Elrentaros Wanderings is a brand-new recreation from Rune Manufacturing facility creator Yoshifumi Hashimoto and his studio, Hakama, which takes place throughout two parallel worlds: one in a present-day Japanese faculty, and one in a fantasy land the place a small village is affected by monsters that dwell in close by dungeons.
Your character — male or feminine — have to be the one to filter out these dungeons, making buddies with the locals and upgrading weapons to tackle progressively tougher dungeons. However typically, once you fall asleep at evening, you get up in that parallel universe… and all of the characters look like those you simply obtained to know within the village. How unusual!
Sounds cool, would not it? It is an isekai! These are all the time enjoyable. Plus, Elrentaros Wanderings has most of the minds behind Rune Manufacturing facility engaged on it. That is a recipe for achievement! And sure, the title is horrible, however… isekai Rune Manufacturing facility!!!
Sadly, Elrentaros Wanderings has little or no in frequent with its Rune Manufacturing facility siblings. It is a repetitive grindfest with little or no motivation to maintain grinding, and despite the fact that you may date the characters that dwell within the village of Elrentaros, you will discover little motive to take action. And that enjoyable parallel-universe-in-a-Japanese-school enterprise? It got here up, like, 4 instances over our many, many hours of enjoying, and by no means actually went wherever. Plus, we could not determine easy methods to set off these scenes, anyway. We by no means thought we might be so eager to return to highschool.
Each single day, your character wakes up in a tent outdoors Elrentaros, and heads in the direction of one of many dungeons you have discovered. Every dungeon has a number of difficulties, which you unlock as you go, with a number of “missions” to finish when you’re in there, like “Keep away from taking harm from spike traps” and “Beat the boss with out passing out.” These missions are comparatively straightforward — except you take on a dungeon nicely above your present stage, which you often need to do to progress. Every mission has an opportunity of supplying you with an merchandise which advances your relationship with a personality from the village, particular cash that permit you to purchase presents to advance your relationship with a personality from the village, or a brand new weapon or armour.
When you’re within the dungeon, you will battle hordes of enemies with these weapons, plus magic spells and buffs that you have unlocked by making buddies (by giving them gadgets). Every weapon has its personal type and upgrades to unlock, together with some sick uncommon strikes that may take out a number of enemies directly, which give many of the selection in every dungeon run. The extent of the weapons and armour you’ve gotten outfitted additionally determines your character stage, which in flip determines how nicely you will do in every dungeon. However truthfully? It makes little distinction.
The dungeons are so samey and empty that you just’re actually simply doing the ol’ hold-down-attack-button-to-make-numbers-go-up factor that grindy video games love a lot. Critically — we had been enjoying on straightforward mode, doing 20k harm a pop to a few of these monsters, and it nonetheless took 30+ hits to take a few of them down. That is not enjoyable! There isn’t any tactical intrigue to ‘hit man till numbers go up TO DEATH!’ We will not even think about how boring it will get on laborious issue. Plus, you need to swap out your weapons actually continuously to maintain up with the enemy scaling, so even should you discover a weapon you get pleasure from utilizing, you will be pressured to alter it will definitely.
It is not all unhealthy within the dungeons, although. The enemies themselves have actually charming and diverse designs that reminded us of Studio Ghibli — there is a huge purple panda that summons extra monsters, a pig-guy that throws poison at you, a rabbit that fires arrows, a fox that buffs different monsters, and large glowing golems, amongst many extra, every with distinctive and detailed animations. Actually, they’re most likely our favorite a part of the sport’s design.
Besides… each single dungeon has the identical monsters, simply recoloured. What begins as a powerful solid of critters to kill quickly devolves into “Ugh, these guys once more?” The bosses on the finish of every dungeon are often greater, harder variations of those smaller monsters, too. On high of that, there’s this one tiny blue fairy that we discovered to detest, as a result of it does nothing however summon partitions in entrance of you. It makes it actually laborious to get across the dungeon, and that is the entire level of dungeon crawls. The crawling!
Whenever you’re finished with all that grinding, you will head again into the village to provide out your hard-won prizes to the villagers, who will reward you by presenting you with stiff, weirdly-localised dialogue that looks as if a fairly literal translation of the unique textual content with little thought to particular person characters’ character or allure, plus a ton of grammar errors. Additionally, it is usually weirdly sexual in a means that made us really feel fairly uncomfortable. A few of the scenes had been unusual, goofy, and even humorous in a means we actually preferred, however general, the writing feels too stilted to get invested in a specific character. It is a disgrace, as a result of we had been fairly into the character artwork. It is attractive!
Not that it actually issues, although — to woo somebody, you need to full particular missions to seek out the merchandise they’re searching for, and a few of these missions are laborious. We simply ended up befriending/wooing individuals based mostly on the missions we had been capable of full, which made the entire wooing system appear fairly pointless, and made us really feel powerless as well.
Oh, and there may be farming, too, technically. You discover sparkles within the overworld and plant them in a tiny plot of land. They develop into rainbow cabbage issues over the course of two days with none enter, after which they flip into extra of these particular friendship cash. That is it.
However, hey! Perhaps you’re keen on grindy motion RPGs. If that is the case, then Elrentaros Wanderings is… that, for certain. However truthfully, you’d have a greater time with a Rune Manufacturing facility, Silent Hope, or one of many many different good video games that really really feel like they convey one thing new to the style. If Hashimoto wished to maneuver away from Rune Manufacturing facility, we completely get it — however Elrentaros Wanderings makes us really feel like he obtained misplaced alongside the way in which.
Conclusion
We did not hate Elrentaros Wanderings’ grindy dungeon-crawling gameplay. There are issues to love, even when these moments are interspersed with lengthy stretches of boring, repetitive enemy-bashing. There are hints of the trademark Rune Manufacturing facility allure right here and there, and the artwork is genuinely pretty, however this sparse motion RPG seems like a brand new pores and skin stretched far too thinly over the skeleton of a a lot better recreation.
