Brave Dungeon - The Meaning of Justice - Reviews

It gets better as you get farther along but the grindy nature and the stupid prequel quests make it so i can not recommend.

I really want to like this game, but there are always updates and nothing is fixed. Not the glitches, not the translations, nothing. In fact it seems the only thing being worked on is DLC for the game, and adding lewd art of characters.

Good game, obviously still in development, against the second big boss the game froze on me when Al died to it's attack, other than that no complaints and can't wait till full release so that I can read the parts that haven't been translated

Improving in many ways past the 1st entry in the series, much of the original systems still remain as a solid foundation. The game itself is rather grindy initially but after getting past the wall your growth accelerates rapidly. The art style and music are very charming, and the characters are comedic if a little cliché. I look forward to the final release but wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to those unfamiliar with the Dark Witch/Brave Dungeon series in its current state.

Game could use some polish for sure, but I had fun with it so far. EDIT: Going to give a full detail review now. DISCLAIMER there will be spoilers below. [h1]Intro[/h1] Brave Dungeon - The Meaning of Justice (BD2) is a game much greater in scope compared to BD1. It has ideas that sound great on paper and there's a lot of improvements over BD1. But there are some aspects which are either questionable or needed more time in the oven. In general it also feels like there were just missed opportunities and also a need for some more polish in some areas. [h1]The good[/h1] [b]Overall fast paced gameplay like BD1[/b] - The second game maintains the fast pace feeling in the combat, the exploration and character growths (lvl ups, getting stronger etc.). - Though there is one section of the game which completely goes against this, which will be mentioned below (Papeline's Story) [b]Excellent OST[/b] - I greatly enjoyed listening to the soundtrack and will continue to do so outside of the game. [b]The new dungeon mechanics[/b] - The new dungeon mechanics introduced in Klinsy's story were pretty good. I also liked the roaming enemies used throughout the game. - Al's story dungeon could've had 1-2 more though, as the only mechanics were the roaming enemies, keys and locks, and poison tiles. It also has a huge maze-like feel which can be fun to explore. [b]Openness/non-handholdyness in final chapter[/b] - I enjoyed the game becoming more open after the first 3 chapters and eventually combining all the things introduced so far. You could choose to engage with whatever content you felt like. - Needing to find your party members in different areas and seeing your party gradually reach it's full potential felt great. [b]Increased party customisation via combo skills and 4 member slots[/b] - With there being atleast 1 combo skill per pairing, that adds a lot of additional skills for each character. You can find lots of ways to mix and match to your liking. [b]More character interactions vs BD1[/b] - BD1 didn't have any interactions at all for the party members, so seeing BD2 add a lot more is nice to see. Feels like the after talks from the platformer games. [b]General UI presentation and looks[/b] - The UI generally looks clean and pleasing to look at. [h1]The neutral[/h1] [b]Removal of items[/b] - I'm not sure why they removed items. Perhaps with the addition of combo skills, they felt like there were already enough options. Though it doesn't really hurt to have even more. With a party without healing, they could resort to using items. So that could add another layer of party customisation. [b]Wonky balance of skills[/b] - With the addition of combo skills, it's understandable that there would be difficulty balancing all of them. But there are some skills which are clearly too good, or worse/redundant than another. Supposedly the balance of combo skills comes from their slower turn speed, which would give you less turns overall, but some still feel too overtuned. [b]Crafting limitations of Seama's items in Al's Story[/b] - It feels like you won't be able to craft all of the items in a single run. You're greatly limited by 1 specific material which seems more rare than the others, but also one of the highest required. Perhaps this is intentional due to the puzzle of figuring out how to get past all the key/locks without forcing any of them open. But it feels weird for the crafting to be limited because of 1 material instead of giving an equal balance of all materials. - I also feel like the 2 items that allow teleporting between camps and viewing the map for rooms you aren't currently in, should've been QOL that is unlocked from the start. [b]A few general bugs[/b] - Played the game on version 1.05.07, and I've seen there were quite a few bug fix patches before then, so perhaps the majority have been fixed, but I've still seen a few. [b]English translation seems off[/b] - The whole english text from dialogue to menus seems to be machine translated. Feels off but it's playable I guess. [b]Story is nothing special[/b] - Probs not that important to note, but thought I might as well mention it. It serves it's purpose enough. [h1]The bad[/h1] [b]The whole city building aspect feels tedious and incomplete[/b] - In Papeline's story, you're tasked with building a city which involves gathering and crafting. Gathering and crafting can feel slow due to not gaining enough mats (until the staff hall is built), high material requirements and needing to manually craft each item type individually for every prereq in the chain. - Building the city didn't feel good at all. It didn't feel like we were building a city. We just place down one building and a few decorations for each stage requirement. It also feels like there aren't that many options to choose from for decorating, so even if you like doing that, it won't be that fulfilling. - It also felt like Paleline's story was just a tutorial. It went slow but also kinda ended abruptly, though perhaps they expected players to play this story last, so they'd go into the final chapter knowing everything they need. [b]Bland overworld in Papeline's Story[/b] - Once again from Paleline's story, one aspect is to explore an overworld to gather materials and do other things. The overworld idea is nice in general but it's very empty and bland looking. There aren't many events or reasons to explore other than to gather materials or find shrines. [b]The Trust aspect in Papeline's story feels tacked on[/b] - Trust is gained via completing specific requests or solving shrines. There isn't much reason for collecting Trust though. It's mainly for the staff hall and map chips. Once you've completed all the main requests though, Trust gain is also super slow, due to small requests needing time before you can refresh them, and they only give out 1-2 per request. You might as well not bother with it, or atleast get the one newgame+ option that transfers map chips and never worry about it again once you've unlocked all map chips. - And for some reason, Trust is used temporarily to gain level ups in Papeline's story. Even though fighting monsters in the overworld is an option, it just felt like they did this to have another option to use Trust on. [b]Skill unlocking should be more simple[/b] - In BD1 you unlocked skills via reaching certain levels. In BD2 you need to unlock the skill via leveling Mindsets, and then learning the skill which costs Miracle Power. Miracle Powers drop from defeating bosses, which can end up with a problem of not having enough Miracle Powers for the all of your party members. Even if you want to try a new character and level them up, you won't be able to use their skills which kinda sucks. At the current stage of the game I'm at (start of postgame), I don't feel strong enough to tackle the rest of the bosses which means I'll need to newgame+ to get the remaining Miracle Power. - Mindsets are also something that didn't need to exist. All they give is stats and skill unlocks. You can customise which Mindset to level up first, which ultimately doesn't matter as all of them will get leveled up in the end. This ends up only adding a bit of tedium if you want the skill unlocks as early as possible. [h1]Final thoughts[/h1] Overall the game was enjoyable enough for me, but it could've been so much better. Main issues stem from Papeline's story, which just feels incomplete. Perhaps if they had a few dungeons in the overworld to be found and explored, more events to be found/things to do, and sped up/streamlined the city building aspect, it'd be much better paced with the rest of the game. Most points in the neutral category are just some polish that could be done. Hopefully a future patch addresses those.

