Originally Posted by
monroeski
Finally finished Dungeon Village. One of Kairosoft's best games IMO, you can tell they learned a lot about what works and what doesn't in this type of game after Epic Space Story. Though all of Kairosoft's games have a ton of similarities, ESS was the first game they made in this "adventurers exploring from a village" type game (as opposed to the facility management type or sports team ownership type games they made before).
In Dungeon Village you basically run a village that adventurers run through while on their way to the field to kill monsters or complete quests; you do the layout of the town, type and quantity of stores available, etc. You can also give adventurers presents (weapons, armor, accessories, and items that heal/boost stats) that help them complete quests. As you gain money and town points you can purchase new items, buildings, etc. When you hit certain thresholds (x quests completed, y income in a month, have a restaurant built, etc.) your town levels up and you get access to new things, and ultimately you can expand the town's border a couple of times. There's also a cauldron you eventually get that you can throw items into to gain elements and create new items.
There are three main downsides I can think of. First, the two town level ups that require income per month are REALLY hard to get; forums seem to have help with those as a very common question and I myself was nowhere close to having the required money even though I met all other criteria for the level up. Fortunately there's an exploit you can use to take care of it, though it breaks the game a little; if you wait until a lot of adventurers are in town instead of in the field you can build something in front of the gate so they can't leave town and instead just run around spending money.
Second, the game ends in year 15 of game time but I felt like I was just repeating the same steps over and over and over after 7 or 8 or so. All there is to do is repeat the same quests and try to build up reputation so more adventurers will come to town, but even the adventurer list ran dry around year 9 or 10 so after that it was just a slog.
Lastly, and this ties in with the second one a bit, the items just didn't seem as exciting as in previous Kairosoft games. When I got the best sword I didn't even outfit most of my adventurers with it because it only offered an attack bonus of +4 or so over the next weapon but the next weapon also gave something like a +30 magic bonus. I had probably unlocked less than half of the classes in the game by the time I hit town level 5 and unlocked the Kairobot class, which is easily the best in the game, so after that I didn't even care about unlocking things. By contrast, Epic Space Story was perfectly times so that the first time you played you got to this big volcano right near the end, just in time for you to maybe get the right equipment to break in and clear a few levels before the time limit came up (you get there much quicker in new game +). Much weaker reward system late game in Dungeon Village.
Overall, it's still a niche game, so if you're not into the Kairosoft type of game this won't change your mind. I AM into Kairosoft type games, though, so I loved it.
