Labyrinth of Zangetsu Reviews

It's good! The gameplay is very similar to Wizardry I-III. There are some alterations - you automatically heal and identify items upon returning to town, there's no (explicit, at least) aging function, and all characters share an inventory they carry consumable items in. The shared inventory is the only QoL change I'm not 100% on board with, but it's not a dealbreaker. The game is pretty awesome otherwise.

If you're interested in a breezy and well made Wizardry-like, you don't need to look any further than Labyrinth of Zangetsu. While it hews close to established conventions of the genre, it avoids the worst pitfalls typical of its associates that result in sudden, unavoidable losses and keeps a good balance between convenience and difficulty. Also of note, the developer has taken it upon themselves to create info-graphics explaining aspects of the game, showing both passion for the game from those who made it and consideration for players rarely seen in the dungeon crawler genre. On the whole, an easy recommend, well worth the 30-40 hours for a standard playthrough.

It is a great little dungeon crawler game. It has roots in wizardry type games. I love the Japanese Flavor. And it very fun. I would highly recommends.

For better or worse, it's a Wizardry game with a loose Asian fantasy aesthetic involving yokai somewhat more than the usual elves and dwarves. Everything is done with a classic ink paint style and it's a pretty good moody look. Game wise, the difficulty is a bit irregular in fights at times, but not terrible. It does play rather obtusely and it doesn't explain all the mechanics in game anywhere. For the most part, it's not too bad, but it can get frustrating when it comes to the erratic importance of alignments with classes and class abilities. And I'm just going to say it- the game is flat out unreasonable and over tuned pretty often. You can get easily one shot with nothing you could have done about it (your wizards barely survive by anything more than luck) and it is very possible to permanently lose characters you've sunk hours into because the resurrection rolls were unlucky. Because the game doesn't explain much of anything, there is a huge aggravation factor going into this. Game play can be strategic, but there is a large amount of a 'it doesn't matter what you do' involved. I guess that's a Wizardry thing outright, but I can't call the ridiculous difficulty and random auto death a selling point. All in all, I'm not the most hardcore Wizardry fan and Zangetsu does borrow both the good and less than desirable elements from that series, but I am enjoying the game so far.

Here is a very cool and exciting game. At least if you like unforgiving, gringy dungeon crawlers. Because, these two adjectives are exactly what makes this game great, for me! The manage Data finction will be your best friend in this massive auto-save beast of a game. You'll have to know when to follow and when to fold if you don't want to lose hours of progress, or even 20000 shiniy money to resurrect your characters. Other than that, I love the artistic direction of the game, I love the music, the sounds and the athmosphere. The story is spare and pretty classical, but I don't need crazy stories to get into a seres of dungeons, or should I say Labyrinth!

Very similar to elminage but shorter and with a better multiclass system.

A nice entry into the traditional dungeon crawler RPG. The two major thing that sets this game apart from others is the graphics and the steam-lined gameplay. However, it lacks in almost everything other department. Graphics: Very unique, the one outstanding part of this game Gameplay: Probably one of the more easier dungeon crawler games I played. Very little penalty (stat decrease at worst) switching classes as you can switch back and forth and be at the last level you leveled the class. Example if your leveled a character to a Level 10 Warrior then switch to Samurai. You can swap back to Warrior and be back at level 10 instead of starting at level 1. Controls are standard for most dungeon crawlers and menus easy to navigate. Most fights don't require too much thinking and you can almost brute force the entire game. Story: Lack-Luster, nothing of note worth mentioning. Sound: Nothing worth noting here either. Overall, I really felt the ball was dropped on this. Especially if you compare this to Stranger of Sword City: Revisited, which I would argue is better in every aspect and is an older Experience title. I was expecting Labyrinth of Zangetsu to be better and it fell flat on it's face unfortunately.

It saddens me to leave a negative review for this game but I can’t in good conscience recommend this game. [h3]The good:[/h3] ✔️ I like the [b]visuals[/b] very much. The dark atmosphere and ink aesthetics give a great look to the game and blend well the story and gameplay. ✔️ [b]Job system[/b] in which you can have the same character be of multiple jobs at the same time and get many of its benefits at the same time. [h3]The bad:[/h3] ❌ The game gets [b]too grindy[/b] but not in a fun way. I bought this thinking it could be a fun dungeon crawler, like Etrian Odyssey but while the latter is fair, the former seems to be trying to screw you at every opportunity. To give an example, when your characters die, and most can die with one hit at many points in the game, they must be revived at the temple in the city. Not bad, but the problem lies in the price being so high, so unreachable that you’d need hours to farm that much money, or you’d better just make a new character, which will also probably die. ❌ The [b]inventory[/b] is a mess. At the start of the game the shop in town can sell you the basic stuff but later on all gear you’ll have to find yourself in the dungeon, which again, is fine, but all you have to hold your items is a storage that bundles everything together in the messiest way possible. It becomes even worse because many classes have certain restrictions but you can’t equip items from the storage, not even in town, so you have to put it in party inventory to see if it actually benefits you. One thing I have always praised Japanese RPGs is how neat they could make their inventory and menu screens, compared to Western RPGs but while this is one is not horrible, it is still a pain. ❌ When grinding, you will often come across [b]chests[/b] at the end of fights. Seriously, the act of checking every chest for a bunch of traps, failing, doing again, succeeding and getting the loot can take longer than the fight itself. ❌ [b]Stats[/b] can go down at level up, which will lock you out of the best jobs. [b]Conclusion:[/b] [u]This is not a bad game,[/u] not horrible, etc. but it is hard to recommend. If you have a very high tolerance to inconvenience, don’t mind farming tons of levels with a bunch of classes on the same character then the rest may in fact be good.