The only entry in The Legend of Dark Witch that despite receiving the game, never finished it nor even cared to, yet I'm not reccomending it.. Expect for some core elements from the game to not be in review because of this change: This game wasn't what I've expected it to be. After watching some gameplay of Nightmare and Godshill in this game, something told me that this game just uses a heavily modified Brave Dungeon Switch engine. This isn't too bad, but the engine isn't optimised properly like the Hedgehog Engine. This is even more evident because most of the ports from the games still have the switch control scheme without giving a full explanation on how the PC's keyboard controls are yet. And what's funny is that this is actually rare to come across in PC games in general because of Nintendo's exclusivity on most of their games, so seeing a game directly ported from Switch without any significant changes makes people question on the programming side of things. Next, on top of that, this game reuses and Im not kidding, A LOT of the series assets more than ever. The game features the same pixel artist from 2014's The Legend of Dark Witch, the same artist from 2016's Brave Dungeon (Correct me if I'm wrong about this), the same composer of 2014's The Legend of Dark Witch, and because M2 wasn't here for this, the same programmer of 2014's The Legend of Dark Witch. This isn't really much of a problem to others, but it completely lacks unoriginality within some things about the game. The new music still reuses instruments from previous Soundtracks, The same artist looks the same, and the programming is already off as hell, with NAN-A isn't truly paying to both sides of the Fandom to make the game even better. Now, let's read why the game is in Early Access. Before I would start with this though, need I have to remind you that this game was translated using Google, which isn't a good software to use because it has a while bunch of mistakes within the platform. Anyways, let's begin. First of all, what does, "Due to the large volume of the game, it is inefficient for individuals to solve all problems. I need a lot of feedback" mean? All I can interpret from this sentence alone is that because of the game being pretty large compared to other entries, other people can't solve all the problems? Every game does have its fair share of glitches, but the thing is, is that you can get as much notable glitches outside of the game before releasing it. Even obscure pens that can possibly break the games. And honestly, that's pretty much I have to complain about when it comes to the Early Access build's details. Most of the information is pretty straightforward, but there could be more explanation to some of the stuff mentioned. The reviews for this game are mixed, which Im pretty fine with, but here's the werid issue: For the people I know within the Main Dark Witch Discord, all of the reviews are pretty vague and just give it a reccomend because its simply "good" and "nice." this doesn't apply to the people that I've never seen before. Just wanted to point this out because I've had issues with the Discord Dark Witch Community and seeing tneir vague responses compared to something like this, poses more of am issue to them. Edit: I also forgot to add this here, but INSIDE_SYSTEM doesn't take constructive criticism as a response to make the game better. There's a member in the Early Access Discord who's a well known Modder for other games, and as he approached every nook and cranny in this game, he spotted numerous glitches that the developer himself doesn't show enough care to patch it out. This alone, is just complete shit as a developer of an Early Access game should always accept any critisism of any kind.

