Death end re;Quest

Finally giving this a try. Been in my box for ages. Bought it last year after seeing a few videos and noticing some unique mechanics. It was never released physically here but I was able to get an EU version from Playasia.

I'm just going through chapter 1 but I get the basics. Bizarre system.

Enemies appear on the map. You can attack them to get an advantage in battle. This will grant you 'speed up'.

It's turn based with the fastest character or enemy going first. On your turn you can move freely within the battle arena. There is no limit on this. There are shiny orbs on the ground called bugs and appear in various formations. They can have positive or negative effects (or both) when you touch them. So far I've only seen ones that do a small amount of damage and corruption, but restore some SP.

You have 3 slots for actions but you don't have to use all of them. These can be any actions like items and defend too. Any combination you want. 3x defense gives you a more powerful defense.

3x attack results in a final knockback attack. The knockback is an extra 4th attack.. This is where it gets interesting. When you send the enemy flying, they can rebound off the walls or other enemies like a pinball. Sending them into your allies will allow them to smash the enemy away again. Any enemy they collide with will also be sent flying but seems not as far and slower. All these impacts do damage.

When you send to an ally it seems it needs to be directly from the front. If an enemy collides with your allies from another angle they'll just bounce off like a wall.

Your attacks have areas and ranges. Other games that I've seen with this system are Fairy Fencer and Trails of Cold Steel.

On your turn you want to move around and line enemies up to catch as many in your attack radius as possible, then send them into each other. You can send them into the bugs as well. There's another 'character', Arata (the guy in the real world) who can manipulate the world when less that 50% bugs are on the field. He can alter the field or change the game's genre. So far I can change to Shooter. This brings up a target reticle and I can shoot enemies at the cost of SP. It caused instant knockback and did tons of damage. There are others.

The game is a visual novel too. I've gone through tons of dialogue in the prologue alone. Somehow I'm kind of interested. You can switch to Arata any time and it becomes fully VN. You just visit places and talk to people through menus and watch events. His investigations in the real world can influence the game world like opening up new areas. He learns his own abilities like what I talked about above.

Will get a bit further and see how things open up.

Gameplay looks pretty fun, though your description does make it sound a bit bizarre as you mention. Art-style is really not my thing though, same with the Visual Novel aspect. Curious to see if you end up liking it more later-on!

The story could be interesting. It's a similar setting to Sword Art Online and it seems some kind of bugs and glitches are affecting the game world. This travelling merchant thing was really funny. They ran into him again and asked why he was in that location since in their first meeting he was heading somewhere else. He explains that since some event which I won't bother trying to explain, he split into multiple copies of himself. He goes on to say how good this is for business since he can control all his copies and sell shit everywhere. What's cool is how Arata (the dev) explained why this is happening. Apparently it's a glitch with him using fast travel. Instead of travelling himself the game created a copy of him at the fast travel points. That cracked me up.

Can't wait to get more abilities. I hope there are some good status effects. It would be absolutely awesome if an afflicted enemy can inflict its status on another enemy when knocked into them.

If a character reaches 80% corruption, they can transform into their Glitch form. I've barely used it but I know it has a super move that changes them back afterwards. You can still do all your normal stuff but stronger I guess.

Corruption goes up when you take damage but not by much. Collecting bugs boosts it alot but these also damage you. You can have another character heal you though. This is how I've been setting it up. There are probably better ways but we'll see once I get more equipment.

Enemies also have corruption and Arata has an ability that lowers it so I assume it powers them up too.

Though the game says he can change the genre, that's really misleading. He can basically just do special moves. For shooter you get to fire some shots but that doesn't make it a shooter. Lily uses a bow and all of her attacks are shots of some kind but that doesn't make it a shooter anymore than Dante using guns if you ask me.

Arata has 3 categories of abilities: genre, code and summon.

I only got summon last night but from the description it sounds really interesting. Actually this was something I read about way back when I first started researching this game and is what got me really interested.

Seems your summons are defeated bosses. I have two now.
They have unique bonuses. Boss 1 boosts knockback distance and boss 2 speeds up your party.

If you summon in a small area you can get ridiculous knockback richochets off of the boss's body because they're huge.

