Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society Reviews

This game isn't for everyone. It probably has too much yapping if you want a conventional dungeon RPG, and too much grinding if you want a breezy visual novel with RPG bosses. Regardless, it seems like I'm the right kind of broken individual this game was designed for. The best way I can describe it is Wizardry meets Madoka Magica. Don't let the cute cover art fool you, the story gets dark fast. Lynch mobs, stalking, abusive parenting, sexual coercion, etc. all come into play. This game plays more like Wizardry than Etrian Odyssey. You don't have many decisions to make from one turn to the next, and 90% of fights will be autobattled with the right setup. Battles come down more to how you prepped beforehand with equipment and leveling. If you're underleveled, you're dead, end of story. Fortunately, this game shifts most of the usual suffering of Wizardry types from gameplay to story. The penalty for a TPK is surprisingly lenient. Money is plentiful and you can brute force everything if you craft hard enough. The story is long, but that's because the game is giving you something to do while preparing for the next difficulty spike. As of the review, I'm on part 2 of the game. Not sure if I'll stick around for the 3651-floor randomizer dungeon in the postgame, but I'll at least stick through the main game. Update after finishing the main story: Definitely not doing the postgame. As the game goes on, the biggest flaw is the class-change system. After leveling a character to 99, you can reset them to level 1 with a new class and stat bonuses. You're expected to reset each character multiple times on the road to the final boss. And you can hit 99 pretty quickly with the win-streak mechanic. But the class-change menu doesn't show a character's job history. When you have 40 team slots to manage, all that page-flipping just to stay informed adds up quickly. It honestly takes longer to assign new classes in bulk than it does to level from 1 to 99. 15 characters could all hit 99 in the span of 15 minutes, then it could take up to an hour to correctly reclass everyone to their next step. I would've loved to do the postgame if not for the atrocious reclassing menu.

Completed true end, 100% achievements. Man oh man. What a game. Overall, an incredible experience with some (legitimate) gripes that can cause some extreme dips in enjoyment. + An absolutely insane story that twists and turns to a degree I was not ready for. I don't just mean insane in the pace or twists. I mean legit insane. It will even prey on your confusion as a player in what it keeps from you. It hits mature themes and surprises you with content fitting its M rating. Be ready to be stunned. It does not shy away from its rating. + Dungeon design and challenge is amazing. I felt great exploring the (premade) dungeons. Finding the curios was an adventure I was driven to complete. I have gripes about the randomized dungeons below. + Art design is great for enemy and players, though facets could have used more color options. + Combat is deep and involved, continues to evolve in complexity even dozens of hours in. + Facets (job system) were all super unique and fun to experiment with. OST is pretty standard fair for Nippon Ichi. If you've heard a Disgaea OST, you've heard a variation of this. - Randomized dungeon design does not present enough unique charm or challenge to be engaging. All floors feel the same, even when the colors on the walls change. This would be fine, until you see how many floor of it you have to go through. - Skill system is obtuse and hidden behind menu of menus, and it's critical to success. It needed more work. - When reincarnating puppets, it doesn't easily keep track of prior facets that puppet has been without a ton of menus or personal record keeping by the player. Multiply that by keeping track of it across 40 puppets by the end of the game, and you see the issue. - 3-attacker covens are how most people will want to play, but the offerings for them are slimmer to others without tradeoffs for less-attacker covens being worth it (imo) - Difficulty spikes and bosses that require a VERY SPECIFIC and VAGUE set of conditions to fulfill (IYKYK) Overall, I was a fan of Coven of Dusk, and Etrian Odyssey games. If you're in that vein like me, you already know you will enjoy this. I will admit, I put it down very close to the end hitting a boss gate, but gave it a rest for a month or two and drove it home happily. It has moments of fairly high frustration on what otherwise has an amazing level of engagement and polish. I say in the end "Recommend", because if we ever see a third Labyrinth of Galleria game, this game has convinced me that I would want to give it a shot. With some UI fixes and dungeon design rethinks, this game would have easily been one of the best to ever do it. They're very close to dominating this space, with a strong showing from The Moon Society.

If you have an interest in this game, it's a pretty easy recommend both for people who have played the first Labyrinth title and people who haven't. The 2 games both have standalone stories, so you don't need to play the first one to understand the story for this one. Labyrinth of Galleria makes a lot of improvements from Refrain, both from a QoL and general gameplay standpoint. Previous issues like not having a bestiary, no autosave, not having access to in-game tutorials, etc. are all issues that have been fixed in Galleria, and while there are still a few strays that didn't get fixed, it is overall a HUGE improvement and makes for a much smoother experience. Gameplay has also seen some much needed improvements with new mechanics that round out some of the rough edges from Refrain. Stun is an actual bar that you fill up now by attacking instead of just something you can randomly proc sometimes. Classes feel more unique now by having active skills that are unique to them. The player character has some nice new exploration focused skills now that smooth out dungeon crawling. The list goes on. Overall, while I love Refrain I find Galleria an easier recommend for people who want to give the series a shot without committing to both titles immediately, these are pretty long games after all. Both games have fantastic stories that are well worth experiencing, but Galleria is just a cleaner package overall. Also this game has a cat class. Play it. Now.