Stranger of Sword City Reviews

i dont think i like dungeon crawlers

I finished this game twice. I loved it.

Very interesting style for a dungeon crawler. Here are some of the main points: Character customization is decent, with the option to multiclass up to 5 times. Difficulty increases as the player levels. Equipment is acquired through a unique ambush system (some tiles in dungeons are locations for ambush where you can fight special mobs and win chests with the equipment) Dungeons often multiple levels up and down and different mechanics that the user will have to learn in order to complete them (teleporting, switches, rails etc) As with most rpgs, difficulty is highest at the beginning, but gets easier as the user gets control over the decisions that impact the power of his team A fatality system involving Life Points (Characters who lose all of them are permanently dead, but they can be restored in the guild over time) All in all, decent game for this genre. Just expect a ton of grind and waiting for teammates who have lost a LP to recover before rejoining your party.

I'm writing this quite early into my time with the game, and I plan to update it eventually. But I must say, this game makes an awful first impression. I'm fairly familiar with dungeon crawlers - moreso than the average person - and I cannot stand this game. My first four hours have been spent plinking away at the tutorial level, carefully killing an enemy or two before scurrying away, hoping that I got a piece of usable C tier gear. From the very start, you're level 1 fighting level 10 enemies, and the game is extremely happy to throw level 10-25 enemies at you in the starting area. And while you can make some steady progress, the glacial pace that you earn money at means that the early game has been gruelingly slow. There's a revive system, however the system appears so strict (1-3 deaths per character) that any character death feels like a major enough setback that I'd be better off reloading. The characters themselves are strangely obtuse. I understand vaguely what skills, spells, and stats do, but not enough to actually competently plan anything. And while it's a low blow, the combination of "being able to create 10 year old girl characters" and "buying characters underwear as a piece of equipment" is making me doubt the quality of the game as a whole. Perhaps my opinion will change once (if) I get over this difficulty hump. Perhaps the start is just slow, like many of the PS2 dungeoncrawlers I've tried out. But I can say that this is not a game I'd recommend to most people. The glacial pacing will turn off nearly everyone, and those few dungeon crawler fans left will likely get weeded out by the difficulty.