So how is it?

[SynDuo]

Let's ignore the non-fans complaining about the price,How is the PC version?
Think there might be a way to mod portraits in?

I'm on the fence to get this on PC or Switch.

[Krude]

yeah there's multiple fast forward options, game is amazing.

[internisus]

Originally posted by retsa2b:

If a particularly clever hacker figures out how to do it, it would be pretty amazing if the draw distance could be forced to exceed the game's built-in limitation, which seems to be 4 spaces from the player.

I'm glad they didn't change the draw distance. The ability to see further away from your current position would change the balance of the game. Later dungeons in particular have a lot of puzzly elements, like moving platforms or environmental hazards. You need to figure them out through trial and error as you explore, and then the idea is that ultimately you find your way through thanks to the accurate map you've presumably drawn. If you could see further away, it would defeat a lot of the intended challenge of the dungeon design. Come to think of it, this is relevant right from the start due to FOEs; it would similarly harm the game design if you could see them from further away than you can now.

[Athrandor]

Is Immunize still OP or is it fixed ?

[retsa2b]

Originally posted by internisus:

If you could see further away, it would defeat a lot of the intended challenge of the dungeon design. Come to think of it, this is relevant right from the start due to FOEs; it would similarly harm the game design if you could see them from further away than you can now.

Makes sense.

Shouldn't be too hard to do the following then: Enable better draw distances, BUT have them disabled by default wherever they would inadvertently spoil game content. And simply not render FOEs beyond 4 spaces by default.

It would still be a very nice thing to have because it just looks silly to have walls materialize out of thin air at about 30 meters, with the only thing you see at longer ranges being a vague, blurry, unmoving wall in the distance. (Maybe if the fade-in/fade-out used true transparency rather than that dithered process that smacks of ten+ years ago.)

[Kylus12]

Mapping on the Steam Deck with the trackpad is quite satisfying.

[KingKrouch]

Seems like these ports are using Unity (Although with IL2CPP, which will sadly make gameplay mods more difficult), and they have some PC specific bells and whistles. I'll commend them for using Unity at least, as that engine is way easier to modify (compared to Unreal) in the case that they do release a mess.

Finally, an okay dungeon crawler PC port to break the curse that Clouded Leopard and Ghostlight started with their bunk ports. May as well throw Nitroplus there, as with their past few Steam releases, I’m predicting Dungeon Traveler 2’s port is going to stink.

I'm hoping someone eventually looks into modding the Untold content into these versions of the game, as it's clear that they rebuilt these games (So similar to Nocturne HD) using a new game engine.

EDIT: So I’m running the game through Proton, and while the framelimiter options are a bit busted, I’m hitting close to the 360Hz refresh rate when not much is being done. 1080p and 4X MSAA. During gameplay, I’m getting around 250-275FPS. This is on a laptop with a Ryzen 9 6900HX and a Radeon RX 6850M XT.

EDIT 2: The game has really solid Keyboard and Mouse controls, and the game supports Xbox/Switch/PS4/PS5 button prompts. If not for the price and the lack of the Untold content, I’d recommend buying this. That decision is made all the more baffling as Nocturne HD included all of the rerelease content including Dante and Raidou.

[retsa2b]

Originally posted by KingKrouch:

EDIT: So I’m running the game through Proton, and while the framelimiter options are a bit busted, I’m hitting close to the 360Hz refresh rate when not much is being done. 1080p and 4X MSAA.

I hear ya on the busted framelimiter options. I'm not curious enough to rock that boat and test if it's just flat out buggy (or if it's simply Special K giving me what I asked for), but no matter what I change that setting to, I get the 120fps of my refresh rate. Not that this is any more or less than what I was hoping for.

Originally posted by KingKrouch:

If not for the price and the lack of the Untold content, I’d recommend buying this.

I know there's a lot of back and forth on this but most people I've seen talk about it stress that the two iterations are simply too different not to effectively qualify as different games. That said, whenever they DO release the Untold versions, they should offer heavy discounts to anyone owning these originals. And I'll say this much at least: The other option was to skip directly to Untold and ignore these versions, which I would have hated.

