Delightful Deception: My First Ten Hours With Dungeon Encounters
Game design isn’t my passion, but as of late I’ve been noticing more and more how life bleeds into the games I play. Let’s take the grocery store for instance. You walk in and you’re usually thrown into the produce and market sections because the most perishable items need to be sold first. What follows after are the the shelf-stable products. Your can goods, beans, rice, cereal, etc. Your last stop is almost always going to be the frozen section, because you want to get those and get out as soon as possible before your ice cream turns to a mushy mess. After you grab your Digiorno pizza for the third time this week you’re at checkout. You made it. If you can, you’re going to want to avoid the first and last lanes because those will always be the most busy. You want to go for the middle. Your cashier will thank you. Once you’re out of the store you can head home and lug all those cans of ravioli you purchased back to your apartment. Congratulations, you’ve gone through the real-life equivalent of a dungeon in an RPG. Each store’s layout is a little different. Kroger and HEB are going to be your classic FF dungeons. Target is going to be something out of Shin Megami Tensei because you kill god at the end, and Aldi- with its constantly changing inventory, its streamlined approach to design, and it’s punishingly fast cashiers…
…is Dungeon Encounters.
Dungeon Encounters was announced on October 1st, 2021 and launched on PlayStation, Switch, and PC in less than two weeks time. Just like the game itself Dungeon Encounters didn’t give you too much time to think. Half a month later and you either buy the game or you don’t. It’s retail price of $30 was lauded as “too much” by various capital G Gamers of ill repute. One person in particular tweeted that the game had no real value and was “boring”. Exactly one tweet later they confessed that they hadn’t even played the game. I’ll commend them though because at least they went and purchased the game. Dungeon Encounters is a luxurious steak dinner of a game, and for half the price of a “AAA” title you’re in for a good time.
Square absolutely knew what they were getting into when they published this tweet. Each member of this game’s staff is like a bullet slowly loading into a snubnosed revolver. Hiroyuki Ito alone is a name that would make the hair on my neck stand up. He’s the creator of the Active Time Battle system. He also directed FFVI, IX, and XII- with XII being the most “out there” in terms of gameplay and scope. This is a real treat. The soundtrack to Dungeon Encounters is literally just Nobuo Uematsu shredding to classical symphony. Guitar covers of Bizet, Mussorgsky and Beethoven is something I usually would roll my eyes over but if it’s the One Winged Angel himself wailing to Farandole from L’Arlésienne I’ll know that he means well. Despite this soundtrack only consisting of two string instruments at a time Uematsu’s work on Dungeon Encounters proves that less is indeed more.
Avid fans of JRPGs are going to see the names of the people at the helm and say to themselves “Ito? Uematsu? Kato? I know those guys. I’ll have to check this out.”
That’s marketing, baby! Use your talent! I probably wouldn’t have purchased this game if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s published by Square and that it has such a great group of people attached to it. Said people are in fact why this game even made it past R&D in the first place. It doesn’t feel like a real game in 2021. It feels genuine. It reminds me of a PSP game from 2006 that had a cult following. It’s a labor of love. It’s “Valhalla Knights” for the modern age.
Before you even start the game up for the first time you should be aware that Dungeon Encounters is all about speed and critical thinking. The former being apparent from the second you click on the game’s icon. On my 2017 Nintendo Switch running the game on an SD card you can wake the system, click on the icon, and be in the game within 15 seconds. Some applications on my phone don’t even load that fast. This game is optimized with speed in mind and with a bevy of movement and battle options you can have an experience that’s catered with your comfort in mind. I like playing the game with movement at 4x speed and with the character “snapping” to each corner and crossroads in the grid. The speed made me a bit nauseous at first so I changed the color of the grid to something a tad darker and it made the game easier on my eyes. My only real complaint is that like most modern games the text is too small for me to enjoy on a TV. Playing on a monitor is passable but this game was definitely designed with the Switch in mind. I’d even say that the Switch Lite’s exclusively portable design makes for an even better experience. If Gunpei Yokoi created the Game and Watch after seeing a business man on a train fiddle with a calculator, then Dungeon Encounters on Switch with it’s speed and tactfulness is like “Business Man on a Train with a calculator: Definitive Edition”. It’s JRPG Esports. It’s like chugging an 8 ounce can of Red Bull right before a cram session.
Now my sweet little battle system Otaku, you’ve purchased and installed Dungeon Encouters and you start the game up, Once you begin the game for the first time you’re met with a short paragraph with some story bits (make your way through the 99-floor dungeon, kill the bad guy, save the world, etc), and before you know it you’re already setting up your party. You don’t create characters in this game but you’re given a small group of warriors to choose from. As you make your way through the list you’ll notice that some of these people are either already walking around in the dungeon, dead, or turned to stone. It’s refreshing to not only know the end goal of the game ahead of time but to also know that the game starts with several characters already living their lives, and dying in the process. As with most JRPGs dying is but a minor inconvenience so what you’ll have to do is make a party of living characters, find these corpses, and bring them back to life. You won’t see these people on the map itself but their whereabouts are signified by coordinates on a grid. You’ll have to write down these locations and remember them as you go along. I’ve never been one to take physical notes on games but Dungeon Encounters made me a believer in that regard, except instead of a pen and paper i’m taking notes on my phone and taking screenshots on my switch.
While some of the best characters in the game are locked behind petrification, death or straight up being lost in the game (they’ll be listed as “wandering”) you can look at each character’s backstory whether they’re with you or not. My favorite character is McCallie, who’s story is that he isn’t a warrior but just…some guy who put on a VR headset and got sucked into the very real world of Dungeon Encounters. He got Isekaied and he’s just kind of rolling with it- or at least that’s what he was doing because he’s dead at the start of the game and yet still marked as wandering. Is someone wheeling McCallie around in the dungeon on a scooter or something?