Knockback can't miss it seems, but the damage can. You can send them flying without damage. Weird.

Got a new character that uses guns and has some very interesting moves that use money. One is a screen-wide ability that inflicts stun for 1000 eni. She also has a gunshot attack that gives the enemy any status effect she has. I can see that being situationally useful. Would be cool if there were a way to inflict your own characters with negatives. There are a few spells that do but I haven't seen anything like being able to poison yourself.

Got two more characters. One has quite a few debuffs.

So far I have moves with poison, stop, slow, spd down, atk down, mag atk down and up versions, and curse.

Enemies and your attacks fall into one of these categories: sun, moon and star. The damage difference when hitting a weakness is insane.

Sadly, poison or other ailments don't link to other enemies during collision. I really hope the sequel includes this and more effects.

Enemies have weight classes. These determine how far they can be sent flying. Size has nothing to do with it.

I might attempt a no upgrade run after this. You learn new moves by doing the right combo of moves in the 3 slots you have. You can't fit every possible move you learn but you can have a lot. I think you can unequip all of them. I might try just going with the starting moveset.

We'll see if I've had enough by the end of my first run. Not everything knocks back and spells/moves enemies are weak against absolutely destroy them. I imagine setting up knockbacks to squeeze out any damage you can will be a thing.

You don't gain access to fast travel until chapter 7.

I can now access the Pain dungeon. Barely survived the first floor.

Attack types really matter. I went back to the first area and some attacks do little damage even at level 60+.

I think the reason I saw enemies bounce off of characters is because they can't be knocked back twice by the same person.

Knockback has become far less neccessary the further I get. I figured this might happen. I'll always set it up though. I haven't bothered checking the menus but I wonder if there's an enemy database. Some enemies take huge damage from collisions and poison.

>knockback less useful
I just fought a boss that took huge damage from it. There's no way to tell, that I can see, how effective it will be on an enemy.

>summons
Summons and Arata's other abilities can be leveled up now. Can't remember how much I detailed these and can't be bothered reading back.

You can summon every boss labeled Entoma Queen. There are more bosses but you can't summon them. Queens are the giant monster ones that are responsible for bugs plaguing an area.

Each has it's own stats and an ability like knockback distance, halved enemy weight, character SP up by 30%. Stuff like that.

They also get a turn. You can wait, attack, or magic. Enemies tend to focus on them and their huge size is great for knockback collisions.

Regarding buffs/debuffs. These stay with the character after battle. This is pretty common in RPGs but what's interesting in that if you heal any negative statuses, you also remove the positive ones. Every RPG I've ever played had an item for each condition, but all this has is Panacea and it removes everything.

There are some spells that remove just poison and maybe some others but I tend to not waste a slot on those because you need to be in range and can screw with what you want to do. The better Panacea doesn't have a range limit.

Buffs are pretty cheap though. Lily can cast speed up on everyone for less than 20SP. It's not a huge inconvenience but it's odd.

You can use a turn to switch in another character too.

I was watching a video and saw you can go to level 999. That's kind of insane. The only things I can think of that might require this are the secret boss and Pain dungeon.

The lower the difficulty, the more EXP and money you get. Usually it's the opposite or the same regardless of difficulty in games in my experience. You can change it any time you aren't in battle. I changed it to easy and did the first and second floors of Pain and it was a level up per fight.

Finished my first playthrough. What a weird game.

NG+ now. I have the Pain dungeon, two DLC dungeons and the secret boss to do. Will see if I can reach the level cap too.

Got Death end re;Quest 2 preordered and won't be cancelling it. I like the first game enough to see what a sequel offers. I've seen a few vids and know the knockback mechanic is still a key mechanic. Hope they add more to it.

Sun, moon, star.

Sun is strong against star.
Star is strong against moon.
Moon is strong against sun.

You can't tell which an enemy is on sight. You have to press circle to bring up a cursor and hover it over them.

I've noticed that sometimes that hitting these weaknesses doesn't do much damage, then hitting with another character using the same type or opposite does. I believe this is due to magical and physical resistance. Each attack is classed as one of these. So if an enemy has super high physical resistance, hitting their weakness with a physical attack won't do much.