[KingKrouch]

Originally posted by retsa2b:

That said, whenever they DO release the Untold versions, they should offer heavy discounts to anyone owning these originals. And I'll say this much at least: The other option was to skip directly to Untold and ignore these versions, which I would have hated.

Yeah, I can agree that preserving the original versions in a polished state (that's better than emulation or backwards compatibility) is a nice start. It's nice to see a re-release or port of an older game that wasn't a straight downgrade for once, setting aside Metroid Prime HD. Especially since games on Steam are usually still selling many years down the line, and you could argue that being forward thinking about things will make them age better than most 90's and 2000's era PC ports were (that require a ton of compatibility fixes and mods to work decently on modern hardware).

While I may think that the lack of an option to play with the new content is a bit of a downer, and I think they could've done something similar to Nocturne HD where the rerelease content was added, I'm at least glad that they got the basics figured out. Using Unity is also a bit of a positive, as other engines have had their problems (Unreal Engine games specifically mostly share the same issues at this point), and there's a decent foundation for modders to do their thing, even if Nocturne HD just recently got a mod that fixes the resolution and framerate issues a few years after that released. Buying Nocturne HD with the DLC on sale (I got it for $30 on a Humble sale) and then using a few mods (that mod, the upscaled cutscene mod, the HD soundtrack mod) fixes most of the problems with that release outside of some of the texture issues. I just think they should've shipped the game with Mono runtimes instead of IL2CPP to give modders a less harder time having to work around it's limitations (not seeing how exactly some functions work) and coaxing tools like BepInEx and MelonLoader to work with it.

I just wish more PS2-era (cough cough Tales of Symphonia) or even recent games from Japan actually got this much attention and care put into it, because outside of those few problems, it's really well polished.

[retsa2b]

Originally posted by KingKrouch:

(Unreal Engine games specifically mostly share the same issues at this point)

I shuddered inwardly at the thought of the afterimage artifacting you'd get with every single 90 degree turn at 120fps, courtesy of UE4's TAA. Not to mention the simple fact that TAA at its best and most static is simply no match for MSAA.

Originally posted by KingKrouch:

and there's a decent foundation for modders to do their thing

Font mod is either done or imminently forthcoming.

What this game DESPERATELY needs posthaste, however, is AI upscaling for its 2D assets and hopefully also the 3D assets, which look to be completely unaltered from their life as Nintendo DS textures. But yeah, mainly the 2D assets, including the UI elements. The harsh 1080p aliasing and excessively lossy compression really did all that beautiful 2D art dirty. It's kind of unforgivable and needs correcting ASAP.

[KingKrouch]

Originally posted by retsa2b:

What this game DESPERATELY needs posthaste, however, is AI upscaling for its 2D assets and hopefully also the 3D assets, which look to be completely unaltered from their life as Nintendo DS textures. But yeah, mainly the 2D assets, including the UI elements. The harsh 1080p aliasing and excessively lossy compression really did all that beautiful 2D art dirty. It's kind of unforgivable and needs correcting ASAP.

Yeah, another thing I'd like to add on is a fast forward mode of sorts for battle effects and attacks that can be triggered by holding a button down. Coming from other games of this type, the battles seem very sluggish in comparison. That was one of my issues with the original DS versions of the game as well.

[魔装機神 Psybuster]

Originally posted by KingKrouch:

Finally, an okay dungeon crawler PC port

Yomi wo Saku Hana and Demon Gaze had good PC ports here on Steam.

Originally posted by KingKrouch:

If not for the price and the lack of the Untold content, I’d recommend buying this. That decision is made all the more baffling as Nocturne HD included all of the rerelease content including Dante and Raidou.

The contents from Shin were pretty universally hated. The story mode was the exact opposite of what people came to the series for and the cast and story had nothing really much going for it, while the "classic" mode suffered from being balanced around the story mode's progression which was especially dumb since none of the new content in the game was accessible unless you played the story mode. Add on top of that the replacement of the gorgeous enemy sprites with the godawful 3D models, and it's no wonder they bombed.

Originally posted by KingKrouch:

Yeah, another thing I'd like to add on is a fast forward mode of sorts for battle effects and attacks that can be triggered by holding a button down. Coming from other games of this type, the battles seem very sluggish in comparison. That was one of my issues with the original DS versions of the game as well.

