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[PSV] Ray Gigant

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    [PSV] Ray Gigant

    Ray Gigant is a dungeon crawler for the Vita. It's also one of those games that take way too much time to introduce characters and setting, I've spent 40 minutes skipping dialogues before actually getting into a dungeon; there was a 5 minutes battle with a very brief tutorial on combat mechanics, but for the best part of an hour I've been sitting in front of the monitor saying "skiiiiiip".

    When finally given the opportunity to explore the first dungeon, I could test the game's nuances. The status screen shows an empty layout of the dungeon, with save points, exit, boss, treasures, and enemies; to discover how these are connected you'll have to walk on each and every tile of the dungeon: lacking the ability to draw maps (like Etrian Odyssey) or the map not being completed by looking around (like Labyrinth no Kanata), this comes as a rather boring process.
    Enemy encounters are caterorised as light, normal, or heavy; the main difference is how many action points performing something takes: heavy encounters require twice as many points than normals, light half that. The kind of enemy and their numbers are random, and can happen that normal encounters are lenghtier and more difficult than heavy encounters despite more expensive actions. Having everything (except secret) clearly shown on the map removes a lot of the suspense dungeon crawlers create, and it's not like you can plot routes around encounters, because you need battle experience and because encounters are almost invariably located on the only tile you need to step on to continue exploring the labyrinth.

    Battles are, of course, turn based. You have three characters in your party, and at the beginning of each turn, each of them can queue up to five actions; once actions have been set, the turn begins with party and enemies alike will start exchanging the programmed blows. The amount of queueable actions is determined by the available action points, a pool shared between all party members; you gain action points by choosing a specific action (which is neither defence or not queueing up any action at all) or by getting hit; bonus action points are awarded at the end of the battle, up to a maximum of 25 if you took only one turn defeating everything.
    Attacks, recovery spells, and defence barriers all cost a variable number of action points, and actions must be set before battles in the "tactics" menu. Characters can only have three actions set, and this greatly limits your options in battle; probably characters will unlock more slots to set more actions from, but it's impossible not to feel limited after the first battles.
    Overall, this system is not bad, and asks to think two-three turns ahead, as you have to manage attack (or the battle won't go anywhere), healing (or the battle won't end in your favour), and action points (or you won't be able to act). Characters are completely healed after a battle, and during boss fight you get few HPs back at every turn, but enemies can hit pretty hard, and it's not uncommon to see one character go down in three-four hits against bosses. There are no items (or at least I didn't find any), and right now I don't have the ability to bring back incapacitated characters, which is really detrimental against bosses.
    Bosses hit somewhat harder than normal enemies, the real difference being that they have a ton of HPs...maybe too many, but mostly because the game wants you to use the SMB system.

    The SMB system is exclusive to your character, and can be used after the relative counter reaches at least 50 points; you gain one point at every attack. Activating the SMB starts an unskippable (grrrr) anime cutscene and a mini-rhythm game to boost the strenght of the attack. The SMB is the only reliable way to get through a boss' health quickly, but takes ages to charge and turns your other party members in just batteries for that; the nice thing is that SMB attacks are essentially a free turn and don't consume action points, but basing boss encounters around that is kinda cheap.
    Enemies (including bosses) have resistances and weaknesses to weapon types (slash, blunt, pierce) and elemental magic, but those are never really exploited, at least against bosses.

    Defeating monsters will give your party crystals to "evolve", rather than plain experience. All of the playable characters have their own skill tree, with some common parts (HPs, speed, attack, defense). Progression is relatively fast, and probably the trees I'm looking at the begining of the game aren't complete. Probably.

    Ray Gigant also features dialogue choices when interacting with some characters, and a mysterious cooking system. All your characters have a "kilogram" stat that goes down as you battle and explore the dungeon; probably low values will result in weaker attacks or higher chances of being inflicted status changes, but I didn't have to deal with this yet. Still too early to tell how (and if) dialogues influence character interactions and/or ending too.

    In my Langrisser thread, I've wrote that the soundtrack doesn't really mix well with the setting, and that applies to Ray Gigant as well, with battles underscored by a jazzy, upbeat soundtrack. Like in Langrisser, it's not bad, but completely out of place. Well, not completely, but it surely sounds strange.
    Graphics are a mix. Character portraits, illustrations, movies, and UI are very well done, as are enemies during battles. Everything is sprite based, but developers went the extra mile to animate the sprites, maybe in a rather basic way, but they surely look nice; some bosses are downrght impressive, and the game has a great sense of scale, with one boss battle featuring a giant beast and your party spread between three different locations, each featuring a different zoom level of the boss' sprite, and only the closest showing some hints of pixellisation.
    On the other hand, dungeon graphics are rather basic, and reminded me of the first Etrian Odyssey games. Coming from two-three weeks of Labyrinth no Kanata, on the 3DS, where everything is polygonal and you can look and down, exploring dungeons in Ray Gigant has been visually boring. Well, even game-wise boring, as you just have to follow the road to the next enemy/treasure.

    One more thing about battles is that enemies are once again simple numbers to go through. This has been a common complaint from me recently, but I can't shake the feeling that a lot of games are simply going for the number of available enemies and forgetting to give them peculiar abilities. Now, I'm always using Etrian Odyssey as a golden standard, but...in EO you had to prioritise enemies and attack them with skills to fully exploit their weaknesses, and battles could be fought in different way depending on the classes in your party and available skills; of course Ray Gigant can't be as complex because it doesn't feature classes, but developers could totally had more interesting enemies. I know this is based on just a couple of hours of play, but lately my first impressions have been frighteningly accurate.

    Aaaaand...video!


    #2
    Between Etrian Odyssey Untold 2, Labyrinth no Kanata, and Dungeon Travelers 2 (might start a thread on this as well), Ray Gigant hasn't been getting too much love; but it's due to Ray Gigant itself, the game turned out to be a dull dungeon crawler, more interested in its story than the crawling component.
    It might be a good starting point for someone that never played dungeon crawlers before, though I would argue that all Etrian Odyssey games since the third have a beginners mode and are far more interesting.
    Anyway, the combat system turned out to be shallow, as you can use just one character to heal/attack and the other two to stock up on APs. Bosses have way too much health, and their fights are a race to get enough SMB points to have Ichiya, your character, to transform and quickly weaken them. By spamming the AP/AP/heal-heal-attack-attack combo you can get through the whole game (*) without much trouble, and there's no real need to use the various buff/debuff spells some of the characters have. Elemental attacks become overly important, and non-typed attacks useless. Incidentally, Mana only has non-typed attacks and buffs, making her an AP battery and nothing more; if she doesn't die on the second turn, because she has the health of a cicada.
    Dungeoneering is boring, maps don't go simple trap tiles and shortcut that must be opened. Some dungeons have multiple floors, but enemies and treasures are clearly marked on the map, so it's possible to navigate through mazes without no worries, as the game doesn't really penalize you for withdrawing from battles or exit a dungeon to recover a fallen ally.
    Ray Gigant is not bad, but it left me rather indifferent to it: by comparison, Langrisser Re:Incarnation attracted me more because I was interested in how bad it could be.

    (*) I think, I haven't finished it yet.

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