Is
It Wrong to Try and Pick Up Girls in the Dungeon? Familia Myth
Infinite Combate by developer MAGES
Inc. and publisher PQube—Nintendo
Switch review written by Richard
with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
You know, I'm just going to use "Danmachi" to refer to this
title work, as it's a lot easier than that full title, and is based
on the original Japanese Light novel, manga, and anime series.
Danmachi itself is a fairly entertaining series, focused on the
adventures of Bell Cranel as he delves into the dungeon in the city
of Orario. Now with Infinite Combate coming out on the Switch, it's
time to find out: Is It Wrong to Try and Pick Up Girls in the
Dungeon?
For those unfamiliar with the series, Danmachi takes place in Orario,
where there is a great underground dungeon filled with monsters.
Adventurers traverse this dungeon slaying monsters in order to
increase their stats and level up. They form Familia's, centred
around a God who is the head of the Familia. Quite literally, as the
Gods do in fact exist, and they do interact with their Familia.
Danmachi centres on Bell Cranel, a young adventurer and the only
member of the Hestia Familia, headed by the Goddess Hestia.
As Bell travels through the dungeon, he meets new people, gets to
have adventures, and decides on a way to carve out a path for himself
in life. For those a little more familiar with the series, Infinite
Combate is the first anime season, or up until the 18th floor
incident. What that means for the player is that you have 10 chapters
as Bell, and 6 as Ais Wallenstein for story mode.
Incidentally, this brings me to my first gripe with Danmachi Infinite
Combate: it's way too short. I finished the main story in probably
about five hours or so, including text and doing all the bonus
quests. In case you're curious, game progression consists of: story,
plot quest, return to town, plot quest, story. This happens each
chapter, meaning you have about 32 total story based quests, each of
which will take 5 minutes or less. That's less than three hours of
plot based quests. Where the actual game time comes is in the extra
mode after you've cleared the story mode.
So how does the game actually play? Well, not...badly, I suppose.
Essentially every dungeon delve has you controlling either Bell or
Ais as they roam around the dungeon beating enemies. This is done as
an active action style, where you can run up to an enemy, smack them
in a combo a few times, and then dodge away to rinse and repeat. Or
just sit in front of an enemy and continue to hit them because they
keep flinching. Either works, mostly.
You can bring up to four items into combat with you, and stacks of
those items up to 9 of each. You'll also have access to a ranged
magic to go with your melee weapons, although Bell doesn't unlock his
for a while. Pro tip: if you stand still and don't move for a bit,
you regenerate MP. I only learned this halfway through the final set
of floors in the first extra dungeon. Probably because you aren't
really told, and half the dungeon quests are on a timer, so you don't
tend to just sit around anyway.
As you go through each floor of the dungeon, you will earn skill
points, money, and item drops from the enemies. Skill points can be
used via your Goddess (Hestia for Bell and Loki for Ais) to increase
their stats, for instance a 5% strength increase, or 20% less chance
to get inflicted by burn, which is way more useful than you'd think.
Monster material drops can either be sold to the merchant for cash,
which also unlocks gear when you sell enough, or can be infused into
gear in order to upgrade the gear. This is actually my biggest
problem with Danmachi Infinite Combate: the weapon/armour shop and
full inventory aren't shared between characters.
Yup, that's right, that cool sword you just spent two hours farming
drops for with Bell? Turns out it's a normal sword, not a dagger that
Bell is proficient in. Go spend another two hours farming that as Ais
as well. This is even more annoying when you realize that Ais only
has six chapters, and the chapters alternate until Ais runs out,
meaning her collected item drops will be basically half the game
behind what Bell has collected, so now you have to go farming
intermediate gear, to get better gear, so you can actually do the
Extra mode content, that's actually the same between Bell and Ais
anyway cuz the devs were too lazy to make different dungeons for the
two of them.
Rant aside, there are many issues with Infinite Combate.
The music is only about 20 seconds, and has the single worst looping
I've ever heard, with a full 2 second pause before just starting up
again,
The game is way
too short,
The text
wrapping during the cutscenes is awful and the grammar could
certainly use work in some places,
The extra mode
dungeons are just a big time sink and aren't really fun just
gameplay time padding,
The dungeons
themselves are mostly just annoying as they can be described as:
too many
enemies,
too much
poison,
too much
damage,
Respectively
for each extra dungeon, the only rewards for clearing the extra
dungeons are points to let you "date" characters and some
super cliché hot springs and sleeping together scenes,
The game
doesn't fully explain mechanics such as MP regeneration or the fact
you can hit the minus button to bring up a map,
The lack of
shared inventory is an awful design choice,
All the bosses
can three or four shot you when you first fight them,
Stat
progression is capped by story mostly so you can't even over level
if you're having trouble with a boss or floor enemies,
You're never
actually told what your special skill actually does,
There's lag on
skill activation that generally made me get clubbed in the face by
an enemy, AND
The hitboxes
are some of the wonkiest excuse for detection I've seen since the
Plesioth in Monster Hunter.
Huh, well apparently the rant wasn't completely finished there.
Needless to say, Infinite Combate feels like 90% padding and 5%
gameplay with another 5% obligatory fan service scenes. The base
combat is surprisingly solid, and the fact you can bring two helpers
with you to use their skills is nice, but why can't you bring them
during free exploration? What the heck is that? I want to bring the
party member that increases monster drops so I don't have to spend
six hours farming monster loot for crying out loud. I think this is
the first time I've ever been legitimately angry at myself for
playing a game, and it only got worse the longer I played. Yes, it
stays true to the source material, yes I'm pretty sure they got the
original Japanese voice actors to do the lines in the game, no that
didn't really make it better. At least the item shop guy tells you
how many of what drops he needs to unlock gear, although being forced
to pay for it afterwards and not knowing what it is before unlocking
it is annoying.
My feeling for Danmachi Infinite Combate is that it feels like it was
supposed to be a mobile game, like something you'd play on your phone
or tablet, and then have to drop actual money on revives when a boss
two shots you with some janky double-hit move, or to get extra drops
or to buy weapon unlocks or something. The worst part is, I've played
better mobile games that were free to play with easily four times the
content, AND less annoying systems. To quote my friend Jamie "So
the answer to the games question, yes it is wrong to pick up girls in
this dungeon crawler".
I mean, the graphics are also poor for what I was expecting, and
quite frankly the post game content felt like the devs were just
saying "haha, we took your money and by this point you can't
refund". I mean, I've liked most of PQube and Mages products as
companies, but this time was a major disappointment. It really does
feel like it was designed as a mobile game, and then the development
crew were suddenly told "oh yeah, we actually want this as a console title" and they didn't have enough time to rework it.
Summary
Overall, while I'm actually quite a big fan of the series in general,
there is hardly any way I can really justify suggesting this game to
anyone given the lack of polish, content, and effective gameplay
given the price. Is It Wrong to Try and Pick Up Girls in the Dungeon?
Familia Myth Infinite Combate is a huge disappointment, and unless it
drops to five or ten bucks on sale, I wouldn't consider it. If you
like mobile games and the danmachi franchise, and don't mind shelling
out more than it's worth, feel free to take a stab at it.
Score: 5 / 10