This game is a cursed entity that seems to only bring out the worst in people, and I've seen so much toxic positivity and toxic negativity around it that I'm just tired of it and wish this game never existed in the first place. For now, though, all I can do is try to convince people to stay away from this game. I do kinda like it, though, I must admit. Update 4/15/23: It has come to my attention that people are getting banned from the community hub for calling out the game's many technical problems, and now that it's out of early access, I should point out that this is not good behavior. I still recommend you stay away from this game, as even without this behavior, it isn't even worth its price of half, let alone a third, of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.

I have loved all the Brave Dungeon games. This game is basically RPG comfort food. There is no huge story line or complex mechanics, it's all about the turn based battles and exploring dungeons. Great for a pick up and play for a bit and enjoy the great artwork. Some of the text is not translated, but nothing essential is missing. A new favorite game.

[b]UPDATE (6/1/23): While the game is """fully released""" now, the game has barely changed since my review, and I stand by almost everything I said here. DO NOT BUY![/b] [b]TL;DR: Don't buy, especially in it's current state. Play the original if you want a good version of this game.[/b] I really wanted to recommend this game, especially with me being a big fan of Legend of Dark Witch. Brave Dungeon 2 makes a lot of improvements over its predecessor. The level up system is cool, the dungeons are actually dungeons this time around, and the partner system is cool. You can run away from encounters. I love the UI as well. But at the same time, there's a lot wrong with it as well. The game is too easy, even on Lunatic. I've only died once so far, and that's because I was playing recklessly. The Capacity Meter refills like crazy, meaning you can pump out strong attacks like it's nothing. With the partner system, it makes it even worse as using a partner move only consumes the user’s meter and not the other partner's meter. One time, at level 6, I challenged a level 12 enemy and won. Battles are tedious. I was in battles for up to several minutes at points. It still takes forever to kill anything, even with the Easy difficulty. Most of it is spamming the A button half the time. The game doesn't reward you for going out of your way to do new attacks. The only time I found skills necessary was in Klinsy's bosses and the final playthrough. That means over half the game, the combat is just brain dead. In fact, Lunatic makes it WORSE, because all it does is increase enemy HP. So don't play on Lunatic, you should probably play on Expert. The translations are literally from Google. And even then, not everything is translated at this time, which is baffling. EDIT 1/1/23: Someone pointed out to me that the game isn't "finished", and they're still adding content, hence the lack of a translation, and that's a pretty fair point. Still, I think everything should've been Google Translated, as it's mildly annoying when you have a screen full of japanese, while other parts are English. The bosses are terrible. The Shady boss is the worst one so far. Attack the wrong one and you get hit. There are four of them. So you essentially can't use revenge magic. EDIT 1/1/23: I found out if you can tank the counters, you can easily spam revenge magic and kill the enemy. It takes forever because of the attack animations, but it's easy. While my experience was pretty stable, there are many bugs. Yeah, it's an early access game, but even then, it feels like this game wasn't even playtested. Klinsy’s story is the worst. Not only are the bosses garbage, but she reverts all of the good changes from Al’s story. I beat Papelne’s story, and while it was fun for the most part, Klinsy’s story made me want to get a refund. It’s THAT bad. Despite all of the issues I've mentioned, the game can be enjoyable. But in its current state, I can't recommend BD2, especially with it's absurd price (seriously, 20$ for an Early Access game? And it's going to be 30$ at launch). There are much better games for this price - might I recommend the Mega Man Zero Legacy Collection? Or Sonic Generations? Or any other Dark Witch game? Or one of my personal favorites: Afterbirth. Now THAT'S a fun game. Overall, I'd recommend playing the first Brave Dungeon over this. It's much cheaper, and more importantly, more fun.[h1]3/10[/h1] ---{ Graphics }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Beautiful ☐ Good ☑ Decent ☐ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS-DOS ---{ Gameplay }--- ☐ Very good ☐ Good ☐ It's just gameplay ☑ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't ---{ Audio }--- ☑ Eargasm ☐ Very good ☐ Good ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf ---{ Audience }--- ☑ Kids ☑ Teens ☑ Adults ☐ Grandma ---{ PC Requirements }--- ☐ Check if you can run paint ☑ Potato ☐ Decent ☐ Fast ☐ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer ---{ Difficulty }--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☑ Easy ☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Significant brain usage ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls ---{ Grind }--- ☐ Nothing to grind ☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☐ Isn't necessary to progress ☐ Average grind level ☑ Too much grind ☐ You'll need a second life for grinding ---{ Story }--- ☐ No Story ☐ Some lore ☑ Average ☐ Good ☐ Lovely ☐ It'll replace your life ---{ Game Time }--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☐ Short ☑ Average ☐ Long ☐ To infinity and beyond ---{ Price }--- ☐ It's free! ☐ Worth the price ☐ If it's on sale ☐ If u have some spare money left ☑ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money ---{ Bugs }--- ☐ Never heard of ☐ Minor bugs ☑ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs ---{ ? / 10 }--- ☐ 1 ☐ 2 ☑ 3 ☐ 4 ☐ 5 ☐ 6 ☐ 7 ☐ 8 ☐ 9 ☐ 10 Grab this review template here! 👉 https://vojtastruhar.github.io/steam-review-template/

