Dungeon Explorer: Warriors of Ancient Arts

[DF]

I've chipped away at Dungeon Explorer for several years, but I finally got to the end of the regular story using my Emporos Hunter after a little over nine hours, at level 51. I didn't dive into the pyramid, but that seems more like a coop-focused part of the game, or it'd take a lot of grinding to get through without a busted spell I didn't have. Emp. Hunter with the Meteor school, and I made use of the Homing Form for most of the game just for extra damage.

There's another Dungeon Explorer: Warriors of Ancient Arts on the PSP, but it's a different game despite the same name. There are a few shared features between them like some of the music and monster generators, but they're otherwise unrelated as far as I know. There's a series of games before these two like on the Turbografx-16 or SNES, but I've yet to play them.

What is Dungeon Explorer: Warriors of Ancient Arts?

This is an action RPG with some Diablo-like qualities, mostly in the items potentially having affixes. Make a character from three races and three jobs, each combination having their own usable weapons and attack patterns, and then dive into the Artrium to have a school picked out for you that determines other factors about your character like Forms and Arts. Beat the crap out of enemies to take their loot, equip better gear, learn spells, complete quests... It's not the most complex game out there. Evil descends upon the land, adventurers come to go get rich/famous, etc etc.

Gameplay

You start in town and are ordered to talk to everyone before being told to get a school at the Artrium. This is done through a quickly-moving roulette, and while you have the option to change schools later in the game, it's behind a fairly difficult boss fight and costs quite a bit of cash to do anyway. Each school provides you two Forms from a pool of five, and these add effects to your attack when you strike with a full charge bar, such as Homing sending a projectile that hits the enemy a few times, or Guard sending that same projectile around you instead. Use of Forms unlocks school-specific Arts, most of them spells of some kind but others had a passive effect, like Auto Heal slowly regenerating health. Once again, here's another game where you really want the stamina bar maxed before you attack. Enemies sometimes drop Art Frags, and every five of these you collect gives you one point to level up an Art. I haven't seen anything that determines how or when Arts are unlocked, but just keep spamming your Forms, I guess.

When you level up, you're given three stat points to allocate between VIT (HP and DEF), ARTS (MP and ATK), STR (how many items you can carry at once, and gear has minimum strength requirements too), and DEX (EVA plus gear equip requirements too). There's a little icon on the combat screen showing if you have stat points, and another icon shows if you have Arts points too.

Each race/job combo can use a small number of different weapons, like my Emporos Hunter being restricted to just shotguns or dual pistols, or the Oros Warrior using a sword and shield, a 2H sword, or two swords. Each weapon type behaves differently, like the shotgun having better range than the dual pistols, or the dual pistols locking you in place while you open fire, or the Taratta Mage's scythe dropping a lightning bolt at full charge or her staff throwing out a fireball. You can equip items to your left/right hands, helmet, torso, and a number of accessories depending on which job you picked--warriors get one necklace, hunters two rings, and mages get all three. And true to form, you'll find plenty of gear your current character can't use because of race/job restrictions. You can just sell those things in town, but you can take weapons to the equipment merchant in town to rework them into something you can use, or feed them and other junk to your robot to heal them.

An early quest allows you the use of Owons, egg-shaped robots that follow you around and blast enemies with their lasers. They're the only help you get in the entire game and you can take only one with you, though there is a little bit of customizing. There's one for each element and a disposition towards attack or defense. Each robot also has slots where you equip units to increase its stats. Robots take damage from enemy attacks and environmental hazards, and are gone forever if they die. You can feed them equipment from the pause menu/Items, recovering their health based on the value of the item. Reworking weapons is pretty expensive, so this can be a good use for things your character will never be able to equip or just don't want. Robots will also make a bunch of noise and start flashing if they come across an illusory wall you can pass through, though you can walk through them without the robot if you know where they are.

You don't need to pause to use items. There's a Battle Palette feature where you can set items to X/Y and Arts to B, with A taking care of your Forms. You hold L and press one of the buttons to shift the quickslot, though you need to pause to shuffle the actual items or spells in and out. You have the usual restoratives, along with a key to open locked chests, or scrolls to boost your attack power or identify items. Items are automatically added to your inventory when the enemy is killed, with a popup of the item's icon appearing above the enemy and the name of the item appearing in the bottom right corner. You can carry only a certain number of items at one time, but items above your on-hand capacity go to the bank in town--but items that go over their limit are instantly destroyed. And it counts every single item you have, from potions to robot units to gear you can't use.

Controls

You move with the dpad and attack with A, using items on X and Y and spells on B. You automatically target enemies but can change your target with R. Hold L and hit any of the ABXY buttons to change your Battle Palette assignments. Start brings up a traditional menu where you can change equipment on yourself or your robot, change which screen is top/bottom, and can even get a small glossary of terms used in the game.

