Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society
From the creators of Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk comes a new chapter in the dungeon-exploring adventure filled with charm and mystery! Summoned by the magnificent Madame Marta, you are but a wandering spirit awaiting your next command. With the help of Eureka, Madame Marta’s assistant, and an army of soul-infused puppets, you are tasked with delving into the depths of a mysterious underground labyrinth teeming with enchanted monsters to unearth the Curios d’art that lie within!
Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society offers dungeon-crawling adventures with new quality of life improvements and 50 hours of exploration alongside a cast of fully customizable companions to do your bidding. Use a variety of pacts and puppet soldiers to customize a team of up to 40 fighters to dive into the darkness and discover the secrets with the Labyrinth of Galleria…if you dare!
Steam User 25
Listen, if you're looking at this game and not the first game in the series, there is a good chance you already know what you are getting into. If you haven't played *Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk*, turn back and go play the first game in this "series" would be my recommendation. Although a little less developed compared to this sequel, the game serves an introduction into NIS's take on a traditional grid-based dungeon crawler. If you really want to dive into the series, hunt down and play *The Witch and the Hundred Knight* in this strange timeline, but know Hundred Knight and its sequel are action rpgs with very different gameplay from the Labyrinth games. If you do want to dive in, be warned, this series is not a typical NIS rpg like their poster child Disgaea. The Labyrinth games have very dark themes and subject matter brought up, and quite frankly awful things happen to the characters within these games, all while hiding behind the cutesy art of Takehito Harada. The story of these games are fucked, and I highly recommend them because of it.
If you have played Labyrinth of Refrain, and didn't drop off the game as soon as you hit the second dungeon, then I can easily recommend Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society. This game takes everything that was learned in Refrain and makes it much, MUCH, bigger. More classes, more mechanics, more dungeons, and of course, a even more complex and demented story. If you were blindsided by just how *bleak* and *mean* things got for the cast of Refrain, Galleria isn't that much different, albeit that I braced for it this time around. In my opinion, Galleria is at it's best when the story starts to spiral out of control, and with it's much larger cast than Refrain, in the addition to just having more story cutscenes in general, Galleria has time to fully go wild during your long play through.
At it's core, Galleria is another grid-based dungeon crawler with an emphasis on telling a complex story, something unique to the genre. Problem being, despite my praise of the story the actual mechanics of this crawlers isn't anything special. 95% of your playtime will likely be easily defeating random battles with little strategy while the other 5% will be the absolute difficulty cliffs of some of the bosses later in the game. Party building is a somewhat frustrating practice that, while greatly improved from the first game with the ability to select what skills a character has "active" and change them when needed during the still tedious reincarnation process, you still need to plan well in advance or start from scratch to get truly good characters. Additionally, like the first game, the massive roster of characters you need to build up to (capping at 40 characters participating in combat) means you either will spend many hours doing inventory management and character building, or automate everything you can via auto-equip and have a written plan for character progression.
This game also introduces randomly generated dungeons floors, which will take up most of the latter half of the game. These floors re-randomize each time you return, and definitely overstay their welcome by the final area, which will have you taking on a colossal one. Not to say the dungeoneering is bad, on the contrary, Galleria has a ton of new and exciting ways to navigate the dungeon compare to the already interesting dungeons of the first game. Breaking walls returns as well as new features like underwater tiles and time limited areas. When you actually are not in combat, the act of exploring the dungeon is fun, and it feels like you can stay in dungeons much longer than the first game without having to return constantly.
Overall, with how the game is designed, unless you are feeling confident and are not afraid to spend many extra hours grinding, I would look up a guide when stuck on a boss or challenge and possibly build advice if you feel outclasses. Random item drops containing very powerful and important items return and it can be frustrating to learn how much grinding some of them can take. You'll also need to complete some very specific sidequests if you want to finish the story, and with how unreliable the loot/quest items can be to drop, it might be nice to know ahead of time what to keep or grind for.
Despite my problems with the gameplay, which is still much better than Refrain (especially reincarnations), I give a hard recommendation to Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society. If you choose to dive in, expect a very good Visual Novel with a good but sometimes frustrating Dungeon Crawler RPG attached to it. It's a game with a lot of good twists and turns that I don't really want to spoil, and it definitely is on the longer side, but I think anyone who is either a fan of the dungeon crawler genre or is looking for a dark and complex story shouldn't pass it up.