2/11/2023 Update: Developer banned me from the official Discord for this review. 2/14/2023 Update: Developer removed me from the credits for this review. His community is defending him at all costs. 4/16/2023 Update: Developer is banning those who report bugs in the steam forums section of the game from the Steam Forums section. This also applies if you say the game is buggy, incomplete, or glitchy. 4/20/2023 Update: The developer had his sole english speaking members harass me constantly lately. It's been going on for a while now. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU READ THE REVIEW FULLY. While Dark Witch may be a series loved by many, this game is the worst of all. Not only has NAN-A, the main developer, lazily ported the game from Switch, he has single-handedly made as many bad choices as possible in the creation of this game. Let's start at the beginning. The Original Demo for the game, released for the Nintendo Switch as a special bonus for purchasing a Physical Copy of Brave Dungeon 1, was an amazing experience. Though there were some bugs, everything worked amazingly, and most of all, did not horribly lag. It was a difficult but rewarding experience with alot of content for something so small filesize wise. Fast forwarding to today, NAN-A has used bizarre compression and archive files for the game, bogging down performance greatly, but only when assets first load. This is not on any Non-PC version of his game, and they occur as far back as his Touhou Fangames, which he created long before Dark Witch was even a thought. Let's go over the translations, shall we? There aren't really any. Only Google Translations. The entire game, plot, items, and all, are held up by the duct tape that is Google Translate. Not a single translator has worked on this game, and none will most likely. All of the text in the game is stored as image files, something VERY annoying to work with, and it makes me question if NAN-A is even using an engine that supports basic Text Strings or not. NAN-A has made the game incredibly easy, no matter how hard you attempt to make it. Every update either makes the formerly very expensive Combination Attacks cheaper, makes the enemies weaker, or gives players incredibly strong buffs. Al's Absolute Zero is capable of defeating the Final Boss on the highest difficulty in a single use. Something like this would immediately be patched out of the original Brave Dungeon. NAN-A has also repeatedly lied about the development of this game. Nightmare was an area added in Version 0.70, however, it has been in the data of the game since 0.62, and possibly further back. This area reuses maps from the First Game, along with maps provided by the community. Nightmare was never playtested. Once. The Boss of Nightmare was said to be something completely new, but it's just Zizou, with her sister Mati. The Original is Zizou. All that was done is lazily adding in her Sister with 0 new sprites, and not even implementing any music for the fight. BUGS! Tons of them! Nightmare, as stated was never playtested, and had a grand total of 12 softlocks! What's more impressive is this is the only bug reported by the Western Fanbase NAN-A has fixed since 2/23/2022. This is over 30 versions ago. A short list would be enemies failing to spawn, graphics failing to spawn, key item duplication, crashes from skipping cutscenes, crashes from dying, crashes from opening menus, and more! NAN-A has also reused so many sprites it's more fun to see what sprites he reused, and from where! What's notable is that any sprites with a RED Outline are reused from previous games. Many sprites with BLUE outlines may ALSO be reused, only with a new outline color. While it's expected to reused sprites here and there, it gets to excessive amounts. NAN-A loves to ignore any major bug reports, and has used lewd content to advertise this game, while also putting in fanart that is purposefully suggestive, in a game that's normally acceptable for most ages. All in All, Brave Dungeon 2 is not worth the purchase. While it is only in Early Access, the amount of issues and such that cannot be said in just a single steam review speak volumes about the practices of the developer, and his disdain for making a proper sequel to a game many love. Many in the Dark Witch community may not like that I disagree about the game being amazing, but this is my truth, my opinion. While I want to love this game and what it does, I cannot.