Recent reviews by Circe

The new building features are great, absolutely no complaints there. Unfortunately that's where the good ends.

The gameplay, while better than New Gundam Breaker, is a marked downgrade from Gundam Breaker 3. The combo system demands builds that can constantly barrage enemies in order to get decent drops. Like slow, heavy weapons? Want to build pure melee? Too bad. This is exacerbated by the number of enemies that will juggle you with explosives, and the fact that one unlucky leg loss can destroy your entire combo if you can't recover fast enough. Hooray for random chance.

The new EX Action system in which all of them spend from the same meter means that most of the time, you're only going to use one, maybe two.

The level design has far less objective variety than GB3. While there are several alternate victory objectives, they're only used one or two times each. On top of that, the fact that you instantly teleport from area to area robs the levels of any feeling of continuity.

The giant bosses... they're okay. All, what, six different ones you'll fight. And I hope you like fighting a giant RX-78-2 Gundam, because that's about 50% of the bosses in the main game.

The dual-wielding system is... fine, I guess? But using two sabers doesn't feel like the dual saber movesets in 3, it just feels like using two separate single sabers.

I was so excited when this finally came out. They learned from the mistakes of New Gundam Breaker. Unfortunately they made a bunch of new ones, and after my initial excitement wore off, the cracks began to show like I was visiting the San Andreas Fault.

I wish they'd just ported Gundam Breaker 3 instead, frankly. Optimist that I am, I have some hope they can fix this for GB5, but I'm absolutely not going to be as excited for it until I have proof they did.

My playtime was inflated somewhat by alttabbing and distractions. New meds. But I was genuinely hooked.

The plot will tread familiar ground, but there's a major focus on the human cost of adventuring and of a world that would motivate adventurers. It's a game about loss from the very beginning; the player only takes over the guild at the request of their departed friend, and the theme comes through in many plot events, dungeon encounters, and depending on your success, possibly intra-party banter.

While I had my minor nitpicks here and there, overall? Stellar game.

Mechanically, there's a few oddities but I found the BP system quite engaging. It essentially measures a character's current courage and mood during an adventure, and is a fixed 0-100 scale. It can be spent on some very powerful abilities and to reroll dice in events, but BP also serves as an additional buffer against death; enough BP can let you survive several successive killing blows. So you have to manage how much you use.

So, if you like Etrian Odyssey, you will most likely enjoy Infinite Adventures, it is very much cut from the same cloth. It takes the plot a while to get going, but I was pretty engaged when it did get started, and the dungeon crawling itself left me with no complaints. Music was fine, and in fact I quite liked the theme for the Dark Expanse. You can increase and decrease your encounter rate in a menu at will while in a dungeon, and on the lower two difficulties you can even turn off random encounters entirely. Obviously you'll need to fight to level up, but it's a useful safety if you get in over your head and need to leave.

But, there's a couple minor issues, and a little plot detail, that I want to bring up so you know.

Class balance is, to use a technical term, wack. This isn't really a big deal, there's enough flexibility and nothing seemed completely useless, but there were certainly a few classes way out ahead of the rest. My party was Stormseeker, Ronin, Shinobi, Archaeologist, Mendicant, and Soul Caller.

There are some polish issues at play. The game has a number of minor bugs - interface occasionally going a little dumb (like the minimap showing up in the pause menu over other elements), sound cues misfiring, I once ended up with negative Focus on a character, which isn't supposed to happen, and had other occasional resource wonkiness, but nothing irreparable. The text is broadly okay but could probably do with an editing pass.

The voices are mixed. Some are pretty good, some are "eh". There were a couple I generally didn't like at all, but nothing unbearable.

Now, the plot detail I mentioned: Your 'main' character has amnesia, the Standard RPG Malady. In the past, and it does come up, they had a lover, and you don't get any choice in who that was. This is a small thing, but since the Traveler initially appears to be the "blank slate stand-in", it may come as a surprise. Also, as they are plot-relevant, they cannot leave your party; make sure you pick a class you'll always want around.

There is one character I wish I could have saved, but that's life (or death, I guess)

Overall though these issues weren't too severe, amd if these devs make another dungeon crawler, I'm in.

Every step forward from FTK1 seems to have been matched with an equivalent step backward. It's frustrating.

The four-person party size is a huge improvement, and the grid-based battles do add a little extra strategy in terms of positioning etc, but ultimately that feels like an afterthought; there are very few ways to reposition an enemy, all of which require perfect skill checks with several rolls. If you don't have a pile of Focus to burn, you're basically just not moving anyone.

This is an issue because weapons and abilities that could reliably hit multiple enemies in FTK1 frequently lose that ability in the sequel due to enemy spawn locations, the deaths of necessary targets, or enemies just moving. Area abilities that can be freely targeted have too little power to be worth using much of the time, especially given the game's use of the simple Power Minus Defense formula for calculating damage - often enemies will be completely immune to these abilities because they just have too much resistance to break.

