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cosmicspear(Originally posted on August 13.)
I don't think it'll surprise anyone to learn that I liked this game, considering how much I've been talking about it.
This is one of a number of games Aquaplus has made alongside Sting, a partnership that's been going on for quite a while. Surprising absolutely nobody given its name, it's a sequel to the first Dungeon Travelers, which was a spinoff of To Heart 2. I couldn't say what led to that happening, but for Dungeon Travelers 2 they went with an original cast.
The plot here is...not exactly gonna set the world on fire. Once upon a time the evil Demon God nearly conquered the world with her army of monsters, heroes defeated her and sealed her away, now it's 500 years later and the seal is conveniently just about to break, thus creating a crisis for our party to deal with. So pretty much an ISO standard fantasy RPG plot, then. There's a single plot twist that's obvious enough to see coming from a continent away, they briefly touch on the issue of discrimination against monsters but don't really commit, but otherwise it hits the main points and doesn't really go any farther.
The protagonist of this game is technically a young man named Fried Einhard. He's a Libra, a sorcerer who has the ability to seal monsters inside a magic book1. Working for the kingdom of Romulea's Royal Library, he leads a team of skilled adventurers to deal with monster-related situations.
...I say he's technically the protagonist because I'm honestly unsure what he even adds to the game, other than the things any sole male character in an otherwise all-female cast is good for. Fried is honestly my gold standard for completely useless main characters of that type, being mechanically just a glorified accessory slot and having very little in the way of an actual personality. He likes researching monsters and...that's pretty much it for his character.
Not that you're gonna be playing Dungeon Travelers 2 for the plot, though. There's exactly two draws to this game.
The first is what most people probably heard about it first, which is that this is a game where you fight cute monster girls and every boss fight2 is followed by you getting a sexy defeat CG for the boss you just beat. I'm not about to judge you for being into that, it's what first got me interested in the game after all. The CGs in question range from fairly tame to surprisingly over the top given this game was originally sold in regular stores.
Then there's the other draw, which is that this is honestly an extremely well-constructed dungeon RPG.
If you've played any DRPGs the way this all works is probably familiar enough. You've got your first-person dungeon crawling, your party of up to five characters, your class system, all that good stuff. The class system's really in-depth, with five base classes that can be upgraded twice as you level up. The base classes have a small selection of really basic skills, the intermediate classes (2 or 3 choices for each base class) get more specialized, and the advanced classes (3 or 4 depending on your base class) are where you really see some interesting speciation. For instance, a regular Magic User might advance to become a Sorceress for more attack spells, an Enchantress for support, or a Priestess for healing. From there your advanced options include Witch for doing massive magic damage, Bishop for the strongest healing magic, Sage for high-end support effects, or Magical Princess for skipping all this spellcasting nonsense and just whacking enemies with swords instead. You learn skills with skill points, with the number of skill points you get for leveling up dependent on your level and skills having extremely variable costs to learn (which conveniently sidesteps the old Etrian Odyssey problem of the basic skills not being worth learning unless you absolutely need to by making them easier to get to a high level).
The monster sealing comes into play with Sealbooks, which are interesting. Beat enough instances of a particular monster, and you can make 'em into a sealbook that's essentially an extra accessory. Sealbooks are also the best items to sell, and they're used for upgrading non-unique equipment. Bosses instead give you Grand Sealbooks. What makes them so grand, you ask? Fried equips them and they give you an effect that applies to your whole party.
Grand sealbooks are honestly a bit of a wash, as a mechanic. The problem is that a lot of them are really situational, so in practice you probably just use the one that increases critical rate all the way from when you get it in the third area to the final dungeon, since critical hits interrupt magic and that's more useful than, say, slightly reducing the damage you take from a single specific enemy type. Then you get the ones that reduce TP cost for abilities and you never need to think about the mechanic again after that.
