Full review

[Shylaar]

I was typing up a review and it ended up being too long for the review section, so I'm posting it here instead.

Introduction

Ray Gigant is another game from Experience, makers of Stranger of Sword City, Operation Abyss / Babel, and the Vita-only Demon Gaze. If you've played any of Experience's other games, Ray Gigant will immediately feel familiar. Movement in dungeons is fast, the left stick and D-Pad will rotate you and move forward while the right stick will let you strafe and backstep instead. Damage floors, pitfalls, multi-level dungeons connected with ladders, teleports, one way paths, forced movement panels, and confusion panels from Experience's other games all make their appearances, but that's about where the similarities end.

Ray Gigant has a basic game flow of four steps: Explore dungeon, fight dungeon boss, explore dimension, fight dimension boss. The first two are in chapter 1, and the latter two are in chapter 2, and this cycle repeats all the way up to chapter 16, where you do all four steps in the one chapter, and then 17 and 18 are both just the first two steps (18 is the final chapter). The only difference between the dungeons and dimensions from a gameplay sense is that the dungeons have treasure chests to find and you can leave them from the map screen at any time, while the dimensions have no chests and you can't leave them once you start them. The dimension bosses are typically harder than the dungeon bosses, but not by much.

Combat

Combat in RG is a deceptively simple affair. Battles are a party turn system (set all commands for party, start turn, everyone acts based on speed, turn ends, set commands again). You get three party members, and each party member can assign three actions (later six) to use in battle. By 360 controls, B is used for attack skills, Y is used for support skills, and X is anything. Each character can act up to 5 times per turn, but every skill has a set amount of AP tied to it. AP is your main limiting resource, as it is consistent throughout all dungeon trips, can be stocked up to 100, and is restored by 10 every time a character passes a turn or less when a character is hit by an enemy attack. AP is also restored by 25 - ((turn count - 1) x 5) at the end of each battle. Because of the high AP cost of skills compared to your ability to restore AP, you'll spend a lot of turns with one or more characters passing their turns entirely. There's a repeat function to redo your last turn's commands if you have the AP for it, but with how often you won't and how often you'll need to change your commands, it's not super helpful. You can run from battles, but doing so will set your AP to zero, so I never tried. HP for all characters is restored after battle, but KO'd characters stay that way until you either leave the dungeon or touch a Jam Stone.

Enemies in RG are always one of four types: Ground, Aquatic, Aerial, or Undead, along with one of four elements: Void (aka nothing), Fire, Ice, or Lightning. The types are all pretty simplistic, with certain weapons either being effective against them or not, essentially meaning that only one of your party is going to be attacking them in any given turn up until the end of the game where everyone gets weapons effective against all types. Individual skills are typically geared towards certain types, but they make very little impact compared to the equipped weapon's natural affinities, though this doesn't apply to your mage character, whose damage is heavily impacted by the type of spell used on the enemy.
Elements are a bit stranger, with one of the most bizarre effectiveness set ups I've seen. Fire, Ice, and Lightning are all effective against Void, and Ice and Lightning are effective against Fire as well. That's it. The only reason to use Fire skills is because they cost marginally less AP than Ice or Lightning skills. There is essentially no difference between Ice and Lightning, and either one is equally effective against every enemy. I really have no idea what Experience were going for with this. There are also some status effects in the game, but they're largely pointless. The only ones I ever encountered were poison, which gives you a very minor HP loss each turn, and stun, which stops you from acting for the rest of the current turn and the next turn. There's at least one more (sleep), but I never saw any others.

Parasitism is one of the major elements of the battle system. Every turn in which a party member takes damage will cause Parasitism to raise by 10%, and when it reaches 100%, you get a warning that it will occur on the next turn. If you finish the battle in that turn it will reset to 0%, but if you don't, at the start of the next turn it activates and remains active for the rest of the battle or until Slash Beat Mode is used (I'll get to that later). While Parasitism is active all commands in battle will use up HP instead of AP. Skills cost more HP based on how much AP they used, and the costs are very high, with only a few actions putting you at death's door, though you can't use any skills if you don't have the HP for it. This system is one of the better parts of the game, which makes you think about when to fight certain enemies in dungeons, and when to use your precious SBM gauge, as being stuck in Parasitism against strong enemies can be a death sentence. Unfortunately, late in the game it becomes a non-factor, as the automatic nature of it is scrapped and it becomes a manual toggle, which is suggested for you to use when you run out of AP, but is really never worth the risk. Before this change, Parasitism can also be reset to 0% by levelling up a character, which adds some strategy to the choice of when to do so.

