Dungeon Encounters

Hiroyuki Ito returns to the helm for the first time since Final Fantasy 12 in another brilliant examination of RPG fundamentals.

Give it a shot, and once you get into it, you might see it the way I do: as a gripping, strategic adventure that is not only a game but a celebration of one of the great innovations of the turn-based RPG genre.

Dungeon Encounters is a masterstroke of game design, character and narrative – it's storytelling in the way only games can be. It teaches how scale is felt in a game, and it teaches, through their absence, the roles of rich visuals and verbose storytelling. Next time we play an RPG with baroque graphics and forests of text, we will understand a little more deeply where a game's atmosphere really comes from.

Dungeon Encounters is a certain type of RPG for a certain type of person. If you are a numbers-nerd who favors battles over story, this might be for you.

Dungeon Encounters is a thought-provoking experiment directed by a titan of game development and its minimalist presentation allows the player to stare straight into the face of the craft of game design. While not for everyone, anyone with a shred of interest owes it to themself to check this game out.

As a Mechanics-First style of game, Dungeon Encounters offers little to entice players that aren't already fans of Final Fantasy's Active Time Battle from yesteryear. What surrounds that dungeon crawling experience is threadbare but established fans can use what's there and chart their own paths.

Dungeon Encounters is a game that’s remarkably difficult to fault for its premise. It sets out with very specific intentions, and it achieves them, even if it frustrates players in the process. This isn’t your typical Square Enix fare; it’s tailor-made for hardcore RPG enthusiasts who savor the likes of pen-and-paper RPGs.

Dungeon Encounters is a very difficult game to fault for its premise. It has very specific goals and it achieves them, much to the chagrin of the player and it achieves its goals thoroughly. This is definitely not something for the average Square Enix fan and caters more towards gamers who enjoy the likes of The Dark Spire or very old dungeon crawlers. Expect to have to rely on imagining the adventure and the battles, because of how nothing is ever realised in text or visuals. This is a hard title to recommend to general audiences, but for those who are truly hardcore RPG maniacs, Dungeon Encounters might be worth exploring.

Dungeon Encounters is what you get when you take solid JRPG combat and overall gameplay, but without lengthy dialogue and colorful visuals. If you want a JRPG simply for gameplay, this is a solid buy, but it might not be for RPG fans who want more in terms of story and visuals.

The strength of Dungeon Encounters is not in its art, but in its science. It is a unique and competent RPG in the role it proposes: to be a game focused on the mechanical essence of a dungeon crawler while reinventing the way of thinking about exploration and combat dynamics in games of this style. This is an RPG recommended for fans of the genre who especially appreciate the science behind dungeon crawlers in creative interactions between combat mechanics and group management with unique dungeon exploration.