Elminage ORIGINAL - Priestess of Darkness and The Ring of the Gods Reviews

I can recomend it for original Wizardry game fans. New features(PC): -PgUp+PgDn+Esc(LB+RB+start) to soft reset. -Keyboad configuration tool in Installation folder. -Advanced option setting (edit Elminage.ini. ex:AntiAlias=1 to enable anti aliasing). -Customise BGM (SOUNDLOAD).

The game might be awesome but this is an atrocious port. I keep installing it and wondering why I've only played 15 minutes. Then I remember it's the uncapped menu fps, nonsensical key bindings, alien-designed menu system, etc. Emulate the PSP version instead, seriously.

Elminage Original is one of the best Wizardry-like dungeon crawlers I've played. It's also one I'd recommend for beginners as the difficulty scales slowly and the game offers an intro chapter contained within a relatively tame area. It still has the trappings of a typical Wizardry game: You create a party of adventurers and send them into the unknown depths of a dungeon. You might lose someone after they're beheaded by a ninja, or even wipe out and need to send a second team to bring back the corpses to the temple. There are traps, pitfalls, ambushes as you enter a room, and so on. But you'll prevail, probably, if you're patient, prepared and pay attention. Where this game rises above its competitors is not a single thing, but an overall feeling of cohesiveness and quality in its production. The 2D art is gorgeous and the artstyle aged well from its original PSP version. The game plays well with a controller and remembers your cursor choices: You can repeat the last turn with R1 or order everyone to attack with Square/X. One of my favorite options is the ability to rename the entire spell list to your liking; the spell names were pure gibberish to me and I renamed them into something recognizable. I love that while this game features all the classes from original Wizardry games, Elminage also came up with new classes like the Maid, the Summoner and the Alchemist. Their original mechanics fit well along the existing ones and add a delicious complexity to building your party. A vast roster of playable races with dozens of portraits to pick from give you ultimate control on what your band of ragamuffins will look like. Give this a try, it's really worth the price!

Addictive dungeon crawler akin to Wizardry, but in a more open-ended format where instead of having one mega-dungeon, you have several that you can visit freely. For those unfamiliar with Wizardry, you start in a settlement where you create characters and build a party of up to 6 characters, then you explore the nearby dungeon, and go back to the town to sell loot, recover and level up. You can keep creating characters so there is plenty of room for experimentation. When characters die, you just have to pay a fee in the city church to resurrect them. Attribute points are assigned automatically on level up. During combat, your characters are arranged in a front row and a back row (in Elminage the characters to the left form the front row, the ones to the right the back row). Characters in the back row have to use spells or long range weapons like bows or sticks to attack enemies. Dungeons are filled with secret rooms and all sorts of obstacles like teleporters, pitch black rooms and pits. The gameplay is what you'd expect from a Wizardry-like but with some QoLs, like a minimap and repeat action commands during combat. Some classes are quite unique like the Summoner who can capture and summon almost any enemy in the game, and the summon stays with you and has persistent HP. You can even use the summoned monster's skills for dungeon crawling (e.g. unlocking chests). The game is challenging but not excessively so. The game doesn't hold your hand, but the basic premise and objective of the game is explained in a pretty elegant way in the tutorial dungeon. The UI is somewhat clunky, especially for managing inventory which feels extremely archaic, but at least the menus support the use of the mouse. What I dislike the most is that you cannot find any explanation on what attributes do, or what skills do. There are many other mechanics that aren't explained. Even the M+KB controls aren't explained, thankfully someone made a guide on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2805408033 The artwork is very good, mostly realistic (rather than highly stylized and anime-like) and dark fantasy-themed. There are so many enemy types and each have really good and high resolution artwork. I think every inventory item in the game also has high resolution artwork. I would say that this and Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar are the two best dungon crawlers on Steam.