If you hold the A button (for some reason listed as the B button in the Steam version) it will speed up battles. If that speed up is too slow, you can speed it up further in the options menu.

[KingKrouch]

Originally posted by 魔装機神 Psybuster:

Yomi wo Saku Hana and Demon Gaze had good PC ports here on Steam.

Excuse the long response:

From what I've played of Labyrinth of Yomi, the way that it handles keyboard controls is incredibly jank (No in-game way of rebinding outside of the Unity launcher at startup, tutorials show PlayStation prompt hints, the retreat input option changes the way you turn to the arrow keys when the Q and E keys are for strafing and I just want the D key to move backwards), mouse input in menus is missing, and outside of said tutorial prompts, the game only has Xbox prompt support. The most I'd say that this has over other dungeon crawlers on Steam is that it runs with an unlocked framerate. I'd actually say a lot of those same issues apply for Omega Labyrinth, but that's more of a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon adjacent game. Both of those are serviceable despite the glaring issues, and I can at least say that Yomi doesn't use IL2CPP, so if you want to make any gameplay or technical modifications, you can easily get BepInEx/MelonLoader working and view the game assembly files in a decompiler to see how the sausage is figuratively made.

As for Demon Gaze Extra, that's an extremely debatable answer. It took them six months after silence to patch in rudimentary keyboard rebinding, the game's 3D elements are stuck at 720p internally, and the game isn't using FixedUpdate (the thing that you should use if you want certain gameplay logic to run at a fixed rate for collision/physics simulation reasons) in conjunction with interpolation (so it appears smooth to the player) for it's logic, so attempting to force remove the 30FPS cap results in the game speeding up (Due to using the Update method paired with not using Delta Time to maintain the correct speed). Reason this is a problem is that it introduces stutter on displays that can't evenly divide by 30, and FreeSync/GSync displays without LFC (low framerate compensation) won't kick in below ~40-48Hz. Pair this with the fact it's using IL2CPP (So it makes it more challenging to figure out a fix), the price, and the situation where they accidentally blocked Steam Deck users from downloading the game, and it doesn't paint a pretty picture. Clouded Leopard has a rocky track record, and there's a reason a lot of people tell others to just skip their Steam releases of the Trails/Kiseki games and just wait for the NISA releases with the better ports.

Originally posted by 魔装機神 Psybuster:

If you hold the A button (for some reason listed as the B button in the Steam version) it will speed up battles. If that speed up is too slow, you can speed it up further in the options menu.

Thank you for noting that, I don't think I noticed that while playing on my 3DS, but I'll see how it's being done with Keyboard and Mouse. Just that with a game that has a lot of components involving drawing, I'd ideally want to use a touch screen (like on the Steam Deck) or a mouse.

[魔装機神 Psybuster]

Originally posted by KingKrouch:

keyboard controls

Fair enough, I was using a gamepad for both, so hadn't even considered that people might use keyboards.

Originally posted by KingKrouch:

NISA

I would highly recommend avoiding anything these people do, as on top of all the usual "localization" cancer they have a history of introducing bugs that not only break your game but overheat your hardware.

Originally posted by KingKrouch:

Thank you for noting that, I don't think I noticed that while playing on my 3DS, but I'll see how it's being done with Keyboard and Mouse. Just that with a game that has a lot of components involving drawing, I'd ideally want to use a touch screen (like on the Steam Deck) or a mouse.

Mouse controls for map drawing is pretty good. I basically play the Steam version with a gamepad and then just use the mouse for drawing the map.

[toughnails]

Originally posted by 魔装機神 Psybuster:

For clarification, I am using the HORI version of the Switch Pro Controller as a wired gamepad on the PC, and while the A button works as confirm as per normal, for some reason the in-game prompt says it's the B button.

PC games use Xbox button prompts by default, so unless a game has support for Switch prompts specifically you'll just have to get used to A/B being reversed.

[魔装機神 Psybuster]

Originally posted by toughnails:

PC games use Xbox button prompts by default, so unless a game has support for Switch prompts specifically you'll just have to get used to A/B being reversed.

That is so bizarre considering how much a non-factor the Xbox is as a whole, and the fact that the button option font I chose definitely looks to be mimicking the appearance of the Switch's Pro Controller buttons.