The numerous retro RPG elements of MeiQ: Labyrinth of Death have served as the selling point of this brand new trailer, hopefully titillating hardcore RPG enthusiasts with its thorough customization options and possibly its wealth of cute girls too, should the aforementioned features all prove spectacularly uninteresting.
The explanatory trailer:
The deadly labyrinth of MeiQ: Labyrinth of Death can be explored by western players come September 13th for the Vita.
Everything before Nep-Nep should have just been a visual novel.
No combat or actual gameplay in the video…Just inventory management? Hrm…
For those who actually care, this is a REALLY bad game. It’s extremely boring. The dungeon crawling works just like classic dungeon crawlers like Etrian Odyssey (without the actual need to draw maps). That’s probably the best part of the game.
There are two types of characters to fight with; Your cute girls, and their guardian (basically a mecha that they order around to do stuff). You choose to 1 of the 2 to take the action each turn. Guardians usually take the hits if they’re in front (i.e. you’re last action was with a guardian). Your cute girl has support spells and some attack spells that are fairly weak.
When you customize your guardian, you can change its attacks and sometimes get bonus skills. You can equip gems/stones that give different effects like use selected action twice or multiply attack by 2. As you level up you can put on stronger gems to mess with the multipliers some more.
There are lots of problems but here are the main ones.
1. Characters aren’t lovable. The game doesn’t give you much dialogue at all for the story so you don’t really ever get to know them. They’re bland and empty. At least Neptunia had some kind of fun developments with the characters. None in this game.
2. Boring battle system. You can get several skills for your guardian, but you always have 1 move that is always stronger than everything else. When you attack, you only ever use 1 move. Your character is support so its a bit more interesting, but you really don’t use it much.
3. No need to customize guardians. There is lots to customize. You can change arms, legs, body, or whatever you want to change your guardian, but the guardians’ best moves only appear when you use a matching set of gear. The gear also determines the element and the strength of the attacks are based on the gems that are equipped. This means that there isn’t really a need to ever customize your guardians gear too much aside from direct upgrades of the same element because its just easier to swap out the guardian for a different guardian that specializes in the element you need.
4. Linear gem customization. You can equip loads of gems the higher your level is which sounds great, but there really aren’t that many different effect that you can gain from gems. The game gives many direct upgrades from old gems to new gems so even though you have a multitude of gems, there aren’t that many things to change.
And the worst part.
5. After you beat the game (with almost no story and just hours of exploring, boring battles that you fast forward, grinding, etc.), you get an emblem that unlocks 1 of 4 (might be 5) post game dungeons, as well as a new difficulty. Now if you want the rest of the dungeons, you must play newgame+ on a different difficulty from the beginning with all your gear BUT WITH ALL THE MAP DATA RESET so you have to run into walls everywhere and explore everything again for loads of hours again so you get get a new emblem that unlocks the SECOND post game dungeon. I think you see where I’m going with this. The game has these zodiac bosses that each drop a unique gem equip, and there are 1(maybe 2?) of these in each post game dungeon. You get quite a few of them in the story, but you’ll never finish the set until you do all the post game dungeons. The newgame+ runs aren’t short either because a LOT of time is spent exploring maps and watching encounter transitions The maps are NOT small.
So that’s the game. Compile Heart expects you to grind mindlessly through a very linear and boring game completely from start to finish around 4-5 times before you can actually “complete” the game. You get your first SILVER trophy after beating the game once btw.
dem thighs on the second one