Advent Crossroad

Pretty decent dungeon crawler. I'd recommend it as a good "First Dungeon Crawler" for someone that's never played one. It has a small bit of jank when it comes to controls and menus, but if you can look past that, there is a little bit to enjoy here. The best portion of the game is the last quarter of the game. The last dungeons of the game, when your party is fully leveled up and equipped with abilities is the best part of the game.

Imagine one of the older Megaten games but without the 20 hours of grinding and that's what you have in Advent Crossroad. I personally loved all the items that let you skip the grind but for those who want truly beefy characters the options are there with accessories that let you gain extra stats on level up to leveling up faster or even gaining extra TP. Not to mention several skills that let you basically farm like no ones business.

The story was about as neat and contained as an early Megaten game as well. With some places where you can make a choice in how the MC responds which doesn't have an impact beyond characterization. I honestly wish we got a little more options in this department or even events or side missions to flesh out the MC a bit more but this might have created the bloat I despise in modern Atlus titles.

If you are like me and have been completely let down with modern SMT and Persona titles due to the obsession with appealing to "modern audiences" then this game is for you. It's short, it's sweet and I hope we get more like it in the future. Great call back to when video games weren't over regulated and moderated to Tartarus and back.

Very simple, short (5-15 hours, I screwed around a ton and my playtime was still 13 hours), retro feeling (PS1) dungeon crawler. It does actually have a story/plot and the ending basically wraps everything up but uhh... I just got done playing the game and I already forgot the character's names so don't worry about that. Conversely the developer's follow up work Core Crossing is somewhat more substantial (at least since it has character/party creation there's about 100 times more replay value if you're into that kind of thing) so if you're looking for more than a weekend from your games check that out instead.

I'd be hard pressed to legitimately call anything in this game unique or original, but (the dungeon crawling RPG subgenre is extremely mature at this point so...) I had a pretty good time with the "scan" system that allows you to learn the attack skills that enemies use. Unlike say the Final Fantasy series (5 and 7 in particular) these aren't unique abilities (I guess the random target multihit moves are technically and there are a handful of abilities that don't scan...) but rather the regular spells/skills that you can use TP to learn on any or all characters as you please. Unfortunately you can't pick up passive bonuses this way, but the TP you'll get for going around normally is enough to cover the best stuff.

Conversely this game has "dangerous" one time enemies (think Etrian Odyssey) in the first handful of dungeons or so which is a mechanic I'm not a fan of, but with a little strategy (weakness and bad status mitigation mostly) you can beat them as soon as you run into them which kind of trivializes the dungeons they're in/the rest of the game. AFAIK it's possible to scan techniques and flee (although escape isn't guaranteed) so that's PROBABLY the intended strat, otherwise the characters that join up later are going to miss out on a few skills (Scindluxe can carry you and only one enemy in the game seems to have it). In fact my 4th and 5th characters were basically dead weight since I'd spammed TP consumables (have to synthesize) on my first 2-3 characters to get everything I wanted at which point I just rushed the last 3 dungeons in a row in about an hour... No idea what the speed run scene is around this game (doubt there is one) but I feel like it would be possible to beat this in less than 3 hours with luck and efficient routeing (I filled out all the maps and got all the treasures but there's no point since this game doesn't have achievements or anything).