The best part of Dungeon Travelers 2, though, is the actual dungeon crawling. At first it's relatively pedestrian, but about halfway through the main story they start introducing map gimmicks and at that point the dungeon design starts getting increasingly Inspired. You get teleporter mazes, one-way wall mazes, very clever use of dark and anti-magic zones, the works. This game's a paradise for people who like DRPG map design, which is probably why I've spent the last week or so gushing about it in that respect. Of course this also means it's really fucking hard, but that's a lot more acceptable in DRPGs than a most other genres.
Which brings us to the difficulty. I've mentioned it elsewhere, but most people probably heard about Dungeon Travelers 2 as a fanservice game, the type of thing you saw all the time on the Vita. So they probably didn't expect something that throws Wizardry-tier difficulty at you on the regular from a relatively early point. But that's what you get: a Vita fanservice game that's also a super-hardcore dungeon RPG. And it's not just the dungeon design, either—there's a fuckton of extremely dangerous enemies to deal with. You'll get hit with deadly AoE spells, deadly instant AoE abilities, regular attacks that can instakill, special attacks that can instakill, multi-hit attacks that do more than an average character's maximum HP, and all sorts of shit along those lines. A lot of the time getting ambushed leaves at least one character down and the rest nearly dead before you can do anything—oh, and did I neglect to mention the enemies that get guaranteed ambushes if your preemptive attack roll fails? Because that's a thing by the endgame. The final boss can just arbitrarily choose to use a target-all fire attack that does most of your HP, activates instantly, and stuns your entire party, and then she can do it again on her next turn and there's nothing you can do to stop that.
Really, DRPGs are probably the only place they could've gotten away with that sort of thing. Almost certainly no other genre would let them do all that and have the result be seen as fun.
But in the end, that's what Dungeon Travelers 2 ends up being. It's nightmarishly difficult, it regularly trolls you, it sometimes wipes your party without you being able to do anything about it, and it manages to make that all fun.
I'm nowhere near done with this game—there's an absolutely massive postgame that genuinely uses the entirety of the available level scale—but I'm confident saying my time was spent well
1. The justification for this is that monsters that are killed just respawn, so sealing them is the only way to get rid of them for good.
2. Except the final boss for Reasons.
I don't think it'll surprise anyone to learn that I liked this game, considering how much I've been talking about it.
This is one of a number of games Aquaplus has made alongside Sting, a partnership that's been going on for quite a while. Surprising absolutely nobody given its name, it's a sequel to the first Dungeon Travelers, which was a spinoff of To Heart 2. I couldn't say what led to that happening, but for Dungeon Travelers 2 they went with an original cast.
The plot here is...not exactly gonna set the world on fire. Once upon a time the evil Demon God nearly conquered the world with her army of monsters, heroes defeated her and sealed her away, now it's 500 years later and the seal is conveniently just about to break, thus creating a crisis for our party to deal with. So pretty much an ISO standard fantasy RPG plot, then. There's a single plot twist that's obvious enough to see coming from a continent away, they briefly touch on the issue of discrimination against monsters but don't really commit, but otherwise it hits the main points and doesn't really go any farther.
The protagonist of this game is technically a young man named Fried Einhard. He's a Libra, a sorcerer who has the ability to seal monsters inside a magic book1. Working for the kingdom of Romulea's Royal Library, he leads a team of skilled adventurers to deal with monster-related situations.
...I say he's technically the protagonist because I'm honestly unsure what he even adds to the game, other than the things any sole male character in an otherwise all-female cast is good for. Fried is honestly my gold standard for completely useless main characters of that type, being mechanically just a glorified accessory slot and having very little in the way of an actual personality. He likes researching monsters and...that's pretty much it for his character.
Not that you're gonna be playing Dungeon Travelers 2 for the plot, though. There's exactly two draws to this game.
The first is what most people probably heard about it first, which is that this is a game where you fight cute monster girls and every boss fight2 is followed by you getting a sexy defeat CG for the boss you just beat. I'm not about to judge you for being into that, it's what first got me interested in the game after all. The CGs in question range from fairly tame to surprisingly over the top given this game was originally sold in regular stores.
Then there's the other draw, which is that this is honestly an extremely well-constructed dungeon RPG.