Slash Beat Mode is the game's limit break, and essentially a minature rhythm game. Activating SBM costs either 50 SBM points for the short version or the max of 100 for the full version. SBM points are very slow to come by, as you get 1 per completed standard battle, or 1 per attack that hits the enemy in a boss battle (which is necessary to get around the Parasitism in them). In SBM you get a short song that plays and you have to hit the notes to the rhythm of it, with every 5 notes you hit adding to your SBM bonus (meaning more hits) and every miss removing a point from your bonus. Your accuracy is graded as either Slash (perfect) or Beat (good), but those don't have any gameplay impact. When you finish the rhythm game, you watch as your character slashes your enemy lots and lots of times, doing small damage each time, but doing enough hits to OHKO most bosses in the game. In short, SBM is incredibly overpowered, and the main way you get through most boss fights.

I should also mention the presentation. Party members are nicely animated when selecting moves, but disappear from the screen during the battle turns. Enemies get less spectacular limb-based animation, but it still looks pretty good. Unfortunately, during battle turns everything just turns into very bland slashing and flashing effects on the enemy sprite or player character portraits, which is boring to look at, especially as the enemies have no reactions. What animation there is is nice, so it's a shame more development wasn't put into proper attack animations.

Character building

In RG you almost always have a party of three characters, with specific roles for them. The first party member is the tank and physical damage dealer, the second party member is for attacking Aerial enemies and otherwise completely useless, and the third is the magic attacker / healer. The first is by far the most useful for the majority of the game, while the second is pretty much useless for the entire game, as they do less damage than your tank or mage and have no useful support skills, so you're best off just having them passing turns to restore AP any time there isn't an Aerial type enemy, which is when that second member is the only one capable of doing any damage to them (until enemy types become moot at the end of the game). Your party members change throughout the game, but these three roles always stay the same.

Characters are strengthened through the Evolve Tree, which isn't very well explained in game, but is pretty simple. You have the stat boosting side, the equipment side, and the skill side. Items to boost all of these are dropped by enemies or found in chests. The three stats are PW for physical attack / defence and a big HP boost, something (let's go with MG) for magic attack / defence and a miniscule HP boost, and something (let's go with SP) for accuracy / evasion, speed in the turn order, and a small HP boost. The characters from above will all focus primarily on their related stat, with PW for the tank, MG for the mage, and SP for the useless one. Characters have a level cap of 15 for most of the game, which is raised to 99 in the second-last chapter. You can reset your level using the item for it, and regain all spent level items, but can only use them again on the same character.
The skill tree is simple, with every character having active skills (attacks and heals), passive skills (chance to retaliate when hit), and passive buffs (+20% to party's magic defence). The passive buffs and indeed most skills are shared between the party members of each type. As with the stats, you can reset and redistribute your skill items.

The equipment part is rather needlessly complicated. Each character has weapon, armour, accessory, and food types. You spend one item to raise the level of each equipment node, and another to actually gain items from that node. The higher the level of the node, the more and better items you can get from it. In practice, you just get a few items and lots and lots of direct stat boosts for them as you level up the node, and once you have all the stuff possible from the node's level, you can't get any more until you level it up again.

Food works largely the same, but with no stat boosts, only unique items. Food is another part of the game, and one that was supposed to be important, but isn't in practice. Characters have a weight that can go from +10 to -10. At 0 there is no effect. At + weights a character gets a bonus to attack and defence, while at - weights they get a bonus to accuracy and evasion, with both granting a bigger bonus the further on the scale they are. Weight is gained by eating food in battle or passing a turn, while weight is lost by taking any action in battle. There are also common story events allowing you to pick food to adjust your weight. The problem here is that food is largely useless, as your first and third parties have healing spells better than wasting the item requirements to get foods, and status ailments are a non-issue in this game, despite the foods dedicated to curing them. The chapters in which you have your second party are the only time you have no healing spells and thus need to rely on food, but any other time you should just ignore food entirely and leave everyone at -10 weight forever. It's a rather wasted mechanic.

[Shylaar]

Dungeons

Dungeons in RG all follow the same basic pattern. You go in, you're presented with a view of all enemy icons and treasure chests, and if the boss is on that floor, you see where they are. What you don't see is the floor itself, so the puzzle of getting from the start to the boss is still there. The key element of RG's dungeons is those enemy icons. There are no random battles; enemies are all on set tiles and you will have to fight many to get through, while others you can avoid. Enemy icons are either blue, yellow, or red, and this is the second key feature of their design. Yellow enemies are the standard type. Blue and red, while having no difference in the enemies encountered or their stats, will instead make your skills use half or double the AP respectively. As such, the key part of exploring dungeons in the game is managing your AP while fighting the different types.

