Mystery Dungeon series

Most Mystery Dungeon games centre around exploring a dungeon with randomly generated layouts and fighting other characters therein in a turn-based manner; every time the player performs an action such as attacking or walking, the opponents also take action. Chunsoft itself described the gameplay as being like chess. Escape from the dungeon is usually only allowed in certain places, or through the use of certain items. Additionally, when the player loses the game the player loses all money plus half the player's items in the more forgiving variants, or loses everything and has to start from scratch in others. An effort has also been made to expand the series gameplay features, such as adding job systems to some titles, and giving each dungeon a different feel and goal. Features distinct to the Shiren the Wanderer series include the "Melding Jar" which allows players to synthesize items and weapons into more powerful ones.

Anyone get into these games? I'm playing Chocobo MD at the moment and have Etrian coming in the mail. Also have my eye on one of the Pokemon ones.

Never played any of these, though I know one of my nephews was completely addicted to the Pokemon ones. They seemed cool!

They're kind of like the Musou games in that they have template and add another series on top.

Of course, it's not just cosmetic; they bring some of their mechanics over too.

I played Shiren on psvita, the pokemon ones on the gba (that was ages ago tho) and the Etrian ones.
I like them, but they usually don't keep my attention for much. The best one of the one I played is Shiren, it's the closer to a classic roguelike and has the best mechanics, with identification, items and herbs with different effects etc.
The worst one for me is the Etrian's one, found it really boring and I don't think the Etrian mechanics translate well into a mistery dungeon, epsecially the focus on a party.

>Etrian party
That's exactly why I want it. Lots of class and team variation.

>with identification, items and herbs with different effects etc.
Are you talking about item identification? Aren't these the MD traits present in all MD games?

Chocobo has these too. When in a dungeon, most items will be labeled as ???????. You identify them with the Appraisal Glasses item, or they are automatically identified when outside a dungeon. The Scholar job has a skill that appraises, and there's a piece of equipment that automatically appraises whatever you pick up.

There are items with all kinds of effects too.

I've reached the post game now and have access to the ultimate dungeon. Just building up my equipment.

I love how you can attach attributes to slots to make your equipment do what you want. I originally had poison, blind, silence, confuse, sleep on my attack. I was almost always inflicting one of these. Sadly, only one can be inflicted per hit and you never know which.

I've swapped out a few of these now that I've come across more options. I've removed sleep, blind and silence in favor of slow and all.

Sleep isn't really that useful. You get a free attack but then they're awake again. Silence is good because it shuts off their special moves, but it doesn't work that well with confuse which is my favorite. If I silenced, then confused or vice versa, I end up with an enemy that can attack its pals, but only with its basic physical attack.

Similar issue with blind though not as bad. In this case blind doesn't effect special moves, and physicals still have a chance of connecting, but it's still limiting confusion.

Blind is still ok if you aren't running confusion because in some cases it almost works the same way. When blinded, an enemy can move the wrong way, or use its basic attack or special on nearby enemies by accident.

I had this cool situation develop when I was in a hallway. Just quickly regarding hallways, these are single paths so you can't be surrounded. Perfect places for funneling large groups. So what happened was I had like 6 enemies in the large room ahead. Blinded the one at the entrance with Thief's Blinding Needle, then this enemy, who has a move where it can blind everything within 1 tile range, did so on all the enemies clustered around the hallway entrance. This resulted in them launching attacks on each other or wasting their turn moving while I sat back giggling and throwing out attacks at whoever came near the entrance.

Some of their physicals missed and they didn't always use their specials. If they were confused this wouldn't have been an issue, which is why I decided to remove blind in favor of the other stuff. Not only is the other stuff more constantly useful, but it also ups the chance of confusion being inflicted.

Also, if I'm using Thief, I have Blinding Needles. I haven't upgraded all jobs yet and I'm wondering if any get confuse as a spell. I still need to fully level black, red and white mage so hopefully one of them has it. That would be great because all basic attack spells have a 3 square range in a straight line so I hope it's like that. This let's you use stuff from a distance or from behind your buddy.

Other ways I inflict confuse is with a Lamia buddy. She only has 1 square range but it's cheap to cast. You can also find spellbook items that let you cast no matter what class you are.

Confusion works on every enemy, but not every boss. No idea why. In those cases Lamia isn't that useful other than to provide another target for the boss and extra damage with its normal attack.

I kept poison because it's always useful and works on bosses. They get ticked every time they move or attack.

Slow is insanely good. You just can't argue with getting extra turns. Only downside would be you get a slow enemy when confused but it works on every boss.