I like dungeon crawlers. I like the satisfaction of pushing through a difficult challenge and succeeding. I do NOT enjoy a leveling system where your stats are as likely to go down as they are to go up. Especially when the mandatory autosave makes these bad rolls permanent (or, if you're willing to exploit the system, very very slow to reroll). These aren't just raw numbers, either. You won't get skills on level up if your stats are too low. You also need strong stats across the board if you want any hope of seeing the advanced classes - not that you'll know that, because the game doesn't tell you the prerequisites unless you've already achieved them. The game will absolutely screw over your entire save if it wants to - not because you made a poor decision, but because it rolled some dice on your behalf and didn't like the result. For all the talk about this game having quality of life adjustments to move it beyond the original Wizardry, it's mind-boggling why such a player-hostile mechanic was left in despite multiple balance patches (and allegedly poor reviews from the Japanese playerbase). Maybe there are masochists out there who enjoy grappling with such a system, but I'm not one of them.

A Wizardry clone that modernizes the traditional systems and gives them a beautiful coat of paint, but utterly fails at dungeon and item design. Also hampered by lackluster dungeon graphics past the first dungeon and a weird difficulty curve. Nearly every non-spellcaster class possesses a variety of in-battle skills, giving attackers more to do than hack away every turn forever. Each class has a niche: Warriors are tanks with extremely strong single-target physical attacks but no other options; Samurai have excellent damage output but poor defense for a frontliner; Monks have a grab bag of special attacks but no strong single-target attacks; and so on. Besides ensuring niche protection, this encourages you to multi-class. Unlike in Wizardry, multi-classing is a fully functional system that works about how you'd expect it to, though halflings' and half-onis' wacky statlines make it hard for them to meet the prerequisites of some classes. Other key modernizations: fixed encounters are visible as pools of fog; item information is fully exposed; level drain and aging (but not, surprisingly, permadeath!) are out; ironman mode is a toggle rather than an obligation. Unfortunately, the game's big gimmick, max-HP-reducing attacks, doesn't really work: the only way to restore your max HP is to return to town, and there's rarely a compelling reason not to return to town, so when you get hit with one (which is pretty rare), you just return to town. The art is excellent. Enemies look cool; the character portraits, while few, are good; the UI is fairly stylish (if you can excuse the inexplicable bloom). Dungeon graphics are a bit weaker: the first major dungeon is a gorgeous blend of 2D and 3D, but everything after looks like PS2 textures as seen through a crappy black-and-white filter. The music is outstanding, but the battle theme's lead-in is longer than the average encounter; it wore on me before the game was out. The big problem: the dungeons are really boring. Like, less interesting than the ones in Wizardry 1, the decades-old game that founded the genre. The penultimate dungeon was decent aside from some truly heinous mandatory secret doors, but it takes maybe eight hours to get there, and then the final dungeon sucks again (mostly because it's incredibly short, leaving you to grind to fight the final boss). Equipment drops are unvaried and largely boring until the final dungeon, which hands out special items like candy. A DRPG with boring items is almost as bad as a DRPG with boring dungeons, and this game is both. Also, there were a few large difficulty spikes. The first, a quartet of heavy-hitting minibosses partway through the second dungeon, made me drop the game until I came back and spent an hour grinding. The second, a pair of even heavier-hitting minibosses at the start of the final dungeon, was maybe half that. The last, the final boss whose AoE attacks can take out endgame-level thieves and wizards in a single round, took a few hours. The common thread here is that there isn't really any way around it: if you don't have enough HP, you gotta grind (and probably reclass your characters so they can level faster and get more HP). I'm not particularly enthused about spending four or five hours in a 15-hour game grinding, especially when said game costs $40 CAD. The localization has some small technical issues, but it reads well. Overall verdict: absolutely not worth your time or money, but a sequel with better dungeon design might be.