This is a tricky recommendation because it's not a bad game. I enjoy it and for the right players it's perfectly fine way to spend your time and money. I'd buy it again without a doubt. But at the end of the day, there's far better dungeon crawls for the average player.

The biggest issue with this game is that it's old-school in ways that hurt the experience. It feels like it has been balanced for players that like to abuse mechanics. Re-rolling characters for hours, generator characters to steal their money to buy your party starting gear, and save scumming. The UI is dreadful and takes alot of experimenting to understand.

This game is RNG madness. The first quest was downright rage-inducing. Between battles that range from 1 to 15 units and hoping to collect random drops that just wouldn't come for well over 2 hours. They dropped me plate mail and magic swords but lord help me I couldn't get the super common tutorial daggers.

While it feels alot better when you have proper gear... the same issues pop up from time to time. I'll be an hour into a delve, three rounds into a combat. "1 damage, 1 damage, 1 damage," and out of nowhere "247 damage your tank is dead." (With a chance of permadeath)

This does add a surprising tension to every single battle which I like, but the combination of random drops, massive variance in attacks, potential permadeath is just overly frustrating.

Despite my complaints, I genuinely enjoy this game. It's perfectly decent and I'm happy with the money spent. The maps are a bit nonsensical and dull but they serve their purpose. The battles tactics can be entertaining in part because of the brutality. From the moment I step foot inside the dungeon to the moment I leave I'm holding my breath.

But when it comes to recommending it... I'd list pretty much any other Dungeon Crawl first. The issues it has are front and center and, for most players, it's going to be unforgivable.

But if you're like me, love Dungeon Crawls, own the rest, crave more and apparently have a masochistic streak I can fully recommend it even at full price.

Wish I could recommend this one, since I really enjoyed most of my time with it, but unfortunately the difficulty ramps up about 2/3 into the game in a way that's making me give up on it. Until that point, I felt able to adapt to most of the new enemies and situations the game threw at me, and the exploration loop felt pretty good. I wanted to push myself as far as I could into the dungeons to unlock the next elevator before heading back to town, and the gradual difficulty creep with monsters provided a really good feeling of tension. The beginning of the game is super well balanced and pushing myself to explore despite the danger felt rewarding.

Then, at some point, you gain access to the "free warp spell", which while super convenient, totally destroyed any feeling of tension. You can essentially warp back to town, rest to get all your spells back, and then warp back to the exact spot you just were, elevators and shortcuts be damned. The game doesn't really give you a good reason not to constantly do this, so the feeling of risk/reward was gone.

To compensate, what the game does next is start to throw enemies that are just absurdly overpowered. Every encounter will feature enemies that always go first, have attacks that instantly kill one or more party members, inflict multiple status effects, drain multiple levels, drain your magic, and on the off-chance they just do a basic physical attack, will do at least 75% damage even to my strongest characters with equipment I've found that's far better than anything you can buy in the shop. The only way I can continue to make progress is through aggressive save scumming. I save after every battle and if the next encounter has more than a couple enemies in it, I hit alt-F4 and just load my save again.

The strategy at this point, I imagine, would be to re-class my characters into something that gains agility so you have a chance of buffing your party and debuffing the enemies before they can instakill everyone. I've done a little bit of re-classing, and the game really feels like it punishes you for experimenting. Changing a character's class drops them back to level 1, and although they keep their stats and spells, they take such a massive HP loss that they're guaranteed to die in 1 hit. You can convert gold into XP to get their levels back up, but because characters have a chance of *losing* stat points every time they level up, this feels like a crapshoot, too.

For example, I wanted to get my bishop's agility up so they have a chance of getting an action before the enemy. So I temporarily changed them into a thief. I got their levels back as high as I could with the gold I had on hand, which didn't bring them up to the level of the rest of my party, didn't give them enough agility to start going first, and also caused them to *lose* so much piety that I wasn't able to turn them back into a bishop. So I loaded my save, and realized I would just have to repeat the process and save scum until I got a more desirable outcome. And finally I realized that this is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and stopped playing.

