Woah, another #GodotEngine beta already? You’re not imagining things, it’s only been a week since our last release.
We’ll likely do one more beta release the following week, but after that we hope to be gearing up for release candidates.
https://t.co/1NiHyb2GLJ
I finished Dungeon Antiqua on hard mode last night. I initially started a game on normal & completed it, not realizing that option doesn't allow the player to access all of the bosses, so I started over.
The game really caught my eye because of how strongly it resembles the NES Final Fantasy art style & thankfully the gameplay did not disappoint; it provided the exact experience I had come to expect from similar games of past eras.
It plays like a combination of early Final Fantasy & Wizardry & while its inspirations are very obvious, the game stands well on its own as a quality work made with passion & is more than just nostalgia bait.
From the outset, you create a party of 5 male or female characters from 4 initial classes: Fighter, Thief, Priest, & Mage; & 3 alignments: Good, Neutral, Evil. Good & Evil characters cannot party up together, Neutral can party with anyone, but only certain advanced classes are accessible by being Good or Evil.
Characters can change class after meeting certain stat requirements through leveling up & by being the proper alignment. Any alignment can become a Samurai, but only Good characters can become Lords & Bishops, while Evil characters can become Ninjas.
The only exception to this is with two special rare items that allow characters of any alignment to become a Lord or Ninja. Alignment wasn't my favorite element of the game, but it does follow in the footsteps of Wizardry & creates a sense strategy through limitation & replay value by going back to try out different party makeups.
From there the player buys equipment & is practically thrown into the dungeon for a little training session & given the main object of your quest: collect the 5 relics. That's really about it as far as story goes, but somehow that's all that is needed.
Exploring the dungeon is rather fun & personally I was glad to be able to do it in the top-down NES Final Fantasy style rather than Wizardry's first-person approach. Floor layouts are somewhat unique to your playthrough being semi-auto-generated with certain static points.
Throughout the dungeon there is a lot of treasure to collect (thieves are invaluable for disarming traps), some key items (which, are, ironically actual keys), & the relics themselves, which first must be fought as a boss before getting each one.
The battles are turn-based sideview with really well-designed party & monster sprites, they're colorful & detailed feeling right out of a classic Japanese RPG. The dungeon itself is a bit plain in comparison, but the rest of the art is great. There are only a few tracks, but the music is really great too, it captures the 8-bit fantasy feel.
The player can return to the castle anytime which recharges all HP & spell charges. You can buy new equipment & sell various items which then become sellable by the store. The only exception is that some rare items cannot be stocked by the store, but the game specifies this before the sale.
There's the church to heal party members of status effects or death, though this becomes less useful as time goes on due to gaining spells capable of reviving your party.
There's also the bar to party up with your members & training grounds to make new characters, change jobs, or names.
My starting party in both playthroughs was 2 Fighters, Thief, Priest, & Mage. In my first playthrough, I ended with a Samurai, Lord, Ninja, Bishop, & Mage.
The second time, I ended up with Samurai, Lord, Ninja, & 2 Bishops. The Bishop class is basically a Sage, learning all the Priest & Mage magic, so there was no downside to converting both spellcasters.
There are a few things I wasn't fond of: in my first playthrough, I actually "lost" a character in the sense that her alignment was accidentally changed to evil through a random NPC encounter & could no longer party with my other members. This happened at around level 30+ so it was a bit frustrating.
It is possible to change alignment back through other NPC interactions, but I was unable to find such an encounter in a reasonable amount of time & just leveled a new character.
The other problem was status effects in hard mode can be a bit overwhelming. Ninja enemies often insta-kill, quite a few enemies paralyze with an alarming success rate, etc. I suppose this is to be expected on a higher difficulty setting, but sometimes it felt needlessly obnoxious.
Granted, this was mitigated later on in the game as I came across more equipment with resistance to these effects, but keep in mind that there is an element of luck there as treasure chest contents are a bit random.
However, none of that ruined my overall enjoyment of the game & are really just a few minor things. Since the game is relatively new, I won't talk about the end but the bosses are challenging & there is also a post-game boss for playing on hard.
Dungeon Antiqua is easily one of my favorite new games I've come across in a while & I hope to see either a sequel or something in a similar vein from this developer. I definitely recommend it if you love classic RPGs.