23/10/2017

Ray Gigant: Not quite a dungeon crawler


I have to face the harsh truth: I've been playing Ray Gigant for 10 hours and I don't quite enjoy it.

I didn't want to believe it at first, you know. I mean, we're talking about a first-person dungeon crawler, i.e. one of my favourite subgenres under the RPG sun and one I'm not too picky about, given how much I enjoyed mediocre offerings such as Class of Heroes and Moe Chronicles; so how come I disliked Ray Gigant? I thought about it a little bit, and it suddenly struck me that Ray Gigant was not really a first-person dungeon crawler after all. Or, to be more precise, Ray Gigant looks and plays like a FPDC to some extent, yet it lacks all the trappings of the genre I've come to know and love. Here are the game's most glaring shortcomings, which are also my main beefs with it:

Easy in all the wrong places: Ray Gigant replenishes your team's health after each and every battle and lets you exit dungeons at any time, which is all well and nice; but I would have preferred an instant save option along with the possibility to heal outside of battle, thank you very much. Likewise, each dungeon features a single save point that also automatically reveals the whole map of said dungeon; but as a dungeon crawler aficionado, I feel totally robbed by that feature. Half of the fun in FPDC comes from maniacally exploring every nook and cranny of a dungeon and seeing the map filling up as you do so, and I don't fancy seeing a game take that simple pleasure away from me.

Too much story: Ray Gigant is a game that has a story to tell and really wants to tell it. In practice, this means that crawling is constantly interrupted by cutscenes bristling with dialogues. Maybe the story is fascinating for all I know — and I don't know that much, given that I stopped paying attention to cutscenes very quickly — but I don't play FPDC for their stories. In fact, I deem stories in dungeon crawlers detrimental to my fun, because constant narrative interruptions prevent me from becoming engrossed in the flow of the crawling. Also, the darn game is so hell-bent on telling its darn story that it doesn't allow diversions such as side quests. How rude!

Too linear and constrictive: I don't mind a bit of linearity in my dungeon crawling, as my intense love for 7th Dragon III abundantly proves; but Ray Gigant goes way too far in that department. For one thing, dungeons are, to quote Doc Brown in Back to the Future, erased from existence as soon as you polish them off. How dare you, game? I painstakingly explored these dungeons and it's my absolute right to be able to keep visiting them at leisure, dang it! For another, levels are capped, which forces you to resort to strategy rather than brute force in boss fights and makes level-grinding entirely pointless once you've maxed out your team's level. Now, I don't mind strategizing once in a while, but why can't I also level-grind if I want to? I'd rather have hardcore difficulty along with the possibility to level-grind rather than a reasonably easy game thats coerces me into a single course of action. It's all about freedom and playing it my way, and Ray Gigant won't allow me to do that — and I despise it for its interfering ways, ooh yes I do.

Too simplistic: No substantial loot. No shops. No real equipment management. No crafting system to enhance said equipment. No items. No side quests, not even Fedex ones. Palette swaps up the wazoo. Tiny and empty dungeons. Enemy placement that never varies. There's a fine line between simple and barren, and Ray Gigant definitely crosses it — more like leaps over it, really.  

That being said, not all is doom and gloom: I've been playing Ray Gigant for 10 hours, so it obviously has a couple of redeeming qualities. Roaming dungeons — when the game lets me do so — is delightful, the difficulty curve is well implemented and I really liked starting over with a new party once I was done with my first team. The final boss fight for Ichiya&co was also a neat and thrilling challenge: you have to balance parasitism, AP and SBM while hitting the boss and making sure everybody stays alive, and it was great fun. But alas, those good points are not enough to make me want to keep playing Ray Gigant. The last straw was when Kyle&co got stupidly wiped out in a stupid encounter after half an hour of intense crawling and fighting, which pissed me off so much that I erased my save file. I'm thus done with Ray Gigant for the time being, and maybe forever: because let's be honest, this game doesn't deliver at all on the dungeon crawling front. It's more akin to a visual novel with bouts of first-person dungeon crawling squeezed between events, and that's not how I want my dungeon crawlers to feel and play. What I want is freedom, huge dungeons choke-full of hazards and loot by the truckload; and if I cannot get all that in Ray Gigant, then I'll get it in other games. Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!

2 comments:

  1. Oh wow, I remember playing this one an year or something ago and absolutely and utterly hating it. It's a horrible barebones dungeon crawler that tries to tell a terrible story. It's mindbogglingly how this whole game passed the initial planning phases and no one tried to fix anything about it.
    And even worse is that this game had the same score as Demon Gaze and other actually great games and it ended up being picked, out of all the games available, for a Limited Release Run. I mean, sure ok but why?

    Anyway, better luck on your next RPG, Isleif.

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    1. Indeed. It puzzles me that Experience Inc, which produced some of my favourite first-person dungeon crawlers out there, could deliver such an unpolished offering. As for Limited Release picking up THAT game for a release, well... I have no words. I could think of at least half a dozen games that would have been more worthy of getting physical that this sorry excuse for a dungeon crawler. Puzzling, really.

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