Dungeon Travelers 2: Thoughts as of Chapter 7

I wouldn’t have thought it possible … but Dungeon Travelers 2 is actually making me miss playing Conception II.

This is not because Dungeon Travelers 2 is a bad game. It is still at least a semi-addictive game, and one that I have and likely will put a lot of hours into. The problem, though, is that all that it really has going for it is the dungeon exploring … but the dungeon exploring seems, to me at least, to be needlessly annoying. They add a lot of things that could be really annoying — anti-magic zones where your magic doesn’t work but the enemies’ does, one way doors, hidden doors, dark zones, etc — and then seem to structure them to be maximally annoying. Not, for me at least, dangerous, but instead really, really annoying. It’s not like, say, Persona 3 or Persona 4 where there’s just a lot to explore if you want to explore everything, which sometimes requires backtracking, but instead there are sections that seem to be explicitly designed to force you to backtrack over and over and over again to explore everything, while you fight random bosses that move from a challenge to, essentially, “They’re going to take off some of my HP, so I’ll have to case Circle Heal after the battle, maybe”. Admittedly, I’m still a little overlevelled, but that really shouldn’t make someone like me like the game less … and if I wasn’t overlevelled, I’d be cursing this even more.

The main issue for me in the game right now is that outside of the dungeons, there really isn’t anything else to the game. Compared to, say, Conception II, the story is too shallow to sustain interest, as is the interaction with the characters, despite them being potentially interesting (mostly because I don’t see any way to actually directly interact with them outside of canned events). The only thing that it has over Conception II is the one thing that I really hated about Conception II: the grinding. Potentially, Dungeon Travelers 2 requires grinding, as bringing new characters up to appropriate levels can take a long, long time. But I’m able to create a relatively balanced party using 5 of the 6 initial characters, a party that with my overlevelling can pretty much handle anything I need handled. And so grinding so far, for me, has simply been wandering through the dungeons to get to the end, chasing optional bosses, and doing quests (which also aren’t as interesting as Conception II’s).

The story mode is about half the actual game, and if I get that far that will probably be it for me. I don’t know if I’ll continue with it, or if I’ll put it aside for a bit to play other things. The best thing I can say about it is that it’s one of the few games I have where I can play for an hour or two and feel like I’ve accomplished something, but also can keep playing it for hours and hours without getting incredibly bored. It’s a good game, but I’m not sure it’s really the sort of game for me. So it won’t be a classic for me, is what I’m saying.