The campaigns are also far shorter than FTK1's, with the equivalent of FTK1's original campaign being separated into five chapters, each of which you start with a fresh party. A run is over just as your party's getting established, seemingly by design; all five chapters have an explicit Complete In 50 Turns bonus objective, one that I've hit without trying on most playing on Journeyman, which seems to be meant as the Normal-equivalent difficulty. I understand that some people may have preferred more bite-sized campaigns, but to me at least it destroys the flow and feeling of progress.

All of this is fixable, and I will likely continue poking at the game as it gets further updates. As things are currently though, I don't think I can recommend it.

Fun game, getting a lot of general improvements to playability and flow, the pride month event includes a free palette with a very wide selection of colors that new and F2P players can get a lot of use out of, and it's making the typical crybullies piss themselves. What's not to love?

This isn't a hard no, more of a heavily mixed.

I'll start with the good. While the plot gets to be a total mindscrew toward the middle, everything does resolve well enough in the end, and I was genuinely impressed at how many seemingly-throwaway details in earlier conversations and descriptions would come back to be very important. I also like quite a few of the character and class designs, particularly the Am Alchymia and the cat facets - they're literally just housecats, but with scythes and capes. The game is also, generally, paced rather well...

Until you get to the Grand Labyrinth.

The Grand Labyrinth is where I stopped playing. It's essentially postgame, but an actually happy ending is locked behind that; at best you get something bittersweet before it. And it is so unbelievably long. Literally 3651 floors. While shortcuts do exist, you're still doing most of that.

And that's where the grind kicks in. Unlike some of NIS's other games, the level grind in Galleria is pretty rough, with few shortcuts and no variety. You don't need to grind any significant amount before the Grand Labyrinth, so the "main" game is plenty doable without, save for some extra final boss prep (as is RPG tradition). You'll have to use Soul Transfer to "remake" your characters numerous times, and if you care about keeping all the details right, that means you have to manually set them again every single time, even if they're Transferred to the same class as the one they're already in (as transfers also passively just boost stats all around).

Also, while I liked a lot of the character designs, miss me with that loli crap. The Prima facets in particular were... uncomfortable. Unfortunately I had to level my cat in one to pick up some of the scythe skills.

Now for the other elephant in the room: I am not exaggerating when I say that literally all but two or three adult male characters are absolutely horrible, with crimes variously including child abuse, sexual assault, child murder, domestic violence, and attempted murder-suicide. A lot of the women are also awful, but a less overwhelming portion of them. So take the content warnings seriously because this ♥♥♥♥ gets dark. (I hear it's not as dark as the previous game though)

The gameplay itself is... fine, I suppose? The dungeons didn't seem particularly deep, mechanically, and the part damage/gore crit system ultimately is nothing more than random chance (that can lead to instant kills for either side). If you're used to games like Etrian Odyssey, Galleria may feel a bit underwhelming there.

Look, it's simple.

Are you a fan of Armored Core? You'll like AC6, but it might be a bit easy for you relatively speaking.

Are you interested in the series but don't know where to start? AC6 is perfect; a little easier than many past entries and still a hell of a good time, and not playing past games is irrelevant to the plot.

That's all, get this game.

Recommendation? Yes, with caveats. I love the class system, and the story had me surprisingly engrossed. This is one of the few games that grabbed my attention from start to end, alongside Monster Sanctuary and Crystal Project (the community of the latter being who recommended this!) But there's a few little things that prospective buyers should be aware of.

1: Certain dungeons can be really confusing. Don't be ashamed to search for a solution.

2: There's a guide for the class system and I strongly recommend you read it. While the game tells you the stat growth and proficiencies for each class, it doesn't tell you about later classes until you unlock them, which makes planning a build harder. The Class Data key item does tell you their learning list if you hit left though.

The next two are much more minor.

3: If you play with a controller and want to use the bestiary, you'll have to use Page Up/Page Down to scroll through it faster; there's no gamepad button for that function. It's weird, but the bestiary isn't really essential.

4: Your first character will be a Generalist. If you don't want that, that's okay, because after the first dungeon you get full control over your party and can replace them with a new lead. They're also the only Generalist you'll have until near endgame, though.

Also, the game has Repels and you're probably gonna want to use them. The encounter rate can be annoyingly high at times, but repels are cheap and 100% effective; the only things they won't block are bosses or map encounters.

Actually, I think you'll find that it's the giant worm that has angered the gods, and you really ought not be taking it out on me.

There's a fun core here, but the game is prone to dropping absolute ♥♥♥♥ moves on you. If you have the patience to work around that, you might like it. I do not.

I wish I could recommend this game, I really do. It's genuinely quite fun.

The problem is that it's also quite crash-prone. In fact, now it's crashing when I attempt to load my save.