If you've played any DRPGs the way this all works is probably familiar enough. You've got your first-person dungeon crawling, your party of up to five characters, your class system, all that good stuff. The class system's really in-depth, with five base classes that can be upgraded twice as you level up. The base classes have a small selection of really basic skills, the intermediate classes (2 or 3 choices for each base class) get more specialized, and the advanced classes (3 or 4 depending on your base class) are where you really see some interesting speciation. For instance, a regular Magic User might advance to become a Sorceress for more attack spells, an Enchantress for support, or a Priestess for healing. From there your advanced options include Witch for doing massive magic damage, Bishop for the strongest healing magic, Sage for high-end support effects, or Magical Princess for skipping all this spellcasting nonsense and just whacking enemies with swords instead. You learn skills with skill points, with the number of skill points you get for leveling up dependent on your level and skills having extremely variable costs to learn (which conveniently sidesteps the old Etrian Odyssey problem of the basic skills not being worth learning unless you absolutely need to by making them easier to get to a high level).
The monster sealing comes into play with Sealbooks, which are interesting. Beat enough instances of a particular monster, and you can make 'em into a sealbook that's essentially an extra accessory. Sealbooks are also the best items to sell, and they're used for upgrading non-unique equipment. Bosses instead give you Grand Sealbooks. What makes them so grand, you ask? Fried equips them and they give you an effect that applies to your whole party.
Grand sealbooks are honestly a bit of a wash, as a mechanic. The problem is that a lot of them are really situational, so in practice you probably just use the one that increases critical rate all the way from when you get it in the third area to the final dungeon, since critical hits interrupt magic and that's more useful than, say, slightly reducing the damage you take from a single specific enemy type. Then you get the ones that reduce TP cost for abilities and you never need to think about the mechanic again after that.
The best part of Dungeon Travelers 2, though, is the actual dungeon crawling. At first it's relatively pedestrian, but about halfway through the main story they start introducing map gimmicks and at that point the dungeon design starts getting increasingly Inspired. You get teleporter mazes, one-way wall mazes, very clever use of dark and anti-magic zones, the works. This game's a paradise for people who like DRPG map design, which is probably why I've spent the last week or so gushing about it in that respect. Of course this also means it's really fucking hard, but that's a lot more acceptable in DRPGs than a most other genres.
Which brings us to the difficulty. I've mentioned it elsewhere, but most people probably heard about Dungeon Travelers 2 as a fanservice game, the type of thing you saw all the time on the Vita. So they probably didn't expect something that throws Wizardry-tier difficulty at you on the regular from a relatively early point. But that's what you get: a Vita fanservice game that's also a super-hardcore dungeon RPG. And it's not just the dungeon design, either—there's a fuckton of extremely dangerous enemies to deal with. You'll get hit with deadly AoE spells, deadly instant AoE abilities, regular attacks that can instakill, special attacks that can instakill, multi-hit attacks that do more than an average character's maximum HP, and all sorts of shit along those lines. A lot of the time getting ambushed leaves at least one character down and the rest nearly dead before you can do anything—oh, and did I neglect to mention the enemies that get guaranteed ambushes if your preemptive attack roll fails? Because that's a thing by the endgame. The final boss can just arbitrarily choose to use a target-all fire attack that does most of your HP, activates instantly, and stuns your entire party, and then she can do it again on her next turn and there's nothing you can do to stop that.
Really, DRPGs are probably the only place they could've gotten away with that sort of thing. Almost certainly no other genre would let them do all that and have the result be seen as fun.
But in the end, that's what Dungeon Travelers 2 ends up being. It's nightmarishly difficult, it regularly trolls you, it sometimes wipes your party without you being able to do anything about it, and it manages to make that all fun.
I'm nowhere near done with this game—there's an absolutely massive postgame that genuinely uses the entirety of the available level scale—but I'm confident saying my time was spent well
1. The justification for this is that monsters that are killed just respawn, so sealing them is the only way to get rid of them for good.
2. Except the final boss for Reasons.
