Recent reviews by Elephant Parade

Not a travesty but not very good. The story is predictable and dully written and the gameplay alternates between bad exploration segments and merely acceptable plate-spinning that controls awkwardly and takes a painfully long time to get going.

Mediocre Mystery Dungeon clone with no particular strong points.

Has the best character-building of any VS-like I've played, but the worst combat. It's as tedious as Vampire Survivors, but visually drab and incredibly lethal. Still enjoyable overall.

A Wizardry clone that modernizes the traditional systems and gives them a beautiful coat of paint, but utterly fails at dungeon and item design. Also hampered by lackluster dungeon graphics past the first dungeon and a weird difficulty curve.

Nearly every non-spellcaster class possesses a variety of in-battle skills, giving attackers more to do than hack away every turn forever. Each class has a niche: Warriors are tanks with extremely strong single-target physical attacks but no other options; Samurai have excellent damage output but poor defense for a frontliner; Monks have a grab bag of special attacks but no strong single-target attacks; and so on. Besides ensuring niche protection, this encourages you to multi-class. Unlike in Wizardry, multi-classing is a fully functional system that works about how you'd expect it to, though halflings' and half-onis' wacky statlines make it hard for them to meet the prerequisites of some classes.

Other key modernizations: fixed encounters are visible as pools of fog; item information is fully exposed; level drain and aging (but not, surprisingly, permadeath!) are out; ironman mode is a toggle rather than an obligation. Unfortunately, the game's big gimmick, max-HP-reducing attacks, doesn't really work: the only way to restore your max HP is to return to town, and there's rarely a compelling reason not to return to town, so when you get hit with one (which is pretty rare), you just return to town.


The art is excellent. Enemies look cool; the character portraits, while few, are good; the UI is fairly stylish (if you can excuse the inexplicable bloom). Dungeon graphics are a bit weaker: the first major dungeon is a gorgeous blend of 2D and 3D, but everything after looks like PS2 textures as seen through a crappy black-and-white filter. The music is outstanding, but the battle theme's lead-in is longer than the average encounter; it wore on me before the game was out.

The big problem: the dungeons are really boring. Like, less interesting than the ones in Wizardry 1, the decades-old game that founded the genre. The penultimate dungeon was decent aside from some truly heinous mandatory secret doors, but it takes maybe eight hours to get there, and then the final dungeon sucks again (mostly because it's incredibly short, leaving you to grind to fight the final boss).
Equipment drops are unvaried and largely boring until the final dungeon, which hands out special items like candy. A DRPG with boring items is almost as bad as a DRPG with boring dungeons, and this game is both.

Also, there were a few large difficulty spikes. The first, a quartet of heavy-hitting minibosses partway through the second dungeon, made me drop the game until I came back and spent an hour grinding. The second, a pair of even heavier-hitting minibosses at the start of the final dungeon, was maybe half that. The last, the final boss whose AoE attacks can take out endgame-level thieves and wizards in a single round, took a few hours. The common thread here is that there isn't really any way around it: if you don't have enough HP, you gotta grind (and probably reclass your characters so they can level faster and get more HP). I'm not particularly enthused about spending four or five hours in a 15-hour game grinding, especially when said game costs $40 CAD.

The localization has some small technical issues, but it reads well.

Overall verdict: absolutely not worth your time or money, but a sequel with better dungeon design might be.

An awkward and derivative dungeon crawler/sim/visual novel hybrid that does some things decently, some poorly, and none particularly well. The combat is cribbed from Labyrinth of Touhou and the time management plays out like a simplified Recettear, complete with weekly debts to pay off. Unfortunately, they don't fit together at all: the dungeon gives you more gold than you need to pay off your debts, buy all the items you want, and purchase a hefty helping of stat boosts (another thing cribbed from LoT) besides; meanwhile, the Stamina system, which is supposed to kick characters out of your party after they fight a certain number of battles, is rendered irrelevant by the clock, which advances with every battle and (once your characters have a few levels under their belts) kicks you out of the dungeon before any of them can leave.

Also somewhat clunky and buggy, possibly because it was made in Ren'Py. I had important hotkeys fail to work, menus lag, and a waypoint fail to be added to the teleportation menu. Alternating between the keyboard for dungeon navigation and the mouse for everything else sucks. Also, the skill menu displays only a few skills at a time and can only be scrolled by dragging the mouse wheel, which is highly obnoxious if you're playing the Freelancer, who acquires approximately one trillion skills.

The dungeon design is surprisingly decent, even if it doesn't do the things I usually look for in a DRPG. There's no sense of exploration or atmosphere; instead, most of the floors ask you to gather orbs and keys to unlock doors. A couple of puzzles use quirks of the system in really interesting ways.

Weirdly, the side characters all have very professional-looking portraits but the main characters are amateurish. Not sure what was going on there.

I found the story yawnworthy and have nothing to say about it.

It took me a bit under seven hours to complete the story, fully explore the dungeon, and defeat the superboss, which is a pleasant length that fits the price. I'd like to play more short DRPGs like this.

Compared to RS2, RS3 has a weaker ludonarrative, slightly less interesting systems, and bafflingly easy random encounters, but almost makes up for it with style and spectacle. I enjoyed it less—partially because I played as Mikhail, who forces you to play a bad kingdom-raising sim and an even worse RTS; don't make my mistake—but I did enjoy it.

Actually pretty fun when you aren't put on a team with three bots who don't understand how the game works

Interesting in theory, bland as gruel in practice. The writing is vapid, the gameplay is repetitive, and the balancing is abysmal. Egregiously, FFF reuses four or so dungeons, one twice—and I'm not talking revisits; I'm talking taking a dungeon layout, plunking it down a second time on the map with a crappy filter, and making you go through it again.

There are bright spots—solid Fairy designs, a sleek UI, the occasional funny line—but it isn't worth playing through the whole game just to see them.

A relatively faithful Wizardry clone with some interesting additions. The massive class list might be overwhelming if you aren't familiar with the genre, but it makes party-building much more interesting. And unlike in purist clones, each class has a unique skill: the Hunter performs bonus attacks on enemies with status ailments; the Shaman can equip weapons in armor slots and create a magic-reflecting barrier; the Thief can remove and steal enemies' equipment. Unfortunately, many of these skills aren't unlocked until Level 25, which isn't far from the end of the game.

The other big addition is the crafting system, which lets you use materials to create utility items or enhance weapons. The latter is where the real meat is: you can do anything from increase a weapon's damage to make it put enemies to sleep to remove the race restriction on it so your fairy can swing around a greatsword. It's a little overwhelming, honestly, but it's a lot of fun to play around with.

The 3D dungeon graphics are nothing special, but the 2D art is excellent; some of the monsters look genuinely terrifying. Unusually, items have art as well, and it's no less excellent. The character portraits don't look quite as good, unfortunately.

There is, alas, one big problem with the game: its dungeons are too big, too empty, and too many in number. Around one room per floor has something interesting in it; the rest hold either a random encounter or nothing at all. Some floors offer interesting navigational problems, like pits that drop you to the next level or an air timer that ticks down in real time, but more don't. I appreciate that each dungeon has its own look, but visual variety can't make up for gameplay uniformity.

All in all, Elminage is an above-average dungeon crawler on a platform where good ones are surprisingly hard to find. If you're interested in the genre, give it a shot.

Mostly fun. There are more than 36 different character/mode combos, but there isn't enough run variance within any given combo for it to be particularly replayable. That's a problem when it comes to the harder modes, which will stomp on you again and again. The music and art are excellent.