Steam User 14
Manages to be both clearly unfinished yet extremely padded out. Insanely simple combat wrapped up in a ton of unnecessary systems. The worst parts of LoG are absolutely dire but the good parts do just enough to satisfy my dungeon mapping brain.
Weird game only for people who want to play a dungeon-crawler/visual novel with a different type of story. Not an easy game to recommend to others, LoG is a niche inside a niche. Tatsuya Izumi seems to be incapable of making anything other than extremely flawed games that have small nuggets of ingenuity spread throughout. He's like Yoko Taro but without the PR team.
Despite LoG's many problems, I would play another "Labyrinth of" game. Weird, flawed games have an appeal all their own.
Steam User 10
tl;dr: More than 150 hours of dungeon crawling and story and I didn't want to leave. Play Labyrinth of Refrain first, then Labyrinth of Galleria, and tell your friends about them.
Long Version:
I will avoid spoilers as much as possible, as the game is best going in blind.
Before I got into the Labyrinth games, I never finished a single dungeon crawler. The team building aspects always appealed to me, but the slow pace of character advancement usually bogged it down. Then, this year, I finished the previous game (Labyrinth of Refrain) and immediately jumped into this one. The story and systems in Galleria and Refrain are somewhat experimental compared to the usual NIS titles, so it isn't surprising that they're not as well known. That said, Galleria has iterated beautifully on Refrain's dungeon crawling, combat, and skill systems, granting the player many more build options for puppet soldiers. You can also make your brigade composed entirely of cats, so that's pretty neat.
Don't let Galleria's association with the silliness of the Disgaea series fool you, the content of the story in gets very dark, and always gives the appropriate amount of weight to every horrific event that transpires. However, the game is also filled to the brim with heart and lovable characters (making the aforementioned horrific events all the more gut-punchy). The story unfolds across multiple parts, making it a very long and arduous journey, but I found it very worthwhile to reach the end to find out how everything tied together.
Getting into the basics, you (yes, YOU) are a wandering spirit summoned to lead a brigade puppet soldiers into a dangerous miasma-filled labyrinth to retrieve its treasures. Your brigade has 5 slots for "covens," which are basically individual squads of puppet soldiers, composed of 1-3 attackers and 1-5 supports. Each coven grants different donum (spells), buffs, debuffs, and other abilities to the puppets slotted into them. Covens can be placed into two positions: Vanguard or Rearguard. Vanguard covens are your melee attackers and tanks, while Rearguard covens are your ranged attackers and casters. "Attackers" directly attack, use items, and cast donum in combat, and are open to being attacked by enemies in return. Supporters do not directly participate in combat, but depending on the coven they can grant bonus stats to Attackers or enable powerful donum to be cast. Supporters can also be sacrificed for the use of certain powerful donum if you're into that kind of thing and have a stock of revival items ready. If your Attackers are all wiped out, then you're kicked back to base with a bunch of lost limbs, but you keep all of the items and experience points you've accumulated up until your defeat. There are also some skills that allow a Supporter to take the place of or revive an Attacker, so it absolutely pays off to build your brigade right.
The overall unit building in Galleria is a strict upgrade from Refrain. Instead of being stuck with only 12 skills max per puppet throughout any number of facet (class) changes, Galleria instead permanently grants each unit all of the skills they have gained from every class they have taken, with each skill costing a certain amount of skill points depending on their impact and strength. You can mix-and-match all of a unit's skills however you like without limit after they learn them (although innate facet skills require them to hit level 99 as that facet for them to carry over). Each puppet's initial/starting facet will have a 75% discount to the skills from that facet no matter which other facet they might transfer into, and a 66% discount on whichever their current facet is, making careful planning very rewarding.
One downside of the new skill system is that the descriptions in Galleria have gone for a more minimalist style, to put it kindly. Unfortunately, this has lead to a lot of descriptions being difficult to understand, or sometimes outright incorrect.
Dungeon crawling in Galleria has also improved, granting the player several new abilities throughout the story, in addition to the basic exploration abilities carried over from Refrain. Every new ability enables the discovery of new secrets and treasures from areas previously explored, making backtracking rewarding to do (especially since earlier enemies will run from your brigade if you're strong enough, cutting down on exploration time). I got stumped on where to go next in the labyrinth a few times, forcing me to check a guide online to see where to go next. I'm a moron, though, so the answer was always right under my nose.
