I'm not going to outright slam this game, because I did have SOME fun with it, but I agree with SweetGhostlyNight's review on it.
I just beat it today, because I had to play it in bits and pieces here, due to my work schedule.
At first, I thought the difficult was a bit high when I started the game and found that i had to somehow avoid getting hit by a rabbit's arrows.
I ranted about it in the discussions, but eventually overcame it.
It turns out that, once you get a good idea of how to proceed through dungeons and their challenges, all you have to do is play through one once to see which ones you failed or passed, and if you already passed one, like with not getting hit by a swine's projectile attacks, you can go through on your next play through it without having to worry about playing through a dungeon as carefully again. So in a way, it becomes relatively easier to deal with challenges. Also, try NOT to get too attached to some legendary weapon or armor because with how you will almost always be underleveled compared to the current dungeons you're running through, sometimes, you'll want to take advantage of a gold or a silver, or even a brown rarity weapon to kill some monsters faster.
in some dungeons, like the highest level swamp stage, some of the enemies can get annoying if you just try to run past them like I did on my second run through it. My first time through it, I played carefully, because as soon as I got hit by something, I failed a challenge, so exited, came back, and just inched forward, throughout that "floor" little by little, spamming spells (I normally just use two, but used three for this floor), which lock onto enemies in the distance, to a certain extent. I hear something new spawn, I fall back, hit them with spells, and move forward again until it says I killed everything for that challenge (without taking any damage). Some of my dungeon runs, I would complete every challenge by playing carefully like that, but the ones you'll find yourself failing are the ones you'd never guess you had to do. You might know that you have to finish a boss off with SOME kind of special attack, but you won't know which weapon's special attack until you beat the boss and realize you have to run it again.
Someone, somewhere, said that this game "respects the player's time", which I 100% disagree.
Any game where your challenges are not known from the FIRST run until you happen to fail or pass one in a 10 floor +boss encounter setup, and expects you to complete the entire run before making them all known isn't exactly respecting a player's time. With how much you have to return to OLD dungeons to play higher level versions of them, that is just artificial bloat to a game's play time. When you have to go through the routine task of sifting through all of your garbage loot to deconstruct it (for money), and consider what is probably worth keeping for later, that's business as usual for any RPG or ARPG, but this game only has so many weapon types, all melee weapons, and the only ranged gameplay you will get is with how you'd utilize three different bow attacks and a number of spells.
You get two items with a 4 second cooldown that are just extra "dodge" charges, basically. I used some gloves to increase my attack speed, and made sure I used armor like a "scarf" to reduce the cooldown of my dodge so that a perk involving it would give me extra attack speed after a dodge.
The gloves plus the attack speed from a dodge was nice with any longsword (or the other longsword type - they're both pretty much the same). The extra dodges made it so you could keep a small speed boost while waiting for your gloves to cool down, and I WANNA say the boost from dodging stacks with the gloves, but I'm not sure.
Oh, and early in the game, I tried to be sneaky. The armor that reduces your cooldown for "attack" magic... Magus Robes or whatever...
That, plus some perks, plus Hajime's ally skill, etc...
Don't think you'll get 100% cooldown reduction if you reach or exceed 100% "RT" for attack skills.
Nope, that stuff doesn't stack in a way that makes it so you can just instantly pop up one spell after another and just rapid fire them.
My use of the terminology, "cooldown reduction" isn't quite what this "RT" junk is, so just try to be happy with whatever you can get. Use magus robes, Hajime's ally skill, and a perk here and there like I did, and you at least get relatively fast cooldowns. You can use the wand (icon looks like a spellbook), the inferno spell, and the spell with the mandragora icon. The inferno sucks them all together, and the other two spells can stun. One with a chance to stun and one that stuns outright. All three do aoe damage. Just learn to manage your cooldowns and use your weakest heal potion, since it's the fastest and use the one that's a lot better, but has a slightly bigger cooldown.
My usual kit involves both heal potions, inferno, and the wand. I only use a third spell in place of my big heal when I want to clear enemies as fast as possible, especially if I want to avoid getting hit by their ranged attacks.
Oh, and ranged attacks... Rabbits are jerks in this game. Some shoot one arrow. Some shoot scatter arrows. Some shoot rapid fire arrows. Some shoot poison ones. I think there's one that fires fire arrows, but I forgot. If you encounter a room with a lot of them that spawn all at once, inferno them together. It sucks them together and then detonates. While they are all getting sucked together, hit them with other spells or melee them to make sure you help inferno kill them fast. Swine are jerks too. Especially the second one you encounter, which roots you in place if you get hit by the blue goo their bombs leave. Fairies are jerks. The first kind you meet wall you off in a letter "C" shaped wall, and you can only exit out of it one way. Mage enemies will try to hit you while you are walled off. My best advice is to roll toward a fairy and beat it down asap. The fire ones aren't as bad with walling you off, but their walls explode and can burn you.
Octopi blind you if you allow them to enlarge then explode on you, so make sure you are killing them fast.
Poison and fire are helpful to use against enemies, but if you get a fast weapon (like one of the two sword types or a fist weapon) with "sky bolt", a +5% perk and a +10% perk on the same weapon might not seem like a big chance to proc, but it procs a lot more than it would seem.
Also, it seems like they proc more if you stand still instead of just holding the direction TOWARD and enemy as you melee it to death. Skybolt seems to be pretty strong against a lot of enemies, and has a slight aoe range, so it can hit multiple enemies.
Bosses all have the same mechanics when it comes to their life bar - they retreat to the middle/top of the screen to summon adds/minions and they're invincible for a short while.
Those big slow weapons like a katana, a halberd, are all okay, but a sword or fist really is fast with taking out bosses.
If it's a fox boss, using a weapon that does more damage to foxes DOES make a difference, provided the level of the weapon isn't too low, in comparison to some higher damage weapon that doesn't have a bonus damage perk for foxes.
Remember: A brown weapon can still be worth using if it normally has a static perk that increases damage done to certain monster types and you stack it with some random perk by spending a little money.
Having a weapon with all of that stuff stacked against a monster type can sometimes be better than one that is a multipurpose weapon with fire/poison/dark mist/skybolt.
The romance stuff in the game... I liked Risa for her ranged stuff at first, but when I found that I prefer spells more than bows, I decided to go with Hajime.
Hajime helps with attack spell cooldowns, and if you give him a ring later, I think the cooldown reduction is a little boosted, along with everything else.
I played a female character and gave Hajime a ring, just for the buff.
