Shaw is reincarnated in a dead man’s body in a fantasy world, and is forced to learn the ins and outs of it very quickly. Fortunately, after a false start, he manages to meet up with a legendary hero and join a proper guild so he can conquer the Dungeon and defeat the Overlord.
This is a very standard EXE-Create game at this point, in both design and systems. Among standouts is that this has an excessively long “start to slime” time, with over an hour of story material (with one example battle) before you really begin playing it. (I also had a repeated issue of the game freezing on a black screen when I tried to ask for a guild quest, though thankfully that went away by the time those quests became mandatory and I was able to finish the game without issue.)
As usual, there are a zillion extra systems and many of them you can spend real money on: There’s a daily roulette and weapon enhancement and a garden and bonus tasks. There’s the grid-based combat system and summons and elemental attacks. One character has 44 findables as a side quest; another gets stronger by eating your excess equipment and also vendortrash. (I do find it interesting that they have lots of power-boosters you can spend the IAP on to make the game easier, but there’s also an Easy mode that you can just set the game to. Like, why pay extra for cheats to play on “Impossible” mode when that’s basically just Easy with extra steps?)
Even moreso than many of EXE-Create’s games, this one feels pieced together out of standard assets. There’s no world map; the conceit is that you’re traveling by wagon between areas (and in practice the fast-travel system is very convenient), and the dungeon is just one long stretch that respawns chests. That said, the dungeon is kind of nonsensical in that each layer is a different biome for no particular reason, and you end up needing to do more (three-floor) areas multiple times because you can only warp to the beginning of each one, but often need to do things like pass through the final area to reach the next floor once you have the appropriate guild rank to do so. Chests refill with random items, but the floor layouts are always the same, so it doesn’t even qualify as “roguelike.”
There’s also a strange design decision that the dungeons have damage floors and one-way floors, but immediately after you discover them you’re given walking modes that cancel them. So the only difficulty from those floors is that you have to switch from fast-walking to the appropriate other speed long enough to cross. I’m not sure why this is there at all—maybe you were originally intended to get the other walking speeds much later?
This feels like a parody of Isekai and LitRPG tropes hobbled by the translation. Like the fact that you’re constantly needing to do guild promotion exams to raise your rank when everyone acknowledges you’re a legendary hero and the fate of the world is at stake. (Or the fact that your schlubby salaryman hero is gifted with amazing powers no-one else has and also happens to know the Overlord’s secrets from his time one Earth.) I suspect a bunch of that is lost in clunky word choices and lack of complete tone; also the fact they chose “Passive” as the catch-all word for special abilities (even ones that are clearly activated!) is weird. They could have called them Abilities or Talents or Mysticiations and I think it would have worked better.
Overall: Middle-tier; eminently playable and with a perfectly cromulent plot that I suspect could have been something really clever with a better translation.
This is a very standard EXE-Create game at this point, in both design and systems. Among standouts is that this has an excessively long “start to slime” time, with over an hour of story material (with one example battle) before you really begin playing it. (I also had a repeated issue of the game freezing on a black screen when I tried to ask for a guild quest, though thankfully that went away by the time those quests became mandatory and I was able to finish the game without issue.)
As usual, there are a zillion extra systems and many of them you can spend real money on: There’s a daily roulette and weapon enhancement and a garden and bonus tasks. There’s the grid-based combat system and summons and elemental attacks. One character has 44 findables as a side quest; another gets stronger by eating your excess equipment and also vendortrash. (I do find it interesting that they have lots of power-boosters you can spend the IAP on to make the game easier, but there’s also an Easy mode that you can just set the game to. Like, why pay extra for cheats to play on “Impossible” mode when that’s basically just Easy with extra steps?)
Even moreso than many of EXE-Create’s games, this one feels pieced together out of standard assets. There’s no world map; the conceit is that you’re traveling by wagon between areas (and in practice the fast-travel system is very convenient), and the dungeon is just one long stretch that respawns chests. That said, the dungeon is kind of nonsensical in that each layer is a different biome for no particular reason, and you end up needing to do more (three-floor) areas multiple times because you can only warp to the beginning of each one, but often need to do things like pass through the final area to reach the next floor once you have the appropriate guild rank to do so. Chests refill with random items, but the floor layouts are always the same, so it doesn’t even qualify as “roguelike.”
There’s also a strange design decision that the dungeons have damage floors and one-way floors, but immediately after you discover them you’re given walking modes that cancel them. So the only difficulty from those floors is that you have to switch from fast-walking to the appropriate other speed long enough to cross. I’m not sure why this is there at all—maybe you were originally intended to get the other walking speeds much later?
This feels like a parody of Isekai and LitRPG tropes hobbled by the translation. Like the fact that you’re constantly needing to do guild promotion exams to raise your rank when everyone acknowledges you’re a legendary hero and the fate of the world is at stake. (Or the fact that your schlubby salaryman hero is gifted with amazing powers no-one else has and also happens to know the Overlord’s secrets from his time one Earth.) I suspect a bunch of that is lost in clunky word choices and lack of complete tone; also the fact they chose “Passive” as the catch-all word for special abilities (even ones that are clearly activated!) is weird. They could have called them Abilities or Talents or Mysticiations and I think it would have worked better.
Overall: Middle-tier; eminently playable and with a perfectly cromulent plot that I suspect could have been something really clever with a better translation.
