So I picked up
Beyond the Labyrinth for 3DS so I'd have some jrpg-ish thing to play on the J-3DS I picked up.
It's by Tri-ace and more specifically by the guy who directed Valkyrie Profile 1/2 and Resonance of Fate. It's an Etrian Odyssey style billion floors, super hard as fuck, nothing but walking around dungeon floors in first person and fighting blobs game, but since it's Tri-ace and specifically this guy, the battle system is fairly deep and very original.
Basically during battle you can do nothing besides hit ATTACK. There's no magic, no skills, there are some items but they are rare. You just hit ATTACK with your 4 person party. But what you CAN do is adjust the strength of your attack which affects where you end up on the turn queue after the attack. You start out with just ATTACK 1 and ATTACK 2. 2 has a longer wait after the attack than 1. When you go to level up spots you can use your pool of XP from battle to buy the next ATTACK for a character or put the XP into pumping a character's max HP. So I just bought ATTACK 3 for one of my characters and it's a lot stronger but it has a looong wait time to attack again after.
But what makes the combat interesting and makes you use the turn queue is that the game has a BLUE>RED>GREEN>BLUE triangle element system. The enemies are from those 3 colors and at level up spots you can change the element of each member of your party between the 3 colors. If you have an element you are superior to (ie, blue person attacks a red monster or blue monster attacks a red player) you do 2x damage AND the damage done goes into an HP pool in the top corner based on the color of the person hit (so in that case you'd get a RED number in the top corner). The next time a player or monster of that color (RED) has a turn they absorb the HP number and heal it.
Also you have no other way to heal in the game in-battle or out. So you depend on absorbing from the HP pool.
So this makes a complicated game of hitting enemy weak elements and absorbing the HP in to heal and not letting the enemies absorb the HP back by making strategic use of the turn queue.
The turn queue also keeps going after battle. So whatever it was at with whatever wait times the characters were in post-attack, they start the next battle the same way. You also pick your battles as there are no random encounters and you can start a fight with an enemy within range and if there are other enemies nearby who will notice they'll come and join the fight as well.
You can checkpoint save every floor at the very start, but you can only real save (which fully heals everyone) at save points which are a few hours apart.
Also gameplay-aside, the narrative is kind of funny because (intro plot twist spoilers)
spoiler (click to show/hide)
it's MST3K where you are 3 dudes and 1 girl playing an online dungeon MMO game and apparently your game connects to some other world where this ditzy girl is lost and sees you as a floating cube or spirit or something (think Baten Kaitos) and asks you to help her climb up. You can't actually communicate to her because you're just a floating screen, but you and the other 3 are constantly chatting as you move along and the girl does dumb things.
For instance the girl will see a door and start being amazed and the text chat will pop up with stuff like:
Guy A: lol, it's a door get over it
Guy B: haha, do they not have doors in this world?
Girl A: If I had to push open doors like that all the time I'd never go outside
The 4 players aren't in any sort of danger. It's not like .hack where THEY CAN DIE. No they're just sitting down at their game screen playing a videogame, so they don't really get serious and care about what's going on. So it's a lot of joking, especially making fun of the girl because she ditzy.
It's an interesting narrative concept and it spices up the dungeon crawling a bit
So yeah, it seems solid so far. The music is nice Sakuraba. The framerate sucks though. Probably runs at like 15fps in 3D and 25fps in 2D. Also the girl has THE WORST ghosting I've seen on 3DS with her white clothes on darker backgrounds. 3D effect is pretty janky.
