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Square Enix has unveiled a new “dungeon crawling RPG” called Dungeon Encounters, and announced that it will be released in just two weeks on October 14, for PlayStation 4, Steam, and Nintendo Switch.
During a special video presentation at the Tokyo Game Show 2021, Square Enix producer Hiroaki Kato and director Hiroyuki Ito revealed a game that doesn’t resemble the JRPG format that Square Enix helped make famous around the world. Players walk along a narrow grid, as if exploring a dungeon map rather than the dungeon itself. The counters on the screen indicate the coordinates of the players in the dungeon, as well as the number of spaces they have discovered. Exploring an entire floor unlocks the next and grants the character additional “ability points”.
We’ve got our hands on Dungeon Encounters already, saying some will be put off by the no-frills looks, but “if you’re the type of player that’s drawn to combat in a simple yet deep way, you should definitely give this one a try. “
Movement through the dungeon isn’t necessarily linear, as characters can use abilities to jump out of the way. The trailer showed one character jumping two squares to the left across a space, while another could move like a knight does on a chessboard, ignoring walls and jumping in an “L” shape.
Of course, dungeons are not without their dangers. Traps can drop characters on lower floors, some spaces can empty heroes’ gold pockets, and of course, monsters are waiting to fight. The combat appears to be turn-based but with limited animation: both heroes and enemies were represented as simple portraits, and attacks took the form of colored arrows and overlays on the screen. There appears to be a wide variety of characters in the game, both good and bad, with a number of less-than-humanoid characters featured among the trailer’s “allied” lineup.
Kato described Ito, a Square Enix veteran whose career dates back to the 16-bit era, as an “expert in game systems design” and the trailer emphasized strategy above all. As the onscreen headlines say, “Don’t feel. Think about it.”
Diamond Feit is a writer / podcaster in Osaka, Japan who uses Twitter and Twitch as his feitclub.
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