Dragon Ruins II: Aftermath

A worthy extension of Dragon Ruins II mechanically. What it adds it subtle, but meaningfully alters how you approach it. I usually don't like to just list out Things A Game Has In It when talking about them, but for DR2A it's appropriate because the delta between Aftermath and vanilla DR2 is basically the entire point. There are new exhaustion and elite monster bounty systems in play. Money seems to be more plentiful. There's still more to buy than you will ever be able to afford, but the bottleneck is no longer as extreme as it once was. The tweaked blacksmith upgrade system makes more sense and makes finding higher tier gear in dungeons more meaningful because you cannot tier-up a weapon by pouring money into it. I also appreciated the addition of weapon descriptions explaining their range. Using an arrow to symbolize piercing damage really mucked up the optics on what was and was not a melee weapon sometimes in the original. Most dungeons no longer need to be run multiple times which is nice because in DR2 the objective was always in the same spot so once you mapped out a dungeon you just blitzed to the final room, especially when repeating them to farm money. You get skills on level up much more frequently, which feels better because now if the pseudo-random list of options you get is full of bad picks, it's not as devastating. I especially appreciate the new mapping skill which gives your automapping an extra tile of range. That's a very good utility addition. Non-active party members get experience now, so they aren't so debilitatingly far behind your party if you want to swap someone out. They tend to trail ~1 level below the active party. There are also more characters to choose from. Several are unlocked from completing quests. The difference is still mostly in stat growths, but I feel like there might be something else under the hood because I have a character with roughly the same defensive stats as two other characters and he's getting his ass kicked a LOT more than they are. That's something Aftermath has not changed from it's predecessor: Most of it's mechanical details are opaque and not surfaced to the player very well. Possibly intentionally. All in all it's more Dragon Ruins II. Fantastic game to put on while listening to a podcast or watching something. Mapping out the dungeons is just as zen and meditative as ever.