Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk

I've only played a few true dungeon crawlers (according to dungeoncrawler dot com or whatever) so I don't know if this is a good one of them as I don't really have the same parameters most dungeon crawler fans I've met do. So I'll do my best to review this anyway.

The basic premise of this game is that you (a memory-less soul that is put into a book, called the... something long, nicknamed to Tractie) are thrown into a well (which contains the many dungeons you will crawl) by a witch, Dronya. The well is overflowing with mana, too dangerous for most living beings to explore, so your fighting crew is comprised of souls bound to puppets.

This is an NIS game, and similarly to created units in your Disgaeas and such, these puppets are highly customizable. There's six initial classes and two you can unlock later. They have six different sprite options, plus an unlockable two outfits, so you can vary their looks to keep your parties interesting (or you can just make an all waifu/husbando team). At least I chose to do so; since eventually you can have 15 on the screen at a time it was fun to name everyone and not just blow through their creation. (If you play this game I can only recommend using the auto-name function, because the names it eventually spits out are amazing. I don't think I'll ever get over one of my puppets being named Dougie Dollar.) The classes have non-standard names, like Marginal Maze and Mad Raptor, but you can easily tell what they would be called conventionally. There's a glass cannon ninja, agile but weak magician, multi-hitting dancer, etc., so you can customize your party to however you'd like to play the game. They can be given different natures and stat growth tendencies: all the stuff that I find extremely boring to labor over but others seem to enjoy. Eventually you're given the ability to transfer their soul into a new puppet, at which time you can change their class and other growth options, and while they restart from level 1, they have better potential. The game doesn't particularly push that you need to do this, but I would recommend it, simply because I, an idiot, did not, and the difficulty spike for the final boss (let alone the much more difficult (so I heard) optional bosses) bit me back more than I expected.

But you can't simply throw all your perfectly honed puppets into 15 slots and wreck house. Every puppet has to be put into a coven, which can potentially hold up to three attackers and five supporters. These covens come in tons of variations; they may have anywhere from one attacker and five supporters to three attackers and no support. Most of them have different bonuses or debuffs for how you place your characters, or they might only allow certain classes. Some seem outright useless. Each coven allows for you to cast different spells, too, so while one with only one attacking slot might seem terrible, it might have your first full party healing spell. Obviously this can lead to as much micromanaging as you'd like to commit to, but personally I just changed them around every dungeon or so...

Simply because the game didn't particularly require me to bother. Why, when auto attack sufficed in everything except a couple of boss battles? Encounters are so frequent it'd be a waste of time to pick a spell, considering even magic classes usually do decent physical damage. Maybe if you play on hard you'll need to? I think this might be disappointing to big dungeon crawler fans, there's no strategy to basic battles.

Even bosses didn't require much more than that, except I tended to throw a buff on, or maybe need a heal or two. There weren't any real boss gimmicks, either. This is an overall problem in the gameplay for me. There's little that makes you have to think or alter your approach. None of the dungeons throw any kind of a puzzle at you, other than some standard annoyances--poison floor, breakable walls, a couple of dark areas that don't map. Where's that staircase again? is about the most that will float through your brain. And I understand that some of the dungeon crawler ~experience~ is zoning out to the grind, but the dungeons are pretty much straight boring, other than the hilarious sexy tower dungeon of lust. That was pretty fun. You get to fight a giant demon woman's feet! Now that's a selling point!

(Each dungeon does have a story of its own but it's told in snippets and assumptions you can make. It doesn't really effect anything in the game. One majorly cool thing, however, is that trophies (I played on PS4, I don't know how the Switch version handles this) actually have an entire story line written into them, explaining more about the dungeons and the life and trials of a certain character. It's legit interesting.)

My favorite part of the game really is the story line, but it's still flawed. Mostly because of the pacing, as this game is heavily, heavily backloaded. After I beat it, I relayed the best parts to a friend and had to add in several reminders that I didn't think this game was that good, despite how interesting it sounds when compressed into a few minutes of conversation. I respect a slow build but you don't get to the meat of the story until, what, the penultimate dungeon? Cutting some of the dungeons down in size, or having more important story information spread more evenly would probably have bumped up my rating.

I don't want to spoil too much, but the story is, surprisingly, something of a tragic romance, told in a convoluted manner. The world is an interesting realization of a fairly unique fantasy setting, drawing on both fairy tails and mythology. But it's too little too late, because you won't learn much about these things for ages. Before then, it's very surface level with the main character Dronya, her apprentice Luca, and other sundry characters in the mysterious town they've come to. It's serviceable to show how the characters interact, but little feels consequential. Just a little stronger sense of intrigue in the beginning would help give the dungeon exploration more purpose.

As you'd expect, there are a fair amount of anime moments. NIS loves its tropes. However, early in the game, Dronya is sexually assaulted by a woman (who I believe we're supposed to like), and it is so offputting. The game doesn't seem to know if it's jokey yuri baiting shenanigans or not, because Dronya's reaction is realistically severe. By the end of the game, you realize there's sort of a reason this scene was included, but again the character who commits it is considered an ally, and it's not just like "haha touched your boobs <3", it's like, she is undressing while Dronya may not be able to resist. As far as anime bullshit is concerned, predatory lesbianism is not unusual, but it's typically not to this level, so I think people deserve a fair warning. Super unfortunate choice to make when the story line actually has what could be a pretty compelling lesbian couple and this instance not being so creepy would make later lesser incidences more tolerable.

So this game falls into a pretty hard three for me. The good elements can't pull it up past the rest of its mediocrity, and it overstays its welcome when you're only given small portions of story versus tons of generic dungeons, running about 65 hours for me. I played this game entirely with my sister (online and in person) and it was definitely an upgraded experience to have something else to do while playing. If you're dying for a dungeon crawler, you could probably do worse, but obviously the converse goes for that too.