Dungeons themselves in RG aren't particularly complex however, and I would say that of Experience's games that I've played (Operation Abyss, Demon Gaze, and Stranger of Sword City) that RG has by far the most simple design. As mentioned before, RG has the same sort of tricks up its sleeve as any of the rest. Damage floors in this game cost you AP rather than HP. Some teleports are the marked kind, others are the unmarked kind. Pits will drop you down floors, while ladders can take you up or down. Movement panels will force your path through areas and make getting to treasure tricky, while one-way paths are used to create mazes in small areas. The most unusual of Experience's trap types is the confusion panel, where upon stepping on it your vision is set in a random direction, and you have to make sure you're facing where you wanted to go before moving on.

Unfortunately, the dungeons are for the most part pretty simple, with only a few of them being complex at all and fun to explore as a result. For the most part there are way too many enemy encounters, and the dimension variants not having any chests in them makes them all the more dull to go through. Puzzles rarely amount to more than "kill this enemy" or "find all the switches to open the locked door". One of the best parts of Operation Abyss was its dungeon design, so seeing how simple RG is is depressing.

Story

Ray Gigant starts some years after the Gigants have invaded Earth and decimated most of the planet. The player takes up the role of Ichiya, a teenage boy and user of a Yorigami, an ancient God that lets him fight the Gigants, as he teams up with other party members using Kurogami, weaker imitations of the Yorigami. I'm not going to cover the whole story, but an important gameplay element is this: After 6 chapters it shifts to a different group of 1 Yorigami user and 2 Kurogami users, and after another 6 it does it again. Each time the levels and gear are all reset, so this essentially puts the player's progression back to zero each time, which makes the game feel a bit tedious.

Back to the story, the Gigants are aliens, the Yorigami joined together to defeat them 65 million years ago and they blew up the dinosaurs while they were at it, and the Gigants were actually just running from Ray Gigant, the biggest and baddest Gigant, and they just kind of accidentally totalled Earth while doing it, sorry bro, we didn't mean to. All the Yorigami users get together which restores the Yorigamis' memories and they all go after Ray Gigant and beat them up, but not before someone else tries to become totally-not-a-Gigant.

The big problem I have with the story is that it's incredibly shallow. The characters are entertaining and bounce off of each other well, but the story itself is poorly developed, with very little exploration of the state of the world, the groups supporting the various agencies throughout, the motivations of not-Gigant man above (and certainly not his processes), or the relationship between Ray Gigant, the other Gigants, the Yorigamis, and humans. It's all surface-deep, barely touched on as you go from dungeon to dungeon following the same gameplay loop until the whole deal with Ray Gigant suddenly comes in in chapter 17 and is then over incredibly quickly.

From a gameplay point, it's pretty low budget, with everything being told visual novel style but there not being many CGs to show events. While I like the character art, every character only gets one pose and a few expressions, except for Ichiya who gets a second fist pump pose that is used a whole two times, for some reason. Also, despite the visual novel format, the game completely lacks the standard functions of the genre, and has no backlog or auto mode, so it's not great for those sensitive to carpal tunnel or RSI. There's a skip function achieved by holding down A or B, but it activates super quickly and it's easy to accidentally skip a line as a result, and with the lack of backlog, you can't see what it is that you skipped.

Localisation

acttil have made a reputation for themselves as a pretty shoddy company with a history of sloppy releases loaded with bugs and script errors, and Ray Gigant isn't going to change that any. While I did manage to get through RG without any crashes (which is genuinely surprising for an acttil release), there are several bugged achievements which were never fixed. The script is standard acttil fare, with some bizarre localisation choices (Ichiya and several others refer to Uzuki as "senpai", and they leave it as senpai when other characters refer to him, but when Ichiya does they change it to "boss-man", which is both inconsistent and disrespectful, so it fails as a translation) and plenty of mistakes in the script. The mistakes are rarely of the spelling variety, but mostly incorrect tenses, misplaced words, and an entire chapter of characters erroneously refering to multiple fish as "fishes".

Amusingly, in a legendary example of acttil's quality standards, the credits lists the staff responsible for the "Engrish Localization".

Summary

Experience are a developer that like to do a lot of different things within their dungeon crawling adventures. Sometimes that works out for them, and sometimes it doesn't. In this case it doesn't, with the gameplay being a mix of ideas that all feel largely undeveloped while recycling dungeon design from Experience's other, better games. The story gives you a bunch of well designed and engaging characters and then fails to flesh them out along with the story itself, which ends on a rather weak note. The music is pretty good, but there isn't enough of it for the 22 hours it took me to beat the game, and the game was pretty braindead easy compared to Experience's other games or other modern dungeon crawlers like Etrian Odyssey or Dungeon Travellers 2. The presentation of the game isn't great, and acttil's sloppy localisation job doesn't help it much. I'd much sooner recommend Experience's other games over this one, and it's definitely not worth the standard $30 price.

[ReborN]

Thanks for the review. Would you recomend I buy it at 85% off?

[Shylaar]

No, not really.