I started this game last year and got as far as the final floor. My cleric and mage did not have their highest level spells so I was grinding on floor 9, but this was incredibly boring so I stopped playing. I hardcore save state scummed for the entire game to get great starting characters, optimize every level up, and make sure no one ever died and nothing too bad ever happened. I also kept online maps handy as well as walkthroughs. This was pretty much unplayable without having multiple browser tabs open for maps, a spell list to translate the gibberish spell names, and an item database to know what item stats were. Even though I do fundamentally enjoy dungeon crawling, this game did just about everything possible to make the process as obtuse and unenjoyable as possible. At least the dungeon layouts were not too complex.

I wandered around exploring the first few floors, using the online maps to find points of interest. I found the items needed to unlock access to the express elevator and didn't even explore about half of the floors. There was nothing interesting to find since all loot was randomly dropped by enemies. This was some of the dumbest dungeon design I have ever seen. Why allow much of it to be skipped? Why give no reward for exploration? The Express elevator was a great way to quickly get out of the dungeon and back to where I left off, but better design would still force the player to conquer every floor, or at least have desirable and useful loot. There was a special fight that dropped a cursed item worth a ton of money, and it could be gotten over and over. Infinite gold. It was not too much trouble to get it out to town as I swapped it around the characters to spread out the hp loss. Thus I was filthy rich and could buy everything. Why even bother beating the final boss when the party could retire with as much gold as they want? Such stupid design. Nevermind all the excessive difficulty, permanent loss, and tedium. It took several state loads to get through floor 10, as some enemies were too dangerous to even fight. Then it took several more loads to beat the final boss until the random effects and turn order went in my favor. Turn 1: mage cast nuke, cleric cast meteor storm, wizard cast silence on the boss. All adds were killed and the boss never got any spells off. Easy win, though he could have easily wiped the party with 2 or 3 hit all spells.

About the only good thing I can say about the game was that it played fast, so I did not need to use turbo mode. Going through the menus was fairly quick too. Other than all the ridiculous issues I have mentioned, there were some other design problems that bothered me: lack of any spells to protect vs magic attack, low level attack spells were so weak as to be useless, the map spell only gave coordinates rather than a map (both of which should be core features of the god damn interface), and there were no ranged weapons. At least the game was better than Might and Magic 1.

4.5/10

My final team:

Chovus level 12 good samurai elf, with blade of biting, iron shield, sturdy plate, helm and gloves of copper. Slayer of dragons in reserve. 107 hp, all stats 18 except 13 luck

Golden level 12 good samurai elf, with wereslayer, iron shield, plate mail, helm of sturdy, and gloves of copper. 105 hp, all stats 18 except 16 luck. Since it was not possible to start as a lord I went with 2 samurai. I thought about making her change to lord but it did not seem worthwhile so close to the end of the game.

Aevariel level 13 neutral thief elf, with blade of biting, iron shield, and padded leather, 91 hp, all stats 18 except 13 luck. I had to balance fighting friendly monsters sometimes to keep him neutral. He actually did ok fighting. I wanted to make him a ninja but I did not want to fool around with making him evil and trying to keep the rest good.

Crystal level 13 good cleric elf, with anointed flail, iron shield and breast plate, 102 hp, all stats 18 except 17 str, 12 luck. Sometimes she took a spot in the front row when someone was low hp.

Valcaria level 12 good wizard elf, with studly staff, small shield and padded leather, 82 hp, all stats 18 except 11 str, 16 luck. It was handy having someone along to identify but I did not find this class very effective because of the lack of good spells. I think another mage would have been better.

Celestria level 13 good elf mage, with rod of flame and robes, 72 hp, all stats 18 except 17 piety, 14 luck.