QUESTER Reviews

Es un juego bastante adictivo y con una premisa muy interesante; ¿Quieres llevar a tu grupo de inadaptados personajes de animé a dar una vuelta por un calabozo lleno de engendros? ¡QUESTER es para ti! Eso sí, no es muy intuitivo y te tomará un rato agarrarle el ritmo, pero si te gustan los Dungeon Crawlers y tienes harta imaginación, no tiene desperdicio.

Nice approach to speeding up rpg combat, great mood and word feel.

Quester is a fast-paced turn-based Dungeon Crawler that has you lead a team of the titular Questers on an odyssey through the post-apocalyptic ruins of the Tokyo Underground. With a tight gameplay loop that lets you focus on exploration and finding new gear, you build up your party and take on bigger challenges to keep exploring the dungeon. Your goal each 10 days is to find enough Food to support your party, but while you are out there you also want to be on the lookout for breakable Walls, keys to unlock Gates, treasure and little bugs that have kidnapped potential party members. With each run you reveal more of the map including the positions of new Base Camps that takes your runs deeper and deeper into the dungeon. Running into Monsters triggers a battle which lets you use your party's gear and skills to deal with them which resolve in a deterministic priority queue (e.g. actions at priority 40 always go before actions at priority 30). This predictability lets you set up your favourite combos and blast through most random encounters while needing to switch things up based on your available resources during boss fights. There are a lot of conveniences like a 100% guaranteed escape (even from bosses) and automatically healing party members after fights (though there is a Fuel penalty for KO'd members). Avoid wiping if you can, it can be a bit punishing if you lose half your Food on the same run when your 10 day cycle ticks over :P Overall, I had a blast playing this game and immediately purchased its followup Quester: Osaka to continue the adventure! It's worth pointing out that this game features a New Game+ system that can make future runs more challenging and let you run into different characters or gear to explore the full scope of the game system. If I had a few points of criticism they would be: - Its clear that the game was machine-translated for English and while that doesn't hinder your experience in a major way you will often run into gear and skill descriptions that are a bit off. For example, some items have the Strength+ trait but there is no attribute called Strength (maybe they meant Vitality or Melee?) and others that have the Defense+ trait but there is no matching attribute (there is one called Guard). There are also multiple message boxes where you see colour tags which have not been closed which might be a result of running a JSON file through a machine translator and importing it back into the game. You do eventually get the hang of how everything works but it is clear that a better localisation is necessary. - The mid-game can be a little friction-less if you luck into a good combination of party members and high-tier gear. The game lets you "farm" treasure caches which can be exploited to find gear ahead of the intended curve. Luckily some of the later encounters in the final two regions pressure you nicely with the last boss being a decent challenge unless you are kitted out properly. This is something that its followup Quester: Osaka does a lot better so its good they took feedback on this. - The UI while stylish in its presentation does fail a bit when it comes to Inventory menus. They give you sort options, however, Weapons of all types have the same icons and colour (despite a rarity system being in place) can only be distinguished by their name which gets a little cumbersome at endgame when you have 16 pages of items to shift through. It would also be nice to be able to mark equipment as Favorites or Junk so you can disassemble multiple items at once and not risk disassembling something your party uses. Also for Level Ups, the ability to do multiple level ups on one UI window by using a bar to let the player determine how many Levels they want to boost a character and the estimated Material Cost. - Story content is very limited which is perfectly fine for this sort of game, but the art did make me curious about the world and the lack of narrative feels like a missed opportunity. At the very least it would have been cool to get little bios of the different party members and where they were when this all started. Once again, this is something that its followup game improves upon by giving you a Navigator character so its able to add in narrative beats without overstaying its welcome. Hope this review was helpful and leads you to check out this awesome little game :)

Quester is a prime piece of doujinsoft, inspired by early 1980s PC Engine dungeon crawlers in a way that is so earnest it almost brings a tear to my eye. Authored and illustrated by Kazushi Hagiwara (BASTARD!! - Heavy Metal, Dark Fantasy -), this is a game that will appear alien to you unless you either know the general tenets of the source material or are willling to let yourself discover a long-lost branch of a genre that, in the West, is best represented by your DIablos and your Wizardrys. From the way the screen is partitioned to the way combat works, Quester strikes a very interesting balance between vintage (but efficient) design sensibiities and modern quality of life. Combat will arguably be the trickiest bit to figure out, as it requires you to select your every party member's action along a *timeline* represented by an orange number in each action's selection window. That number determines when any specific action goes off, helping you piece together a "timeline" of attacks that will unfold automatically after you've selected every move and pressed "start battle". Once you figure out how to "program" effective combos in this system however, the rest of the game is actually quite generous: the resource management is light, fleeing battle is always possible (at the cost of your main resource) and a full loop clocks in at around 25 hours if you take your time to look for cracked walls, stock up on food and maybe level up an extra party member or two. Party members which are, by the way, either found inside of green crystal bugs or whenever you discover a new bonfire/fast travel point. The game's only real penalty comes in if you actually get careless enough to let a full party wipe happen: in which case half of all food you've collected during your current 10-day stint will be lost, along with a significant amount of "Materials" - the resource that lets you upgrade your weapons and level up. Oh yeah, there is also a story - but, much like a lot of the game's mechanics, is minimalist and sort of streamlined. You'll find logs explaining bits and pieces of it every now and then, all of which are very neat and shed morsels of light on a setting that is overall quite interesting. That said, the game's "linear" story isn't really the focus of the experience, and that is perfectly fine. Also, if you're wondering whether to get this one or Quester OSAKA: the differences between them are, essentially, the same as those between DOOM 1 and DOOM 2. Take that as you will.

Cleverly designed, perfectly addictive, and criminally overlooked. I wasn't expecting this unassuming game to be one of the best dungeon crawlers of the last few years, but that's what it is. At first I was a bit mystified by the terse interface and seemingly chaotic combat, but once I figured out what was going on (hint: read the manual), I was hooked. Exploration is gradual, but rewarding. New campsites and purification upgrades increase your range of exploration, scattered miniboss encounters raise your team's level cap when defeated, and new questers and equipment expand your strategic and tactical options with new skill combinations. It's hard not to keep playing for just one more turn. I do wish that party members were a bit smarter about targeting enemies; most attacks will target the enemy with the lowest HP, even if it's about to die anyway from dots or AOE, which leads to some wasted attacks. Still, that just means that planning your attacks efficiently is part of the game.

An old school style dungeon crawler, with some light overworld and battle resource management. Challenging, but not unfairly difficult. Brisk as well, clocking in between 10 - 15 hours for a single playthrough with NG+ after that. There are so many combinations of party members and skills that you could go out of your way to break the game's balance if you tried. Bosses are all about finding the right combination. REMEMBER: This is styled on old PC DRPGs. That means status buffs on your party, with debuffs and negative status effects on enemies is imperative. Do not expect to brute force your way with simple attacks. Learn to use fire and poison properly, manage your battle resources, and always have a tank and a healer in your party at all times. Good luck, Quester!