A relatively faithful Wizardry clone with some interesting additions. The massive class list might be overwhelming if you aren't familiar with the genre, but it makes party-building much more interesting. And unlike in purist clones, each class has a unique skill: the Hunter performs bonus attacks on enemies with status ailments; the Shaman can equip weapons in armor slots and create a magic-reflecting barrier; the Thief can remove and steal enemies' equipment. Unfortunately, many of these skills aren't unlocked until Level 25, which isn't far from the end of the game. The other big addition is the crafting system, which lets you use materials to create utility items or enhance weapons. The latter is where the real meat is: you can do anything from increase a weapon's damage to make it put enemies to sleep to remove the race restriction on it so your fairy can swing around a greatsword. It's a little overwhelming, honestly, but it's a lot of fun to play around with. The 3D dungeon graphics are nothing special, but the 2D art is excellent; some of the monsters look genuinely terrifying. Unusually, items have art as well, and it's no less excellent. The character portraits don't look quite as good, unfortunately. There is, alas, one big problem with the game: its dungeons are too big, too empty, and too many in number. Around one room per floor has something interesting in it; the rest hold either a random encounter or nothing at all. Some floors offer interesting navigational problems, like pits that drop you to the next level or an air timer that ticks down in real time, but more don't. I appreciate that each dungeon has its own look, but visual variety can't make up for gameplay uniformity. All in all, Elminage is an above-average dungeon crawler on a platform where good ones are surprisingly hard to find. If you're interested in the genre, give it a shot.

It's a very barebones port of the PSP version but the translation is better and the game itself is a really good dungeon crawler in the vein of the classic Wizardry games.

This is more mixed than it is purely negative since it only gives an option for yes or no. But in any case: Pros: Enjoyable combat, good music, a pretty deep crafting system and strategies. Very similar to Wizardry. Cons: No Load button for in game menu outside of the starting screen. Also, this is the only game I have ever played where you can GET WEAKER WHEN YOU LEVEL! I have never seen a game where you can lose stats just by leveling. I can understand if you multiclass your stats get dropped to match upon multiclassing, but not from simply leveling up. The only way to get around this is to save, and constantly have to close the game before you level in order to hope for better RNG each time. This is something that could be fixed by either simply not giving stats negative values upon leveling, or adding in a load button in the in-game menu. Finally, access to your map is tied to a specific class. If you don't have a member of that class, you can't tell where you are.

This is a great wizardry-style game. Full disclosure, I totally understand this game isn't for everyone. But I enjoy it for what it is. It's a great homage to classic CRPGs. I do like how after the initial dungeon the game becomes open ended. Though it can be difficult, it does give you a lot of options for characters and equipment. Elminage is very old school in comparison to modern rpgs but the menus and navigation are really well laid out. A lot of older CRPGs suffer from clunky interfaces and thankfully Elminage does not have this problem. The game has a ton of obscure secrets so I do recommend reading FAQs to get full enjoyment out of the game. While not perfect you will get your money's worth if you enjoy dungeon crawlers.

A very good turn-based dungeon crawler, that I'd be tempted to call great if it wasn't for the tiny issue that a following game in the series; Elminage Gothic, is imo better. Everyone's mileage may vary though and E:O is certainly more forgiving than Gothic. With an auto-map right from the start and less enemies that can instantly kill you in the first few dungeons, this game is a better entry point into the series than Gothic. It can still be a bit obtuse, with little in the way of explanation in-game. Be prepared to look stuff up online, probably from the comprehensive Japanese Wiki, (thank you Google translate!) Make a party of 6 characters in the training school, form a party in the bar and then go out and explore dungeons, solve puzzles and bash monsters, all in turn based combat that has suprising depth when you understand it. Don't go in expecting AAA graphics, but it looks better than emulating it from PSP and the translation is better. The key thing is that the gameplay is great. You get one save file, although you can save anywhere, and trying to get all the dungeons mapped out can be a tense and exciting affair. Later dungeons have all the staples you'd expect of the genre- anti-magic zones, dark zones, teleporters and more. Manage your spells, HP and items and get back alive from the depths! Levelling comes pretty fast, especially straight away, and the stat increases on levelling seem more generous than in Gothic. There's precious few of these games being made outside of Japan, so English language versions of crawlers of this depth are few and far between. Buy it and see what all of us crawler fans find so enjoyable!

So many doors. So many rooms. So little in the way of meaningful content. On the surface it looks like a huge game. Dig deeper and realize it's practically empty. Besides decent combat and really well done art, there isn't much to go on here. This is the last poorly translated Japanese game I'll ever play! I'm still giving it a thumbs up, as it does nail the Wizardry components down quite well, and I've been playing this style of game for the last 30 years. If I was new to the dungeon crawling genre, I'd be put off from trying others. If your gaming funds are limited, try Fall of the Dungeon Guardians, Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar, or Ruzar first.