If you're curious about whether to purchase Elminage Gothic, the very first question is whether or not you like Wizardry style dungeon crawlers. If you don't know what that is, I strongly recommend playing the updated version of Wizardry first to see if you like that style of game, because Elminage Gothic is a longer and less forgiving version of that.
With that out of the way, there's a lot to love here and a fair amount to criticise. Beginning with the positives, since this is a positive review, the game is absolutely massive and sells for a ridiculous price when on offer. The main game alone delivers you 40-50 floors of content with hundreds of items and monsters, and on completing that you then get a bonus 3 dungeons that add another 30 floors to play with. The game is also super atmospheric. A lot of care has been given to the crafting of the dungeons, and they've achieved a lot with the simple 30 by 30 grid. These aren't just patterns of corridors that all neatly fit together. Caves feel like caves, with random shaped chambers interspersed between windy corridors. There's a tree where you travel in rings as you ascend it, or descend into a star of root like passages when you go below. One dungeon has you descending into a wind pit, whereby you walk around the sides until you find the hole down the central pit, and travel up by wind one way wind elevators rather than stairs. An old two floor mansion turns into a nightmare when you access it's basement and delve into a dark dungeon full of rooms crammed with bloodstained tables. And all of these are supported by 65 odd quests that, while they all fall into "go to this square in this dungeon", still add to the creepiness and setting.
Then there's the monsters, a good 10-20 in every dungeon, with some pretty impressive designs that range from comedic to downright grotesque. For example, in the ice caverns you're meeting creepy snowmen, frost giants, ice dragons, emperor penguins, and snowball riding santas. Every new floor brings new excitement to see what they're throwing at you next. This extends into the ridiculous number of item drops. Sure, most of it's trash and I've never been a fan of mass identifying loot, but I did get a twisted pleasure going to the shop later in the game to see what once held the basic sword, dagger, staff, and basic armours to be now filled up with all the stuff I've sold there. It's almost like you're building your own business.
But for all that praise, I have to give fair warning: this game is seriously hard, and not in the fun way. The thing about wizardry is many of its infamously hard systems were largely in place to extend the life of a game that was relatively short. And while Wizardry was hard, it was also fair. Sure, you'd meet a new set of creatures and be instantly wiped out, but once you knew how to deal with them, what spells to use and what things to target first, it was hard to get killed, and even if you did lose somebody, it wasn't that much of a slog to get back to where you were. Having a master ninja that has a chance to behead one of your characters is fine in moderation, but Elminage Gothic doesn't do moderation. It's no less tedious getting 40+ minutes into the depths of a dungeon only to have your healer clipped by the 1/20 chance to instant kill off a glancing blow than it is taking four steps into the third dungeon, coming up against 3 crabs, and seeing your whole front line decimated because they also got off their 1/20 chance to instant kill on a tickle hit. And this is the easy stuff. Those master ninjas have a 35% to instant kill you on every hit. But wait, they also duel wield, so they get two chances every attack. BUT WAIT! Because they also get two attack round for every one of yours, so they actually get 4 chances every attack with a 35% chance to instant kill who they hit. Oh, and they also have max range so they can hit your back row. Did I forget to mention they have ridiculously high agility, so they also are very likely to get to attack before one of your team can answer? Oh, and they can also come in packs of 4-8, meaning they can potentially have 32 chances every attack round with a 35% chance on hit to instant kill whoever they attack. Oh, they can also chance to appear hidden so you can't even attack them back. And if all that isn't enough, let's also have them appear in a dungeon where half the floor is covered in a passive silence field meaning you can't even cast your escape spell, assuming the character with it can even do so before they've decimated your entire group. And let's not even talk about being ambushed. You're not even 50% through the main game when these things crop up. By the time you're in the final dungeon, you're facing monsters with 40-50 Agiilty when the max your fastest race can get is maybe 24, all of whom get anywhere from 2-8 attacks per attack round, each blow of which is proccing all manner of debuffs assuming the person getting mauled isn't pummelled straight into the afterlife. Sure, there are items to mitigate instant wipes, but when so much of the game has been intentionally designed to have you roll the dice on every encounter on whether you just wipe out while spending a minute watching the 50 attacks play out against you before your max agility halfling can even raise a finger, all this does is encourage save scumming -- and thank god you can, because the game would be nigh unplayable otherwise.
At the time of posting this review I have 178 hours played, but my save file was only 140. That's almost 40 hours of non-stop: step forward, get into encounter, be destroyed, go to main town, quit to main menu, load game, go to dungeon screen, load current party, step forward, be destroyed, repeat until you face something manageable. Even if you know the mechanics through and through, build the right classes with the right races and farm for the appropriate gear and materials to forge the correct stats, there's still no way of overcoming much of this in any sane way when you're also having to deal with the Wizardry fun of resurrections that fail. And this really does kill the experience some, because it's difficult to truly appreciate the atmosphere and setting when such a large portion of your time is spent jumping in and out to reload from the main menu.
In summary, know what you're getting in for. The main story is likely going to take you anywhere from 70-100 hours depending on how experienced you are with this type of game -- a ridiculously good return for what this is priced at. Should you then go for the final tower, 20 floors of pure hell where your Teleport spell is MIA and even Miracle won't help you in most encounters, you'll be rewarded with a further 60-80 hours of ... I want to say entertainment, but the mental scars would probably disagree with that. Needless to say, if you don't already curse out of habit going into this, you will be by the end.
