I’m going to take a break from the usual today, and actually review a game I just played.  Since (in a way) this blog is about how games can impact our lives, it seems in keeping with the spirit of things–especially when I’m left feeling uncertain of how I should feel at all about a particular title.  This will be long, so if you want the tl;dr version, skip to the last paragraph.  So, without further ado…

In one of my earlier posts, I mentioned how my early experiences with Dungeon Master shaped my love of the first-person dungeon crawler, and how happy I am that the genre is still alive and well in Japan.  So, even though many contemporary releases don’t reach the level of depth and immersion of that old classic, I still tend to pick them up.  Some I enjoy more than others, and despite its shortcomings, Labyrinth of Refrain was proving to be a fun example of the genre…until one of the characters was unceremoniously killed in a back alley nearly 60 hours in, and I lost.

This is a problem, because I have no idea what I did to get a bad ending.  In, say, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey (another dungeon crawler), if you got an ending you didn’t want, the story made it clear that you supported the wrong people.  Going a bit further afield, in something like Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, if you got a bad ending, it was because you trusted the wrong people, or split the party into the wrong groups.  You might not know exactly what went wrong, but you had an idea of what to try.  Even in Silent Hill 2, a game with some of the most subtle elements that influence which ending you get, you at least see a list of statistics at the end, so you have an inkling of what you can do differently the next time around.  In Labyrinth of Refrain, I have absolutely no clue what I did wrong, and this is due in large part to how the story is presented.

See, you aren’t the main character.  Your role in things is to just venture into the (increasingly inexplicable) dungeons, kill monsters, and answer the occasional yes or no question (or remain silent).  The actual plot plays out around you in visual novel-style cutscenes, that happen mainly when you enter a new area, or find a certain item.  There’s no way to choose which scenes to watch, so I can’t opt out of the one that gets me the bad ending, and I’m at a complete loss as to what I did that got me to this point.  Did I complete a side quest I wasn’t supposed to?  Was my karma too high?  Too low?  Did I not sell enough items at the market, or too many?  None of the yes/no questions seemed to pertain to how things ended up, so I don’t think it’s that, but I have no way of knowing, because the game doesn’t communicate my mistakes at all.  And after sinking that much time into it, that’s frustrating.

The experience leading up to that point was…more enjoyable than it probably should have been, honestly.  In about 95% of the battles, I just ordered my units to attack, and sat back until the enemy was dead.  The other 5% was the early game, where you’re a lot more fragile, and thus have to experiment more to stay alive, and during boss fights.  Attack magic usually wasn’t worth sacrificing the base attack damage from your units, and it’s fairly easy to get a skill that auto-heals your party after battles, so healing magic is pointless most of the time.  What kept me going was the story I wasn’t directly involved in, and the loot…for awhile.  I’ll touch more on the story in a bit, but the loot takes some explaining, because even that has issues.

Your adventuring party consists of five slots (called covens) of units.  Each coven can hold between one and three individual units, depending on its type, with the possibility of having numerous “support” units attached as well.  And each unit has its own set of equipment: left arm, right arm, head, chest, boots, accessory.

Starting to see the issue?

Weapons aren’t so bad, because not everyone is going to be using a crossbow, or lance, but for armor, nearly every class and gender can wear any armor in the game.  So, whenever you find a new armor piece, you have to go though potentially 15+ units, comparing its stats to what they’re currently wearing.  And loot drops ALL THE TIME.  Stats are randomized (within a range) for each piece, too, and if you factor in the Diablo-style item prefixes (“breezy” sword, “odorous” traveler’s cape, etc.), there’s no shorthand way of knowing whether an item’s worth checking or not.  You can have one piece of gear with four pages of stats you need to consider.  Do you sacrifice a bit of illusion resistance for a boost to your guard chance?  Is losing some defense worth the increase in charm?  It’s micro-managing to the extreme.  But for awhile at least, it’s fun chasing higher numbers.

The dungeons themselves are distinct and nicely drawn (as are the enemies), though they’re nonsensical in how they fit together.  Maybe it gets explained in the “good ending,” how you go from underground areas, to open-air kingdoms, to towers who knows where, but it wasn’t during my 58 hours of play time.  And while there are some puzzles, they’re never terribly complex–find the key, or the switch, or the MacGuffin to move forward.

As for the story itself, it’s very disjointed, but there’s enough of a sense of mystery and foreboding, that I wish I’d been able to see it through to the real ending.  The characters aren’t always sympathetic, and some are downright confounding (like the nun who has an immediate and seemingly-inexplicable crush on one of the other characters), but underneath it all, there’s more I wanted to learn.  Something is undeniably wrong with the town of refrain, and the people in it, and discovering just what’s going on is a big part of what kept me going…which makes my sudden, unavoidable failure all the more galling.

Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk is a hard game to recommend–or to completely write off.  There’s enough tension to the combat (will an attack miss, deal a critical hit, apply a status effect to give your units a breather?), that even just spamming “attack” like I did kept my interest in the battles, more often than not.  The maps are huge, with tons of loot to find (for better or worse).  And the graphics are quite good for a game of this type.  But at the same time, you as a player aren’t a direct actor in the story that unfolds, and whatever impact you do have behind the scenes can lead you down an unwinnable path, and good luck figuring out what you did wrong.  Also, your predilection for micromanagement might greatly influence your enjoyment, when you get to the point of having to juggle equipment between upwards of a dozen characters.  There are also some, uh…questionable scenes of either a surprisingly violent, or weirdly sexual nature, depending on which ones you get.  You never directly see anything overtly gory, or X-rated (at least I didn’t), but reading about someone being mercilessly beaten, or pursued by someone they have no interest in can be uncomfortable.  It’s a very mixed bag, but there’s some fun to be had here–just be warned that you can lose a lot of time, if the game decides you deserve a bad ending, for whatever arbitrary and unexplained reason.  Best of luck, if you decide to pick this one up.  In a very literal sense, you’ll need it.