So yeah. Can't see any way to proceed without hours of grinding or save scumming for better die rolls. Maybe I ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up by not being diligent enough by re-classing my characters more frequently when the game was still "easy", but the game never stresses this as an important mechanic and by reducing your characters to level 1, massively disincentivizes you from doing so. That said, for 15 bucks I still got a lot of enjoyment out of it, and if you go into it knowing what to expect, it might be possible to have a party capable of dealing with the high-level threats, but unfortunately it's too late for me. Maybe I'll revisit the game in a couple years and start fresh, but for now, I can't recommend it after seeing the late-game balance changes.

批判的なレビューで数多く見受けられるような「移動速度が遅い」などといったことに関しては高速で移動できるようになるキーがあるので個人的には気になりませんでした。ただ戦闘中のテンポに関しては往年のwizシリーズと比べるとあまり良いものとは言えません。ですがまあそこまで高速入力したいわけでもないので個人的には全く気にならない点でした。(ボタン押しっぱなしにしていれば前回選択したコマンドを継続入力してくれるので、そういった意味でストレスはあまり感じませんでした。)

キャラクタの挿絵に関しても許容できる範囲でした。いろいろ用意されている中から選べたら良いポイントにもなりえたのでしょうが・・・
キャラボイスはミュートできるので無問題です。


問題はゲームバランスの悪さです。これに尽きると思います。
とにもかくにも有料のクオリティとは思えないほどのバランスの悪さです。
フリーゲーム製作者が後半部分の制作にだれてきてバランスもなにもかも投げやりになったのか？と思うほどの出来です。
１００段階で序、中盤までの難易度を表すとしたら１０～２０。オート戦闘で十分事足りるほどのヌルさです。本当にヌルいです。
後半の難易度は９０～１００になります。いきなり難易度がぶっとびます。
それだけならまだ我慢できるのですが、なによりもつまらないなと感じたのは結局のところ強敵の倒し方がワンパターンしか存在しないことですかね。
ほぼ決まったパーティ構成でバカの一つ覚えのようにバリアを張ってバカの一つ覚えのようにお祈り呪文を唱えて高火力魔法で敵をせん滅。戦略もクソもありません。
強敵に一撃死させられるため、眠気と闘いながら地獄のレベルダウン作業というものを強制させられます。(ここクソポイント)
強敵と戦いやすくなるために、眠気と戦いながら地獄のレアドロップ掘りを強制させられます。(ここクソポイント)
これがまたアイテムの種類が少なさ過ぎてレアドロップ掘りのつまらなさに拍車をかけています。決まったアイテムが出なければ深層に潜る資格すら無いのと同義なのです。つまり戦略性皆無というわけです。自己流の組み合わせなど存在しません。

wizシリーズの理不尽さ、無慈悲さを履き違えている作品です。
wizシリーズ古参の言う理不尽さなど別に最近の作品にまで求めているわけではないのです。
ただこのゲームは無慈悲さをとことん履き違えています。理不尽さや無慈悲さを踏襲するのは構いませんが、やるならきちっとユーザーの心をつかむような形でやりきってほしい。
とりあえず後半では敵を強くしておけばいいだろうみたいな投げやりさ加減を無慈悲さとは言いません。ただの手抜きです。

wizシリーズだからやってみようというwizファンの方、新しくwiz作品に手を出してみようという方。
恐らくたくさんの方がガッカリする作品に仕上がっています。とてもオススメできません。

■戦闘操作のテンポが正直「耐えがたい」
個人的にWizシリーズって割と「ボタン連打の速度に比例して戦闘テンポが決まってしまう」ってイメージだったんですが、一回一回の選択に0.17secぐらいの間が入ってるとイメージされると伝わり易いのかな。失望するほどテンポ悪いです。

■キャラグラフィックが一周回って「何で存在してるの？」と
いや、素敵な絵だと思うんですよ？正直好きです。が、種族と性別への固定グラなら逆に無い方が良かったなと切に。Wizってキャラメイクが肝で、持ち主の性格が顕著に出る例えば「ドワーフって何故か避けちゃうんだよな」とか「何か気付いたらHumばかりだわ」とか。まだその辺Wiz亜種の方が弁えてくれてる感じ。

