02/01/2016

Dungeon Travelers 2: The unsavoury bits + Final thoughts


Back for my ultimate post about DT2! I want to enumerate the few points that rubbed me the wrong way and routinely annoyed me during my otherwise fantastic playthrough of the game—which I will sum up once I'm done with said points. No game is ever perfect, indeed, and although DT2 did an amazingly high number of things right, it also did a couple of things wrong. Here are the joykillers in all their annoying glory:

  • DT2 is heavily skewed toward elemental magic spells and status effect-inducing attacks. Sure, this is not at all uncommon in RPGs, and it makes even more sense in that particular game because of the Chanting Time: since casting spells is a long process that can fail before being completed, it feels only fair that the payoff for succeeding should be hugely rewarding. Still, the game took the reward a trifle too far. Making spells inflict literally fifty to one hundred times more damage than regular physical attacks is completely exaggerated, just like making regular enemy attacks cause status effects. From a certain point in the game, it is simply impossible to emerge from random battles without being afflicted with a status effect—or a couple of them, for that matter. Sure, they wear off after some time—bar the dreaded Petrification—but it's still incredibly annoying. As for the damage ratio, here's a telling example: even when I was towering a good fifty levels above my foes during the late stages of the game, said foes' elemental spells still dealt 150 to 450 points of damage while their physical attacks hardly ever dealt more than 3 to 20 points of damage. And that was while wearing some equipment raising my elemental defense, thank you very much. Although this discrepancy didn't stop my progression by any means, it is completely outrageous and definitely qualifies as a flaw in my book.


  • The financial balance in the early stages of the game is absolutely horrendous. Everything costs an arm and a leg while random battles and sold items only yield a ridiculously tiny amount of money, meaning that it's hardly possible to buy anything without copious amount of grinding. Since I was running solo, I managed to avoid grinding specifically for money; but my finances were more than tight during the first half of the game, leaving me with hardly enough money to purchase healing items for boss fights. If maintaining a financial balance was hard for me as a solo runner, I don't even want to imagine how excruciating it could be to keep a full party furbished with the little money granted by that stingy game. Although things fortunately get better as the game goes on, it's hard to look past the financial hardships of its early stages.

  • The capacity of the inventory is way too limited. Thirty slots that can each accommodate nine copies of a given item may seem like a lot of inventory space, but in practice, the limitations show up very quickly. Monster drops are so incredibly abundant that it only takes a couple of battles to fill up the inventory, after which gained items are discarded. That wouldn't be such a huge issue if not for the precarious money balance that I mentioned above, which makes every item a unmissable commodity that can be either used or sold and has to be salvaged at all costs. By "all costs", I mean escaping the dungeon with an Emergency Exit every time my bag was full, selling or storing my loot and going back into the dungeon to have my bag filled up again after a couple of battles—rinse and repeat. My inventory finally expanded by five slots after I cleared enough side quests, which gave me a welcome latitude; but honestly, I had to exit from dungeons to empty my choke-full inventory a couple too many times for my taste and comfort. 


  • The difficulty level is often ill-balanced. Don't get me wrong: DT2 is overall a tough and challenging game for all the good reasons, and far from resenting that toughness, I'm lapping it up and relishing the challenge to the fullest. What I'm not lapping up and relishing, however, are the wild and uncanny difficulty fluctuations that occur both in random battles and boss battles. Battles with similar enemies can result in vastly different outcomes, from the finest to the direst: depending on which attacks your foes of the moment decide to unleash, your party can either escape unscathed with hardly a shred of damage or be wiped out after two turns—or anything in between. This can obviously lead to some progress loss when you suddenly hit a hardcore battle and get beaten into a pulp, and it prompted me to save literally every three steps during the first half of the game. This issue receded and became but a distant memory as I progressed and gained a overwhelming edge over foes, but it definitely tainted the first twenty hours of my playthrough.

  • Last come a couple of minor annoyances that I was rather surprised to encounter in a 2015 RPG. For instance, when you browse items in the Library's shop, the game doesn't let you know how many copies of a given item you already own; to know that, you have to select "Sell" to check your inventory. Also, the menu cannot be opened while in the Library and the only way to access the menu options is through the "Guild" section. It is also impossible to try on new equipment if your bag is full: there must be at least one empty slot to remove the piece of gear you want to change. Small details allright, but nevertheless annoying on the long run.  


Now that I'm done with the unsavoury bits, here's a digest of the second half of my playthrough. The game got easier by the dungeon thanks to the massive amounts of XP that I stockpiled, and by the time I reached the last dungeon, I was so overleveled that no random battle could take me down. The Final Boss Battle was a mere formality, and the only reason why I needed three tries instead of one to wrap up that battle was that said Final Boss wields a formidable attack that can inflict up to 2000 points of damage. I succumbed twice to this pest, to my utter annoyance. Fortunately for me, my HP was somewhere around the 2200 mark by that point; so during my third try, I dutifully kept my HP above 2000 and managed to stay alive and to beat the final boss to a pulp. Sweet, sweet victory! After that, I threw myself enthusiastically into the postgame dungeons with the firm intention of clearing them all. Alas, that glorious plan was not meant to be, as all my drive evaporated when I learnt that levels didn't go beyond 99. That dreadful fact meant that I would be overpowered by foes sooner or later—sooner rather than later, since I had reached Lv.93 at that point—and knowing that annihilated on the spot any desire to explore the postgame dungeons. Sure, I could have reset my levels in order to gain some stat increases à la Dragon Quest IX, if not for one tiny detail: unlike DQIX, Dungeon Travelers 2 packs no Metal Slimes to allow for some power-grinding—along with convenient spots to hunt for them. That meant regular level-grinding, which I was definitely not in the mood for; and that's how I finally gave up on DT2 with a deep sigh of regret and a heavy heart after 45 hours of intense roaming, exploring and rampaging.

Despite that postgame fiasco, my feelings for DT2 remain unashamedly positive. I absolutely adored that game from beginning to end and I would have played much more of it if not for that level issue. As a matter of fact, I am definitely planning to play more of it no matter what: there will be another playthrough for sure, and that time around, I may go as far as to play with a three-ladies party—maybe even with a full party, if I have the guts to put up with all the micromanagement involved. I want to discover more characters and more classes, not to mention explore the vast postgame territory, and all that involves a bigger party and a longer playthrough. I don't know when this second playthrough will happen, but it will definitely happen at some point. Last but not least, to all my fellow dungeon-crawler aficionados out there: play that amazing gem of a game, you won't regret it! Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!

No comments:

Post a Comment