Scarmonde

I would consider Scarmonde to be a really "bread and butter" 2020s 8 bit dungeon crawler: Pacing is good and there seems to be a lot of variety on how to build your team. One of the more enjoyable aspects is to figure out how to make your team/one character as broken as possible. For me, I half accidently built one character way too good around the halfway of the FULL playthrough and while I enjoyed watching that character do 90% of the work, the game did end up being qutie repetitive. It would be ok if it wasn´t so hard to escape random encounters as it is in this game, which is by far the biggest downside of the game. The other part is that when you do have that broken character(s) in your team, even the final boss is quite easy. Still, I enjoyed it and this is a good game for this genre that has a lot going for it. It was much longer than I expected!

Neat little game with fun battle mechanics. NES FF era aesthetics. Nice spell effects and animations. If you like thinking about party comps and builds and like the 8-bit presentation, this game is for you. The only 'weak' element of this game is the story, which is a by-the-books excuse plot. There's also a randomly generated dungeon you can play instead of the main game, and there's post game content too.

I was recommended this game because I liked Crescent Tower (and if you like this game consider checking out Crescent Tower). I love me a job/class system, and 12 options was pretty fun. I enjoyed the game from beginning until the final boss... but the postgame is kinda tedious, I might not even finish the postgame because it feels kinda like it's dragging on, but I enjoyed the base game enough to recommend it based on that alone. There are some things I wish would be changed though. 1. Sometimes enemies bypass what should be a 0% chance to be inflicted with a status ailment (the final boss does this intentionally and is balanced around it, but I feel like other bosses and enemies aren't working as intended, but I could be wrong, it's very annoying intended or not though) 2. The battles are very slow, even with a 4x speed modifier it's too slow, 4x feels like it should be the base speed, and it should have options 2x, 3x, or 4x that. 3. As someone who likes to track their runtime... the game's clock runs way too fast, like 3-4 times faster than actual time.