作品としての評価ではないですが上記の通り、個人的には憤るレベルで御座います。同類の方はぜひご参考に。

このゲームは残魂の迷宮は収録されていません。
たしかにＤＬＣは全て追加されています（残魂の迷宮は確かアペンドディスクだったはず）
ですが今の時代全ＤＬＣ入り＝“追加コンテンツ全て”収録されていると言う意味と同義です。
文字だけを正確に読み取り「あぁ、ＤＬＣは入ってるが残魂の迷宮は入ってないな」と察する事ができる人が何人いるでしょう？
はっきり言って限りなく詐欺に等しいと思います。せめて一言「残魂の迷宮は未収録です」と書くだけでよいはずなのですが、、、
マジでざけんなよ！

Так себе игра. Из плюсов можно выделить лишь неплохую работу художника, рисовавшего персонажей и неписей, да интересную систему сохранений, где персонажи одного сохранения могут нанимать персонажей из другого.

В остальном же всё предельно посредственно: архаичный графон, крайне блеклая музыка, скучные данжоны, где есть только бои и поиск рычагов, открывающих двери, ужасный баланс классов и экипировки (среди боевых классов доминируют самураи и лорды, которые обладают имбовыми абилками и большим ассортиментом легкодобываемых убер-шмоток, среди магов доминируют бишопы, потому что у них, опять же, имбовая абилка и они владеют ВСЕМИ заклинаниями волшебников и священников), здесь совершенно убогая экономика, где деньги - просто рудимент, потому что магазин всего один и его ассортимент никогда не обновляется, ну и, наконец, примитивный сюжет, состоящий из нескольких квестов уровня "принести-подай" и "найди-убей".

Вывод: на откровенном безрыбье пару десятком часов поиграть можно, но счастья это не принесёт. А если хочет поиграть в добротный японский данжон кроулер, берите Stranger of Sword City - она на голову выше по всем без исключения параметрам.

nice visuals and sound......
extremly annoying interface ,
better of playing wizardry 6 or 7, or even better starcrawlers or strangers of sword city.

Hey, so you know those levels you just went through and spent excruciating hours exploring every nook and cranny? Well, here's the final main quest, with a vague hint...and go explore them all again.

If you enjoyed the Elminage games, you may enjoy this. They aren't much different, except Elminage Original actually had a somewhat coherent quest line.

The UI and quests are the worst in any dungeon crawler I've ever played. The monster art is beautiful. I don't play games for art, though. I play for fun. This just was not fun at the end of the day.

When I was a kid I played Wizardry 5 for the snes and there was something magical about that game. The graphics were grainy and the distorted midi music chimed along in the background in that way that only dated games did but there was something compelling about it that kept me playing long into the dark hours of the night; mystery. Old dungeon crawlers always kept you guessing gave you tons of random encounters that made you feel like the game had even more things to do and explore and never fully revealed all of its secrets even after playing for hundreds of hours. Sometimes you would get really lucky with loot drops even in early areas and get an awesome item but much of the time awesome items would be cursed and you could never tell until it was too late. They were painful, cruel, but also mysterious. The mystery of these old dungeon crawlers isn't in Labyrinth of Lost Souls. It's soulless. I can't recommend a modern gaming title that is barely more appealing in terms of visuals or audio than an snes title and isn't as good in terms of overall quality. If you are old like me and actually enjoy dungeon crawlers there are better modern titles to choose from and lots of older games.

Update #2: A few months later, and the links posted below now take you to blank pages on the Playstation Store. That is absolutely crazy.

Update: I've been farming for over ten hours. It's pretty bad, and it didn't need to be this way. You'd have to be insane to find this fun.

Look at what these developers did in other regions on the PS Vita:
(Link removed by me.)

They're selling a low-level weapon that can be farmed on the first level of the Dungeon of Trials for the equivalent of $4.00 USD.

Here's another:
(Link removed by me.)

This is the best weapon in the game for Lords, that takes hours of farming, available for the almighty dollar -- and it's cheaper than the Bushido Blade!

The drop rates in this game were clearly engineered to drive people crazy and tempt them into shelling out more money. It's made worse by a difficulty spike midway into the game.

I doubt they adjusted anything when they brought it to Steam, so we just get to deal with it.

Developers need to stop doing this. I'm thumbing this down, but if I could use my middle finger, I would.

I deleted my original review. I neither disagree nor agree with it at this point. But I'd feel guilty talking someone into buying LoLS knowing how much farming is involved and why it was probably made this way.