Exploring the map. Doesn’t this look like a beautiful world worth saving?
Like most dungeon crawlers, Labyrinth of Zangetsu has a story, but you’d be forgiven if you can’t remember what it is while playing. A plague called “The Ink of Ruin” is turning people into madmen or demons. With the land overrun, Ido stands as the last holdout and calls for warriors, mages, and priests – and perhaps even more unscrupulous types - to fight back against the plague. But all of this is just a setup for classic Wizardry-style dungeon crawling.
The first thing you’ll notice is the hand-drawn artwork. You won’t find anime here, by design. The stark black-and-white style brings the ink theme to the forefront. The character portrait style fits in nicely (apart from several anime-style DLC portraits) with the overall look and feel, but the number of different portraits is too limited.
There are two difficulty levels: normal, where your team transports back to Ido on a party wipe, and hardcore, where the fallen team’s corpses remain on the tile where they died until you bring a new party around to pick up them and their equipment. Considering that resurrection costs five hundred times the character level (and double that upon failing!), hardcore does provide a challenge. The real difficulty, of course, rests in how you build your party and how much you stock up on supplies.
Character creation
Creating a new conscript is straightforward: Choose a race, roll for bonus points, and select a class. There are six races to choose from when creating a character and their strengths and weaknesses align with what you would expect. Humans are decent all-arounders with average stats apart from higher charisma. Dwarves are physically strong and make for good fighters and clerics. Elves have high intelligence, making them excellent wizards and sages.
Three non-standard races are also available. Cavegrams are creatures who live underground and have extraordinary luck – an apparent reference to hobbits or gnomes (they are called hobbits in Japanese text). Their high dexterity makes them great for starting as thieves. Nekomata are catlike people well-suited for samurai. Finally, Half-Oni have the highest physical attributes of any race, making them excellent front-line fighters of any kind. They also receive a small bonus to regeneration each round, but the limit on maximum attributes means they cannot become Sages.
Likewise, there are nine classes to choose from, and each has minimum stat requirements to join. The base classes are Warrior, Cleric, Wizard, and Thief. Monk and Samurai are advanced classes: with enough bonus points, characters can qualify for either of those classes even at creation. Finally, Paladin, Ninja, and Sage are the special classes. You’ll need to advance your characters a bit before they have the required stats for those.
Character screen – look at what 22 bonus points can get you: Class change to Paladin at level 6!
Alignment
Character alignment is one place where Labyrinth of Zangetsu does try something new. Upon character creation, after choosing a race you choose an alignment for the character as well. Unlike most games in the genre, parties can contain a mix of good, neutral, and evil characters. Healing effects work more strongly on good parties, while evil parties receive a bonus to damage – and a chance that resurrection will not work. Mixing character alignments cancels out these bonuses.
Classes can be of any alignment as well – even paladins or assassins – but some class abilities are restricted by alignment. Your evil-aligned paladin won’t be able to use holy attacks against enemies, after all. The developer has hinted that he may add additional abilities for these “off brand” aligned classes in a future update or DLC (more on that below).
Leveling
As a “classic” dungeon crawler each character will increase hit points and gain (or lose) a few attribute points when leveling up. Every few levels each class receives a special ability as well. Some of these special abilities have alignment or minimum stat requirements. Each class has a maximum of 20 levels with the exception of Sage which has 30.
Provided your character has the minimum stats required, you can change classes at any time. The first time you change into a new class, the character will reset to 1 in the new class and lose two to three points in each stat. Moving back into a previous class also costs one or two points, so think carefully about what you want the character to focus on.
Exploring and Fighting
When your party leaves Ido, you can travel to any dungeon that’s been opened up to you. Dungeons are all standard square grids with enemies to fight, traps to avoid, secrets to discover, and NPCs to talk with. There are no wandering random encounters. Certain squares are covered in a smoky ink containing a random group of enemies to fight. These encounters have a chance to be avoided if your team sneaks through them, though, and they reset each time you leave the map. You may occasionally run into “neutral” enemies as well and actions can move your character alignments toward good or evil.
A typical battle screen. Get used to hitting that “repeat” button.
The grid is auto mapped, and while you technically aren’t shown which direction your party is facing unless you cast Orientation, a single move in any direction makes it obvious where your party is moving. Darkness effects also prevent the auto map from appearing.
The battles themselves are nothing new: Each fight is round based, and you can set each of your characters to attack, defend, use magic, use a skill, or flee. Some enemy attacks will “corrupt” your character, reducing their maximum hit points until you can return to town and cleanse them in the temple.
After each fight a locked and possibly trapped chest will appear which your group can attempt to unlock, disarm, or bash open. And you’ll be opening a lot of chests since the market in Ido has only the most basic of supplies to offer.
Negatives
At launch the game had a bug with not auto-saving for some non-English versions, especially severe since there is no manual saving. The easiest way to avoid this bug is to use the English version of the game, but a patch is being released to fix it.
Like many JRPG dungeon crawlers, the UI is console focused, most clearly seen in the default controls. Thankfully, all inputs can be remapped. The inventory screen also suffers because of this.
Each character has indicators for whether you have a weapon or armor that can be equipped in equipment slots. It is supposed to tell you whether the available equipment is better than what is currently being used. Unfortunately, the indicator wasn’t especially useful as it didn’t distinguish whether another character already had that item equipped. It also doesn’t take into account any special effects the item might have.
Auto mapping is controversial. My preferred method is that used by the Bard's Tale Trilogy remasters, where the auto map can be toggled on and off, and more map features appear depending on spells cast. This game needed a boost in this area.
A bestiary of enemies encountered would have been nice. A bestiary that progressively gives you more information about enemies as you defeat more of them would have been nicer. The unusual enemy types made it difficult to know whether a spell or attack was especially effective or ineffective against them.
The first map. Sorry if spoiling this ruins the game for you. Who knows, maybe I left a secret for you to find.
Dev secrets
For now, information like class guides is extremely limited. In fact, the only known game guide is on a single Japanese language site – but thanks to a little known program called Internet Explorer and Bing Translate, all of the site’s secrets were mine! The developer has been active on Steam providing more detailed information about the game and his plans for the game’s future. That includes a DLC with an additional dungeon and tweaks to the current balance.
He has also provided insights into the game’s development: he felt that many players are turned off by the “complexity” and anime style of many modern dungeon crawlers, so he wanted to bring create a game with a straightforward gameplay. Also, the game contains several homages to D&D, including d20 attack rolls (all of this is behind-the-scenes).
In addition, there are many puns and wordplays in the original Japanese games that were not carried over into the English version. For instance, the game’s name for Dwarves is “Daruma,” which are a type of Buddhist monk that are often depicted in a dwarf-like appearance in good luck charms.
Conclusion
Labyrinth of Zangetsu is tailor-made for those looking for a classic dungeon-crawl experience with some modern elements. If you’ve played most games in this genre, you may feel that this doesn’t bring enough that’s new to be worthwhile. Completion times can range between 20 – 40 hours, depending on how much time you spend maximizing characters. There’s not much replay value unless you want to try out different classes.
