I found out about Dungeon Encounters the way I typically find out about a particularly exceptional indie game on Itch: all of a sudden my Twitter feed was filled with friends hyping it up, and I mean going buckwild over this game. At first, I actually did think it was a particularly exceptional Itch title, based on how the game was being described: a barebones, completely minimalist Rogue-light dungeon-crawler where you basically pick a party out of random adventurers-in-waiting and delve into the dungeons below, getting increasingly more powerful with each new run.
So imagine my surprise when finally I go to buy the game, and not only is it not on Itch, it’s a game published by Square-Enix, of all companies. That’s super weird! You’ll never guess what I found out next: Dungeon Encounters was directed by none other than Hiroyuki Ito, the original designer of the Active Time Battle system, as well as the director of Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy IX, AND Final Fantasy XII. Huh! This seems like a lot of information that would get people extremely excited about this game, and yet I had to dig for it! Extremely, completely weird!!
HEY DID I MENTION THAT THE MUSIC IS COMPOSED BY NOBUO UEMATSU, WHO HAD PREVIOUSLY SAID IN 2021 THAT HIS LAST MAJOR COMPOSITION WORK HAD BEEN ON MISTWALKER STUDIOS’ FANTASIAN? NO? YEAH DUDE IT’S TRUE, NOBUO UEMATSU JUST FUCKIN SHREDS IN THIS GAME. WILD HOW YOU DIDN’T HEAR ABOUT ANY OF THAT HUH.
I really want to just talk about this game, because it’s truly phenomenal and any hype you’ve heard about it – probably exclusively via word of mouth – is justified. But I genuinely can’t get past how terribly this game was marketed. Square-Enix basically didn’t talk about it at all. And Dungeon Encounters didn’t seem to be the only game they released last year with that problem. While their tentpole MMO received plenty of – also-deserved – attention, single-player games like NEO: The World Ends with You and Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars got basically fuck-all. Okay, that’s maybe uncharitable for NTWEWY, as the anime remake of the first game ties into it, but also I watched that anime, and nothing in there said “yo there’s a NEW GAME coming out you should play it.” So, you know, uh, grain of salt there.
Actually it’s funny, Voice of Cards still shows as “TBA” on Square-Enix’s upcoming releases list lmao. Game’s been out for at least a month.
Dungeon Encounters strikes me as being an epochal RPG. It’s definitely the best one Square-Enix has released in years, that’s for sure, but beyond that, it feels more like the mechanical counterpart to a game like Disco Elysium than games like Tales of Arise or Bravely Default II. It requires a lot of high-level strategy, and this in turn feeds into the player’s internally-generated narrative. Here’s an example of what I mean:
Last night, one of my party members got petrified, and I had just spent a bunch of money on upgrading their armor and weaponry. You have to leave petrified players behind, so before I dumped the gentleman off I uh
I took all the gear back. Leaving them naked, stony, and surrounded by monsters on the fifth floor.
I later unpetrified the guy, but uh, I think he’s still there, still naked, fleshy and still surrounded by monsters on the fifth floor. Now: do I go back and get him? I probably should, but I’m further into the dungeon now, facing tougher monsters. Going back to get him right this second would entail leaving one of my other party members behind, which is just shifting the problem to someone else. Not to mention: monsters respawn when you move between floors, and fighting some of the stronger ones with a diminished party is risky business when the goal is to not die for as long as possible.
While I’m trying to figure out if I should rescue the naked adventurer, dude’s still up there naked. The longer I wait to rescue him, the more I’m starting to feel that good old fashioned sense of embarrassment and anxiousness that comes with facing someone you fucked with unintentionally. Mechanically, like, I’m sure he wouldn’t even blink if I went back in a month and picked him up, but this is the story I’m creating.
I think the reason the fact of this game and what is essentially its anti-marketing campaign touched a nerve with me is that, like – okay, they released this game, and barely three months later Square-Enix’s President, Yosuke Matsuda, comes out with his New Years letter talking just massive amounts of shit on “people who ‘play to have fun,’” lamenting about this nebulous second category of “underserved” player, someone whose motivation is “play to contribute,” not being given any incentive to make assets and shit for the company, essentially unpaid up until now, and saying “THIS is why we’re doing NFT shit in our games.”
I’m no CEO, but it seems to me like, if you want players to “contribute” to games, putting out and supporting something like Dungeon Encounters is a great place to start. Have you thought of that? Because of its barebones structure, players can, if they want, actually role-play, creating stories of their own and building up a shared mythology in the dungeons under the Academy. But that’s obviously not profitable, so I guess I can see why they spent no money on marketing it and haven’t even so much as glanced at it since October.
Anyway, go get Dungeon Encounters, because aside from being published seemingly on accident by Square-Enix, the game is flawless.