You’ve got all manners of JRPG protagonists in Dungeon Encounters. Wizards, moms, A giant cat person, a giant cat, McCallie, you name it. Once you read up on these characters though the game’s story doesn’t progress until it’s already over. This was never going to be a riveting tale about loss and love, it was always going to just be about the gameplay. One thing to take note of is that the only thing separating one character from another is their level, and that levels in Dungeon Encounters only affect Heatlh Points and Proficiency Points. Proficiency Points are essentially the cost of equipping gear. Let’s say you have a character with 10 PP. You want to hold a sword that costs 5 PP. You’re only going to have 5 PP left for defensive equipment. As you level up you get more points, but better gear will cost more points down the line so you’re always going to want to keep grinding away. While a lot of games lately have cheapened the concept of “getting better” Dungeon Encounter’s slow experience gain makes each level up feel more valuable.
My favorite thing about Dungeon Encounter’s battle system is how unlike most RPGs your stats aren’t tied to any one character. This is an equal-opportunity battle system so if that sword you just equipped says that it can deal 10 damage, then it’s going to deal 10 damage. If you give it to someone else it’ll still deal the same damage so characters in DE are merely vessels for issuing out commands. Same mindset applies to Armor. If you put on a fancy hat that says “10 physical defense” then guess what that means. You have 10 physical defense now. Battles in this game are simple. Each character and enemy has a set amount of Physical defense and attack and magic defense and attack. Your attacks and defenses are dictated by the equipment you wear. Your enemies may have both defenses or just one, or none at all. A physical attack will deplete physical defense, and a magic attack will deplete a magic defense. It’s easy. Once you get one of those defenses to 0 all subsequent attacks in that category will now deplete your or your enemy’s Health Points. Once the HP is at 0 you or your enemy is dead. If your entire party dies don’t fret, for you can make a new party of characters that will basically act as a “rescue party” and one by one you can take the corpses of your teammates to a specially marked spot in the map that brings characters back to life. You can leave party members wherever you want, and you can always see their coordinates in the menu, but it’s always best to keep everyone organized. In the event that everyone in the game dies then it’ll finally be game over, and you can either roll the game back to when at least one person was alive, or in dire cases you can start the game over again from scratch, except now your characters will retain their levels before they died. This almost gives a rogue-lite element to the game but in my honest opinion after starting the game over twice I find it best to have a party attempt to bring everyone back to life and play it safe. There are no real random encounters in the game so you won’t get surprise attacked.
I say that there’s no “real” random encounters because on the first floor of the game you’re introduced to the ability system. Abilities are active or passive mods to the game’s design that are used to enhance the experience. You have classic mainstays like a flee ability, a health regeneration ability, abilities that let you go up or down floors without stairs, and so on. Each new ability that you find feels refreshing, but you can only equip as many as your ability points will allow. You gain AP by filling in each floor, and with each floor completed you get bonus points. Your first found ability is to see battles on tiles. Each combination of monsters is indicated by a respective combo of letters and numbers, and the same applies to tiles with health regeneration, AP regen, etc. After about 5 hours you’ll start to remember what most combinations mean, and without spoiling anything you’ll want to save before you get into any battles labeled “74”.
Now that I’ve talked about the equipment, battle, leveling, and ability systems let’s talk a bit more about battles as a whole. By taking your knowledge of each system you’re now ready to fight. In the opening hours of the game battles are incredibly simple. You fight a skeleton with 39 magic defense and your first magic spell has 40 attack. This is the game teaching you to prioritize on depleting the weakest defense in order to cut to their HP as fast as possible. Each battle is a like a puzzle, and like a Rubik's Cube shot out of a canon some puzzles can be deadly. You have to pay attention during most battles, but a lot of the time once you have each attack planned out you can hold the A button and watch each character go for each defense- and you’ll slowly see the enemy’s defense, and then HP drop to 0. It’s cathartic.
When I purchased Dungeon Encounters I had already seen most of what Square had shown in the two weeks between the game’s announcement and release. I was sold from the first trailer. I knew I was in for a good time. I played during a weekend and found myself hooked.
In those two days I played nearly eight hours off and on during breaks at work and in bed. I almost never play games at work so you know I was feeling some kind of way. After I hit the 9 hour mark I decided to stop and take a break. I played Melty Blood. I watched that Squid Game. I enjoyed my time off work and cleaned and thought to myself “hey I should play some more Dungeon Encounters….”
So I did.
When I started the game up after my short sabbatical I noticed that in the time between sessions I still had my muscle memory. Most of the time when I play something muscle memory only sets in after about 20 or so hours, or when I’ve been playing a game for a long time. For instance in Resident Evil 5 I have the memory of “aim, shoot, reload, turn, repeat” locked into the part of my brain that was supposed to hold memories of my non-existent children. Dungeon Encounters is a special case because a game with such a simple, unique style of playing hit me harder than nearly any other RPG. It’s almost like Tetris now. It’s all gameplay all the time. No story beats, no drama, no political intrigue, no one getting stabbed halfway through the game.
“Less is more” is the mantra for Dungeon Encounters, with it’s simplistic UI, No-frills soundtrack, and it’s spartan ability to set tropes aside and just….be a videogame. It’s difficulty curve almost serves as an instruction manual for itself and after I eventually finish the game I have a feeling it’s only going to make me want to play it more. I’ve been vocal about experiencing burnout in RPGs but Dungeon Encounters has been the most refreshing take on the formula in a long time. Next time I go to Aldi i’ll probably end up Tetris-Effecting tiles all over the cramped aisles.