Gameplay Modes

You can either play the game alone or in a party over the now-defunct Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, but playing with someone nearby is probably still possible. The idea is that you gain strength by vanquishing evil in the countryside, and then you and others dive into the pyramid in town to kill the evil in there. Or you could do it alone, but it's apparently not balanced for that.

Difficulty

For difficulty, it's not that bad until some later bosses, and then you'll get hit for a lot of damage off of their attacks. Enemies that can move quickly will be pretty annoying because they can just move out of attack range and back faster than you can move. The boss that allows you to change schools is pretty notorious because you not only have to deal with three enemies at one time, they're all very fast and use plenty of projectiles. There isn't much info about the game. GameFAQs has some info, and I found other stuff on a Japanese Google Sites page here.[sites.google.com] You'll need Google Translate or what have you to glean anything useful, though.

Graphics

The game's presented in an isometric view using 3D graphics, though they're pretty ugly given the low resolution the game runs at on the DS. I thought the visuals were still clear enough to tell everything apart from everything else, but they're still not pretty. You can't adjust the camera except to three different zoom levels, but I left it at maximum zoom just to have a better view of the action. The bottom screen has a map of the area along with monsters, generators, and stairs, but some dungeon areas will remove the map but still show the other points of interest. You can also change the screen orientation if you want too.

For UI, you have the action on the bottom screen. Your health meter is shown in red pips in the upper-left corner, with the yellow Form charge bar below it, and a blue MP bar below that. If you have a robot, its health bar is shown in red below this yet. The shortcuts for your ABXY buttons are shown over on the upper-right in a column. When you come into range of an enemy, its name shows up on the center bottom with its healthbar and icons that I think are its elemental types/defenses. I never figured that out. On the top screen, you have the map on the left, with your Battle Palette on the right. "Total Items" is below the map, with a current/max readout of how many individual items are on your person and how many you can hold. Your name and character level are shown below the Palette, with a readout of how many Art Frags you have and how many you need to level up an Art. Above the map is the name of the dungeon/area plus whatever subsection you're in.

Audio

I don't really have anything to say about the music. It's there and I didn't want to mute it at least. I'm not sure how much is shared between it and the PSP version, or if the songs came from the prior games or not. There's some voice grunts but that's all the voicework you'll get.

Replay Value

You only have three save slots, and there are three races with three classes each, and all nine play a little differently due to weapon types and all that. There are eight schools and I forget how many Forms attached to them as well as Arts too, so there's pretty high value for replay here. There's potential for playing with others too, if you can find someone else with a copy. And, apparently you need to grind quite a bit for the multiplayer-designed pyramid dungeon, so you'll probably have a bunch to do here.

What Worked For Me

I liked not having to manually pick up items dropping off enemies. This meant I could just focus on attacking the enemy or avoiding their attacks. Though this also makes it hard to keep track of everything you're collecting, and there's no way to avoid picking up stuff you don't want.

The game stopping when you open the menu is nice too, given I'm used to games like actual Diablo still running when you're trying to manage your inventory or stats allocation. And this is really helpful if you're trying to save your robot since you don't have to try and futz with items while it's getting torn apart. Or to save yourself if you get into a bad situation too.

The game is pretty straightforward. If the stairs or door you need to continue isn't open already, you'll either need to hit a switch or kill enemies to open it. It's telling that even with fairly long gaps between play sessions, I didn't need to look up a guide for where to go, though I only needed to figure out which area was the newest.

What I Didn't Like

School selection is mostly random. There's a trick where you try to stop the wheel either on the school you want or the one after, but if you're gunning for a specific school, this kind of makes it difficult. You can keep learned Arts when you change schools, but I never did anything with that. I don't really have much of an opinion on Arts either, since I didn't invest in any of the spells my Hunter learned. This could potentially be a problem when you play as another race/class combo, since you could end up rolling the same school the other one had.

You get gear you can't use, but there's no way to transfer stuff from your bank to someone else on your card. I know you can just throw whatever into the robot or sell it, but you're stuck with any set items or legendary items that drop. Kind of a shame since you get three save slots and thus can probably have a save where someone can make use of the stuff another character finds.

The robot isn't very smart. Environmental hazards will be a constant danger, and it'll make no attempt to evade enemy attacks naturally. I found them a little fragile, though you can try to really kit them out for defense. I wasn't really impressed with their attack patterns, though they get much better attacks when you really pump up their attack stat. Glass cannon or meat shield?

Verdict - 3/5

It's an okay game. The most damning thing I can say is that it's nothing special, but I don't really know of other Diablo-likes on the DS. Something kept drawing me back to the game over the years, though I'm sure it was knowing I was pretty close to the end and I suddenly got the drive to just get to the end. Or what I'd consider the end, since I'm not interested in grinding a bunch to get to the bottom of the pyramid. There's a little bit of variety in the different races and jobs and schools too, but I still can't comment on any magic being good other than what I've read about Bird's Berserk snapping the game in half. At least the pace of the game means it's playable using touchscreen controls on a phone emulator.