Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk (2016)

This is actually the first dungeon crawler I have tried and decided to drop it halfway through. Nearly all normal battles can be done with brainless auto attacks. And most of the time you have to use auto attacks since magics cost too much SP. You have to save it for bosses.

When I was about halfway through the game, it began to overwhelm me with loads of equipment and 95% of them are clones with minor differences. But you have to go through all these things to decide whether to equip them to "thousands of" your team members, sell them, or melt them to get mana. The UI doesn't help either. Every time I came back from the dungeon, I was desperate to see all those same-looking equipment with slightly different numbers and so many characters to manage. That's when I decided to drop it.

P.S. I did buy the sequel but never put it into my Switch. Why? Because they threw you 3,651 floors of randomly-generated dungeon in this game. Sorry, I'm out.

So I got into this because I read it was a dungeon crawler JRPG similar to the Etrian Odyssey series, which I love. Here are a few of my early comments:

1. Story cutscenes I have seen so far are... underwhelming. But that's okay, who even plays these types of games for the story? Not me, that's for sure.

2. Fights don't seem that deep so far: either you mash auto attack through them and win or your team gets annihilated instantly. I'm sure it'll get better as I get further in, though.

3. Who the hell thought it would be a good idea to have the A button make you walk forward? If I want to move, I'll hit the D pad. If I want to open a door or do whatever's in front of me, THEN I'll hit the A button. I may be stupid, but this little A button to walk forward thing has gotten me to walk off of a cliff into...

4. Pitfalls that actually do damage to the party, to the point of ACTUALLY killing them? Okay....??? Leaving aside the fact that in Etrian Odyssey pitfalls don't deal damage, that's real cool, especially when it drops you TWO FLOORS at a time into mobs that are clearly much stronger than you're intended to be facing (2k HP and 500 damage vs. the previous encounters' 100 HP and 50 damage). These are normal mobs, not minibosses! They are all simply that powerful down here! Okay, great, I'll just have to escape from them for now and come back later. Except...

5. So here I am, completely in over my head, all party members but one dead and the last person at 1 HP. (The cause of this is not important, and totally not my own damn fault at all. Nope.) This is prime time for me to call the run quits and go back to town... except they, for some reason, have not given me the Escape Rope type feature to instantly leave the dungeon. It does exist, they have advised me to use it, but I don't have it available to purchase from the Witch Petitions. What's up with that?

For comparison, in Etrian Odyssey, the equivalent Warp Wires/Ariadne Threads items are literally THE SECOND ITEM IN THE SHOPS, and one of only two items with infinite supply/no material costs. Here, the only options I have to get myself out of this pickle are to get my ass kicked by these ridiculously strong monsters and lose a bunch of items and money, or to lie down and die, which leads to the same result but saves a couple of minutes, I guess.

tl;dr: I may be stupid