Poor level balance right up until the endgame.
If you try to explore everywhere (needed to find the keys and bosses) you end up so overlevelled that almost nothing in the game can hit you. This includes the bosses, so getting losing events sometimes requires finding a poison chest and letting that
very slowly kill you during the fight.
You can avoid overlevelling by running away, but then you run into the issue where being practically invincible on one floor still gets you utterly destroyed on the next one.
The only floors without these problems are the last 2 or so. The game has a level cap and expects you to reach it by then, so enemies are actually as hard as they should be for once.
Poor dungeon design
Huge mazes with
required secret walls and invisible warps. One warp sends you backwards a whole 5+ minute walk away. There is no way to find a fake wall other than walking into it. There are floors that are literally banging your head against the wall until something gives. In one area the map shows some walls where there aren't any and vice versa.
Oh you found a secret? Well done, here's an exact duplicate of the shield you started the game with! But only if you can find the exact tile that the chest is sitting on! Oh wait that was the other secret, this one just has a poison trap.
The only way to rest or buy things is to warp to the start and then spend up to 15 minutes walking all the way back to where you were. The shop isn't even outside, it's in the dungeon and is only accessible after following a chain of finding keys and doors to use them on.
At one point you're expected to warp out and go to another area for the plot, then spend 10 minutes walking back up when you're done.
Broken plot sequence
Almost everything in the entire story is optional. You can walk straight past events, ignore boss rooms, and go straight to the next floor, with what little plot there is acting as though you did everything you were supposed to. It can get pretty damn confusing.
- An event trigger appearing in an area you may have already explored, which can result in missing an entire subsection of the game even if you're taking the full exploration approach.
- A staircase puts you inside the locked boss room on the next floor instead of by the adjoining stairs. You can walk out but not back in without the key.
- An event where Raidy and the others look for Foless. You can ignore it and just go upstairs and beat the rest of the game, and at some point with no introduction Raidy will just start talking out of nowhere as though she'd been there the whole time.
- The group finds Foless via an old man you meet at some point. Or maybe you skipped that event too because it's hidden behind literally a dozen secret walls. It doesn't matter.
- A door that leads to an empty passage. Presumably intended for extra content but not currently used. They forgot to put a wall on the end so you can walk out of the map into a mess of glitchy event triggers.
- Let's just completely skip rescuing the person we went in there to save in the first place and kill the last boss. No problem.
Gameplay
It's the same as always. And that's the problem. Dated garbage almost entirely carried by the art, characters, and presentation. This time there isn't as much to carry it and it shows.
Instead of juggling weird and nonsensical plots to force solo expeditions, make a damn party system already.