There is much more I could talk about (alchemy, mana, petitions, requests, etc.), but I'll just tell you this: play with Japanese voices. While the effort is definitely appreciated from the English voice actors, I just enjoy the Japanese voices more. They have some of the best crying/bawling/wailing I've ever heard in a game, and really ramps up the impact of certain scenes.
Verdict:
This game is a real gem, and I highly recommend it despite a few flaws. If you enjoy dungeon crawlers and haven't played Labyrinth of Refrain or Labyrinth of Galleria, then then you should play Refrain, followed by Galleria. This is a threat. I want a 3rd installment and I won't get one if you don't buy this game.
Steam User 10
Another amazing work following the previous LoR (Labyrinth of Refrain) game which was quite some time ago.
The game itself is independent of LoR story wise (it's basically a multiverse/world with each independent story mostly) so you don't need to play LoR beforehand.
The gameplay is much more refined compared to LoR with the same quality of story or maybe better. Beware that as it is still about magical/fantasy story, the story gets deep as well.
Overall I'd recommend it very much. 9/10
Steam User 8
Had lots of fun playing this game. Galleria did improve aspects of Refrain that were lacking substance, such as dedicated support classes and the improved skill system. Though the ending and emotional core weren't as good compared to Refrain, the gameplay experience throughout was still as enjoyable.
My problems with this game though is that as they were improving the gameplay, they added more problems and annoyances, such as how you need to set skills to your puppets every soul transfer and how the button to feed all exp items to 1 party member gives them everything instead of saving leftovers if the member reaches max lvl. There's also the issue of how the new sort buttons don't always sort the items in each menu, such as the one for the catalyst stones in the synthesis menu. They also still didn't fix the problem of stats of items changing when equipped to a person. Why can't it show me the actual stats once equipped for all the weapons before I equip it? Why is the Dark light power even in the game if your map still shows you the "hidden" walls? Why introduce this feature to find fake walls so early, then introduce enemies that are ACTUAL walls at the very last 3000+ floor dungeon and have the power not to reveal these guys? I like how they added more voice lines for the puppets, but why does everyone have a level-up quote? It gets annoying when your 40-puppet party levels up. I'm just glad that they included a way to turn these voices off in the settings, but if i have to resort to that, then why include it? You can now dismantle useless pacts to get the spells from them, but why include bad pacts that are only meant to be dismantled? You also can't get all the spells unless the pact is sufficiently leveled, as it just adds unnecessary and annoying farming without any reliable ways to do this faster.
My biggest issue is how 2/3rds of this game (~50-70 hours) is exploring randomly generated dungeons, with the last dungeon being over 3000+ floors, while the first third of the game (~20-40 hours) was pre-built. Also, the labyrinth layout of the first section was overall better than the average labyrinth from Refrain, but the actual visuals were much worse. every floor had the same patterns but in a different color. First is the green dungeon, then we go to the blue dungeon which is followed by the yellow one, then back to blue, to red and back to blue, to indigo and back to blue, to green part 2, and then back to blue. Because of this, I would rather have people play Labyrinth of Refrain first and then come back to this game if they enjoyed the gameplay over there.
Steam User 7
I know it will sound weird but this is the best "turn-based battle system" I played to date.
Defensive classes have an actual role, there are several types of offensive classes that each has something going for it, a bunch of spells that each has their use and even status effects that are potent without being over-powered (something very few games manage to do right).
The story is a bit weird (starts very family-friendly before tackling some rather heavy topics) but enjoyable, and if you don't enjoy it you can very easily skip it and just focus on gameplay (they don't swarm you with exposition every 5 seconds).
The game is rather lengthy (I have not finished it yet at 80 hours but I probably didn't play super-optimally either) and the late game allows you to continue to grow your characters beyond the limit by doing other classes.
The limit on skills you can have active at a time (most of them impactful passive) means that you still have to pick what you want from each class rather than end up with godly characters that do everything.
For example, a tank based on avoiding hits is different from one based on taking a defensive stance and tanking hits for the back line characters as well.
Similarly you can build both types to have rather potent counters.
I had played a bit of the previous game but stopped when the story started to go into the weird territory but I am happy to not have stopped this time (although some parts of the story were deeply uncomfortable, on purpose).
Sadly the game is not flawless and because of the rather complex systems it can be a bit hard to understand everything without a guide or google and there doesn't seem to be a great wiki for it (I have not found it if it exists at least).
Steam User 10
I love Nachiroux