Nah mate, this isn't game about your family reunion.

I guess I am not going to buy this game yet, and will wait for the first sale to come after the game is working in WINE. (If it worked, I actually would have bought it, as it iappears to be in my favorite genre.)

In the meantime, maybe I'll just buy Tangledeep (which has been recommended to me in multiple threads) the next time it goes on sale.

(What WINE version did you use?)

Blues, please check the reviews.. LePeureux strikes again.

just ignore him, haters going to hate.

Not going into full details, but there's a job system. Each girl will gain access to different jobs you can unlock which help define available skills. You can also opt to level-down to gain new points to unlock different skills, etc.

This looks interesting.
I have played many JRPGs but no dungeon crawlers so far.
I think trails in the sky 3 would be the clothest thing I have played.
I love all trails games by the way.

I want to ask about the genaral game system regarding exploration and combat:
- Happens everything on the world map or do you enter a combat screen when engaging an enemy?
- about pacing:
1.) Is everything turn based (moving and combat)?
2.) Do you and the enemies walk around in real time but you enter turn based combat when you touch an enemy ( like the trails games but with grid movement)
3.) Is everything real time ( like legend of Grimrock, I have not played it but I saw the video )
- Are there any survival mechanic outside of hitpoints? ( Like your chars have to eat or they have to treat illness or injuries other than just using a potion or spell )
- Are the world map and enemies generated randomly or is it always the same?
- How difficult is the game? I have much experiance with turn based JRPGs but not with dungeon crawlers.

The videos or screenshots in the shop often do not show much about actual gameplay for many games.
I am good in turn based games and real time with pause, but I am bad in action games. Moving and clicking on actions, items or abilities all the time like in Legend of Grimrock would be nothing for me.
I do not mind a complex class and skill system as long as it makes sense. So a fighter should have high strengh and a big sword and a white mage has high int and healing spells. Final fantasy II would be an example for a system that sound sound good in theory but it was the most unituitive BS you had to do to get a good char ( I mean FF2 for NES, not FF5 for SNES that has been called FF2 in the western world sometimes).

-Don't mind this space... someone answered another post before me and explained it better.-


I have been interested in this game though GOG seems to dislike the idea of VNs or anything that looks like them. Difficult as heck to actually get some games on here because of certain perceptions on non-western style games.

I played it a bit yesterday, and answer to most of your questions are obvious right from the start. Encounters are mostly random, and not visible before they happen. With few rare exceptions
- event points are visible on the map and 3d dungeon view, and they frequently include a battle
- I have found two stationary monster groups that are visible in the dungeon too
- the "nightmare" encounters are special in many ways Most of things are turn based. You move in square grid, battles will happen (or not) when you move to a new square. Battles are turn-based too, you have queue of characters and monsters based on initiative (AGI) and they will take turns. A bit similar to Trails combat (and many many other JRPGs), minus the random turn bonuses and s-breaks to take advantage of them.

Nightmares hunt you through the dungeon in realtime. Didn't notice any. Any debilitation from combat stays in combat and is cured after you win. Except for hp and sp, those have to be regenerated by consumables, healing spells, or automatic full restore by visiting a city. Map is always the same. Encounters are generated radomly from the fixed set of possible monsters for current area. I have played too little to answer this reliably. On normal difficulty, I explored most of the first area (City streets) without too much grinding, killed the boss there (with some trouble, but on first attempt) and opened a second area (and my team got replaced by complete pushovers with no equipment so I got my ass handed to me, barely managed to escape from the first fight). I guess I'll have to go look for my original team before venturing there, but it was too late yesterday. The class system is not too complex. Stat growth seems to be determined by chosen class, no randomness. You have option to respec to another class and continue to gain power, similar to wizardry 7. Which likely means it will be hard to screw yourself permanently - even if you make bad choices, just delevel and try again.

Thank you

I thought random encounters with invisible enemies are a thing of the past.
It was normal in the old SNES and PS games, newest game that had it were Final Fantasy X/X2.
I really liked them when they came out, but when I played them recently they were still very good but having random encounters every few steps when you just want to go from A to B was annoying.

Maybe I just got used to the style of trails or Xenosaga in the meantime.
Anyway, I will give it a try. I have not played a game that can be described as "bloody fairy tale" yet.

Oh, some more questions:
- Judging by your post, there are many characters but only the ones in your current party get exp.
Is that correct? Because of that reason I have never finished FF6, you have to level up too many chars.
- Is it relevant for story/dialogue/cut scenes which characters are in your active party?

Personally, when it comes to RPGs, I find it preferable to the most common alternative, in which enemies move in real-time, turning the game into an action game.

Just a correction: The SNES game that has been called FF2 is actually a version of FF4, not FF5. (Note that this is *not* the original FF4, as it's been simplified; on the other hand, it isn't EasyType either, as that version still has other differences.)

I actually like the idea behind the Famicom FF2's growth system; it's just that there are some flaws in implementation (like the fact that heavy armor is a nasty trap, and the system isn't transparent enough); the SaGa series would later take some of the ideas, but implement them better. (Note that SaGa 1's growth systems, however, are completely different.)

There is at least one item that reduces random encounter rate, available very early (DLC, but included in GOG version. It looked way too OP to be available that early, about 20x more def than anything else available, so I didn't claim it yet). Pretty standard for the genre, you can again look at Trails universe where you get Scent/Haze quartz to regulate how often you want to fight. The fights do get a little annoying, but with autofight and speedup (hold RB) they only take few seconds. I didn't get to a point where I have more chars than can fit in my party. The screenshots look like you can have at least 5 active fighters. This is Idea factory so if I use Neptunia for comparison, you should be able to fit at least as much chars into support slots... 10 chars is probably more than you can recruit over the whole game. My guess is that leaving some fighters behind won't be a problem here. Of course there is that class-change/delevel stuff where you deliberately lower level of one (or more) of your fighters to gain more power in the long run... See previous. So far story dictated who will be in my active party, not the other way around (my previous party rushed off to some rescue, I was left behind with significantly weaker party and I suppose I'll have to go rescue the rescuers. Mainly from themselves and their blood rage. Just a slightly educated guess).

There is one hidden character, if you don't recruit her, you won't get her events.

*Eyes avatar pic suspiciously* :P

P.S. I also love Golgo 13.

On topic, interesting release of an old-school style dungeon crawling rpg.

I currently use 3.11 with and without staging, and 3.0.1 without staging. I also use both with or without wine-nine (I use amdgpu, which supports this in mesa). In the next few days, I expect to update this to more recent versions (3.0.2/3.12). I used to maintain these myself, but now I use gentoo's standard wine-vanilla, wine-any, and wine-d3d9 packages for this (with only one patch that disables soft links outside of the wine prefix). I try to run all of my wine games with "stable" wine, formerly also with wine-nine, but that seems broken of late, As I mentioned in my post, I haven't yet thrown everything possible at this game, so maybe I'll have something better to report later. Or not. In fact, I've found that 3.11 doesn't actually crash, but instead pops up a confusing dialog box ("unable to create a custom presenter"). 3.11+staging changes this to a specific complaint about playing movies ("Movie\Movie.cpp (113): MPFAIL : Unknown error 80004001"), so I will probably play around with movie-related stuff for a while. Wine's movie playing is one of its weakest points (gstreamer almost always makes things worse, for example, to the point where I have a script I usually run to strip gstreamer out as much as possible, without having to compile it out and have yet another set of wines to test everything against).