Merchant in Dungeon Reviews

[h1]Great idea for a game, but terrible execution.[/h1] Well, what can I say? I followed this game for a long time, played the demo, watched the AI artwork change over time, bought the game on sale and paid like six bucks for it, finished the story. Was it worth it? Maybe. It's not the worst game I ever played, but there are just so many places where one has to wonder why things were being done they way they were done: [b][u]Combat.[/u][/b] This game has a very simple combat system, where you and your party of up to three employees fight one or two monsters appearing before you. The way this is being done is both your party members and the enemy combatants have small circles that fill up based on the speed stat and once all of them have been filled the attack is being executed. There are no skills or anything. This has the following consequences: 1. Higher rarity means shooting out your attack faster. 5* employees only got one circle to fill up, while 1* has five. Your character has three which is this equivalent of a 3* employee. On higher level stages you can forget about pretty much all characters that aren't at least 4* because they won't attack fast enough and the enemies will simply KO people. 2. You can not use the high hitpoints high defense warrior class to protect the low defense high attack wizzard or archer classes, since there are no taunt skills or anything. All the game evaluates is warrior beats ranger, ranger beats wizzard, and wizzard beats warrior. Which also means sudden KOs of the class your enemies have an advantage over happen regularily, which is kinda annoying. 3. All battles boil down to: Do you have enough stats on your characters? And do you get an unlucky miss on your first attack? It's just not very satisfying. [b][u]Relationship sim.[/u][/b] This probably disappointed me the most. You pretty much just shower the girls with gifts and fullfill their ever refreshing requests for goods production/delivery and slowly get their intimacy level to five hearts 100%. And then... it simply keeps going? I had a girl at 355% in the end and there was no benefit in doing all of that. I got very few cutscenes from relationship, like really really few. They didn't offer me anything in return, for example a discount for their stores. At the end of the game you decide for one girl to be yours, everyone over 100% agreed to proposing them... but the girl who sat at minus 21% because I ignored all of her annoying requests and never gifted her anything [b]also agreed[/b]? Whuuuuut?? Yeah so anyway, the whole romance and relationship part seems to just be there so you can watch the number rise and it leaves me wanting some actual decent content. And another small annoyance are the many times where there are text formating errors or mistakes in the English language. The devs keep posting status updates on having fixed things but somehow these always escape their watchful eyes. I mean, it's not that big of a deal to have one person go through all the dialogue again and fix your spelling so the game looks presentable. This is just a lack of care. [b][u]Game economy.[/u][/b] Your task in this game is to pay back an astronomical amount of money. To achieve this you can do the following things: Gather stuff in dungeons to sell or have employee only parties do it for you. Place production orders with the girls and then sell those. Craft something yourself and sell it. Bet on monster battles at the tavern (super annoying, I ignored this feature). To sell it you need shops, that need employees. Some shops got specializations to make a certain category of goods more valuable. All of the shops got different star ratings, the higher the rating the more you need to invest into your staff and shop expansions to get the maximum out of it. It does sound good at first glance, but really isn't: The balance between different types of stores is completely off. The best ones are: Weapons, then armor, then accessory, and then dishes. Drink, ingredients, herbs, tools, explosives or no bonus are unable to keep up with those. They are just in the game to be there and be useless. The reason for this is because the more expensive an item is, the more you gain from 200% sales, and this limits you to the types of stores I named unless you want to spend more time finishing the game. All of this is neither being reflected by the star rating nor the total cost of a shop - a 3* weapon shop still outclasses a 5* dish restaurant, and a 2* general goods market can outperform a 5* general good market based on their bonuses and having and easier time to fill the bonus bars with fewer employees. Once you have enough money to simply keep placing lots of production orders. You don't have to do anything else anymore. Just produce - wait - sell - repeat. It's quite frankly pretty boring when so many activities are just a sidenote on the path of beating the game. [b][u]Does this game have good sides?[/u][/b] Well yes. I would call it an entry level dungeon crawler, for people who want a casual forgiving relaxation game on the side. It serves the purpose of letting you test the waters so to speak. And it's an inexpensive game, you don't really risk a lot by buying it and having fun for a solid 10-15 hours. [spoiler]If this review helped you, consider giving it a thumbsup.[/spoiler]