That's my guess anyway. The other possibility is their corruption level. Characters have this too. At 80% you enter glitch mode. At 100% you drop dead. At some %, I've never checked, but I think it's 100, enemies fully heal and get an aura. This might be what puts their resistances up. I barely notice it though.

Reviews for Death end re;Quest 2 are popping up.

There's something called Super Knockback but they didn't explain how to do it. The enemy goes flying super fast with a trailing effect and rebounds more. I like how the camera zooms out during knockback so you can clearly see what's happening. In the first game the camera stays on the enemy you hit.

There's a new mechanic called Overkill which seems to be doing damage beyond an enemy's HP for more rewards.

Bugs seem to have been changed too. Apparently there are little to no negative effects. In Death end 1 they can take huge chunks of HP, inflict a shitty status, prevent recovery, etc. They always up your corruption though. It's something to think about if you want to enter glitch mode. I was wondering why in Death end 2 they were in glitch mode so often. Honestly hope it's not like this on hard. I doubt the reviewers played past normal.

I've got it preordered and fully paid for. It should be out August 28. Will make a separate topic after I've played a few hours.

Done. Got all the trophies and did absolutely everything that could be done. The DLC boss was the toughest, but I defeated it at such a high level it couldn't really hurt my characters.

Played on hard which wasn't really hard at all. Looking back I barely activated glitch mode. The bugs usually did too much damage to be worth walking over for the corruption or had negative effects that had to be dealt with.

Two characters have a spell that makes them invincible so you can use that to safely collect bugs.

Glitch mode gives a large boost to stats and you can put a super move that hits all enemies in the third slot only. Using this exits glitch though. Each character grants something after exiting from a super. Like Lily fully heals the party and Lucil removes all status effects, even positive ones sadly.

Staying in glitch is the better option if you ask me, but you need to maintain it. You activate at 80% corruption and at the end of you turn you lose 10%. Go under 80% and you revert.

In the Pain dungeon there were always an invincible bug or two per fight. I'd get these and start collecting others. Once the character transformed I'd get a few more to put it just over 90%. That way when I'd lose 10% after my turn I'd stay in glitch mode.

I bought the DLC character. She was only $1.65 I think. Really strong. She has these these physical attacks that have HIGE range. One is a large rectangle shaped box that extends the length of the screen, and another is a huge circle that can usually catch the whole group of enemies. She then swings these shockwaves that do insane damage. The slight downside is they hurt you characters too. This is due to her being one of the villains I guess and I think was intended for after you've finished the game.

What's cool is that at camps you can talk to her as Arata and the other characters can't see her. The stuff she says clearly indicates you're supposed to already know who she is.

Another interesting move is this explosion type that uses her HP instead of SP. Less range than the others but super strong.

I've considered attempting a challenge run because I really like this combat system but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work.

The rules would be the starting moveset only. But after some though I came to the conclusion that it just won't cut it at all. Levels ups would happen no matter what and fact is this is one of those games where you need them to survive.

Knockback collision damage is fixed so that's not going to compensate. Types are a thing, and I'd run out of SP. The first half of the game was pretty heavy item use for SP and cnstant use of Lily's Manafort skill. This restores 50% to all members, even Lily herself, giving back what she lost to cast it. Without that it just wouldn't work.

That said, there are speedruns so I'll look into those tomorrow and post some notes here.

I think the second game might be possible to challenge run. Some of the new mechanics hint at the possibility but we'll see.

Overall, this was well worth the time. Unique combat system that got me to preorder the sequel. The story was pretty interesting though there's one point I think I missed or didn't understand. Will look that up.

Had a quick look at the hard mode speedrun. Went more or less like I thought. Under 2 hours, no grinding, around level 60 by the end. This info was what I was mainly interesting in learning; what level was possible and how much grinding, if any, was required.

This was for the normal ending which means you don't fight the true final boss. It has 3 forms but I doubt they're much of an issue. Might like at the true ending run later.

They learned more powerful moves though. This is something I don't want to do. Much more use of glitch mode which I liked. But with no all healing or revival skills I could be in trouble.

A challenge run definitely looks possible, but I feel a little burned out on this game right now. Will think about revisiting later but will probably be a while, like after I finish the sequel or other games.