All is very interesting. First, you can attach elements to you weapon or armor, and gain them in attack or defense. To get All, you have to equip a piece of equipment with one of each element. When you are about to fuse in your final element, it will combine all of them into one slot. Fantastic.

So you save on like 6 slots and have every element in attack and defense, with the exception of light and dark for some reason. Better to have two pieces of equipment with 6 slots to create your All, then fuse it to your main.

On my weapon I also have gold and trident. Gold prevents rust status which I believe is an MD staple. Not all weapons can be rusted so you save on wasting a slot on gold but those ones aren't as powerful. Max slots is 7, so you have more than enough even with gold.

Trident is super great. If enemies are in a horizontal line in front of you, you can hit all of them with one kick. Normally you have to turn and face the enemy. Trident becomes even better when inflicting confusion, slow or anything.

The last slot has Critical, but I'm thinking of swapping it out for Rage, which is a basic attack boost. It would probably be more consistent damage-wise. Critical and Rage would be pretty strong, but I don't want to lose trident.

My armor used to have a lot of negative status protection, but I removed all of them since I got the Ribbon accessory which prevents almost all of them. The ones it doesn't prevent are curse and stun, so I have those on now along with some other stuff like health regen while walking, decrease hunger rate, stealthstep (won't wake sleeping enemies) and mirage which ups evasion.

FUN.

I've only played the Pokemon ones.

Seems like you've been having tons of fun with Chocobo's MD, Birdman. I was a bit curious about the game when you started talking about it in the DMC5 board, and now I think I really should give it a try.

Just to clarify, are you playing one Wii game called FF Fables, or a Switch game called Every Buddy?

>Pokemon ones
Those look super fun and way more advanced.

>DMC5 board
That was to troll and derail the thread but if it generates interest, all the better.

>which one
Every Buddy. It's on PS4 too.

I just did this pain in the ass dungeon. You're stripped of everything you have and have to reply solely on pick ups and enemy drops. It's NASTY. There's no food either.

The boss is impossible to defeat without 100% RNG on previous floors. I've found you can farm enemies for a few X Poitions and if you're lucky a Max Potion, and hopefully some poison drinks because they really hurt this boss.

Equipment is random. One time I got Treasure Talons which increase item drops, then Genji Talons which are really strong. Another time I got bad weapons but 3 damaging drinks. The boss has around 4000 HP and the drinks did 999 each, poison drink ticking 100 per turn, plus haste drink on Chocobo and just scraped by. His attack power is high though so without enough healing items you're dead and you have no control over it.

It sickens me that to get that boss as a buddy I'll have to do this dungeon a few more times to get enough buddy points. That could easily become 50+ tries of getting shit items.

Birdman wrote:I just did this pain in the ass dungeon. You're stripped of everything you have and have to reply solely on pick ups and enemy drops. It's NASTY. There's no food either.

The pokemon games have something like this as well, IIRC your level is reset to 1, and you lose every item (and I think money as well) upon entering. But my memory is really fuzzy on this one. I actually can't remember if you lose every item and you're limited to picking up to three items plus one item for each ally from the dungeon itself, or if you are allowed to bring three items of your choice, while still being able to fill up your inventory to its max capacity from any item you find in the dungeon (or not).

Maybe it's both of those; you can either enter with some items or none at all, I think it depends on the dungeon. Or the game. But I do know your level is reset to 1, and you lose any move learned via TMs or levels.

One strat that some people had when doing these dungeons was to bring a certain Pokemon with them, and a TM that taught said pokemon an AoE move, or something that did fixed damage (although some throwable items are able to do this as well), or something that scaled off your current level.

Sounds very similar.

In Chocobo, these types of dungeons have a level and job cap, and some let you bring a buddy.

You can select your level too for an extra challenge I guess though some are clearly impossible as you would be one shotted. I found an old topic on Gamefaqs where someone was trying to do them at job level 1 I think but I didn't read the whole thread.

Some have other penalties. I did one that made me have no SP and in another everything killed me in one hit.

One thing I'm really hating is the item limit. With the best bag I only hold 48 items, and the vault only holds 78 after upgrades.

I just might have had enough of this game.

The extra challenge dungeons are that RNG bad type. No way to tell what you'll pick up and everything hinges on that.

Another is a 50 level dungeon where you have to do the whole thing in one go and start from level 1. You can level as you go but I'm not sure I have the patience for it especially when there's no telling what gear or items you'll get or what boss is going to pop up.

Definitely doable, but the opposite of fun.

Done with this. Definitely got my money's worth out of it and set me up for more Mystery Dungeon games. Can't wait to get Etrian.