Guild Encounters

So, want to be honest and say the heavy use of AI art is a turn off, but it is at least mostly decent art. Honestly though, there are so many free or cheap art packs out there that the choice to use AI to generate the art feel heavily unnecessary, particularly because it is used for every non-menu asset, it seems. I will look past that, as this is an indie project, and seemingly more a passion project than a major commercial one, For future, however, projects from this dev, I would seriously hope they invest some of whatever they make from this into supporting actual artist as opposed to utilizing programs trained off stolen art. All that said, I will talk about the actual game now. First impressions are the menus are a little bit overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time. The game offers multiple game modes, for instance, but there is only Arcade mode available to choose. In game itself, there are a lot of menus and sub-menus to parse through, which made me personally feel like I was in for a very tough combat from the very first encounter. I was a little dissappointed to find that my first run wasn't only easily won, it was won by mostly ignoring the Enhancement system and just keeping everyone equipped with the one that doubled XP gains. I figured, the game must be holding my hands at the start, right? But, no. My next four runs went just as smoothly, and I managed to get enough Guild Points to unlock seven heroes and max out the Enhancement slots. On my fourth run, i played with the slots a bit more and... well, the mage girl was able to hit the bosses for about 10k damage by hitting their weakness with the spells she unlocks at level 14, and the berserker set up to deal elemental damage was routinely hitting about 4k. Well, game suggest 25 for the next difficulty level, but... I feel ready for it already, so lets give that a try, right? Only, the stats you get from leveling seem to be very important, because the step up from Normal to Hard mode was intense. A bit too intense, perhaps. Enemies were doing about half a bar with basic hits and nearly one-shotting with every skill. So... yeah, gotta grind up those levels I guess? And that is the heart of my issue with the game. It is decent, decently fun, though a bit generic in its execution. But it is also a massive slog of a grind. Even with the +100% xp Enhancements and +100% xp guild point buff, I think I got two or three levels for my party on my fourth run of the game. And that is for the characters I was using regularly. Thief (who was only used to steal in boss fights) and Priestess (who I found very little use for past the first 6-7 levels) just barely eeked out a level each. And that is for a full, 30-40 minute run. So, if there is an update to this game, I would seriously hope to see a reduction in the grind needed; even if it is just to give full xp to all characters, regardless of if they are in the fight or not. I would also like to see a bit more variety in enemies, and maybe the ability to choose between different biomes during runs and a peak at the boss for each one before you select it. Maybe also force a player to commit to a single party set up for a full delve, so we can't just swap in the perfect person for each individual fight? Something to add a little more challenge without having to do a full balance adjustment, basically.

Not bad for 6 bucks. The game does exactly what it sets out to do, nothing more nothing less. I can appreciate that from the dev. You fight turn based battles, try and get as far as you can on a run and when you fail use the GP points you earn to buy run altering items from the Shop and recruit new party members. It's like you have access to the Grade Shop in a Tales of game always available to you. Pretty fun.