I’m so busy playing three games at the same time + real life that I haven’t posted in a few days, but I’m alive and well. And hungry, so let’s make this quick.

Entaku no Seito (lit. Students of the Round Table) is a Japanese first-person dungeon crawler developed and published by Experience Inc. Experience has made a number of Wizardry-inspired crawlers, mainly on the PC, but none of them had been localized until Demon Gaze came out in 2011. It doesn’t seem like Entaku no Seito will ever make it West, but NISA is publishing Operation Abyss in April and we might get the PSVITA port of Stranger of Sword City if we’re lucky. I really should start saving for a VITA.

Story

“We have to stop the Last Boss or the whole world is doomed!” cries the hero of every RPG ever. But would happen if the heroes failed? What happens after the Game Over screen? Entaku no Seito is set 100 years after the good guys got wiped out by super evil demon Ol=Ohma. The world has indeed gone to hell, except for a few tiny pockets of resistance. But there’s hope. The hero has been resurrected in a new body and now he’s busy gathering a new crew to take Ol=Ohma down once and for all. Will he have better luck the second time round?

System

I’m going to assume we’re all familiar with the basics of first person dungeon crawlers. It’ll be faster to talk about what changes/additions Entaku no Seito has made to the formula, with the disclaimer that I haven’t played too many games in the genre so what is new to me might be old hat to veterans.

First, battles. A typical screen looks like this:

Where to start, where to start. Okay, bottom up. It’s hard to show without a GIF, but this game has the same scrolling HP system as Earthound, meaning if you can heal your party member really quickly after a fatal hit, s/he will probably survive. But HP scrolls really fast and my healer tends to die first much of the time, so in practice I’ve only been able to pull it off twice.

The murky purple fog behind the enemies hides a cursed chest, a dungeon crawler standard. Cursed chests are a good source of equipment since everything costs an arm and a leg. However the chest is guarded by a ‘leader’ who will run away if you take too long to defeat him. There was a similar system in Ore no Shikabane, so maybe that’s a dungeon crawler staple as well? Anyway, the red triangles under “Lost” show long long you have before the enemy runs.

The round wheel on the left contains all your standard RPG actions – attack, defend, item, escape. The only item of interest is the pointy one left of the sword. That contains your Union Skills, used with the Union gauge that reads 17 on the top right. Union Skills are joint skills that everyone gets together to use, e.g. Magic Veil that reduces damage from an enemy for a turn, Magic Burst that strengthens all magic attacks that turn, Knight’s Bond that prevents charm (very dangerous and incurable), etc.

Union Skills are useful and also important because they’re a good way to raise your character’s Soul Gauge. Soul Gauge and Soul Ranks are super-important both in the story and in battle. The characters theorize that the Knights lost last time because their bonds weren’t strong enough (you know Japan and their Power of Friendship fetish) so forming those bonds (i.e. raising your Soul Ranks) by using Union Skills, fighting together and eating together is your main job as hero.

See the number that reads 3%? When it reaches 100% I can to take Saul to my bedroom for a little heart-to-heart chat and then his Soul Rank will go up by one. A higher Soul Rank means more Union Points because your max UPoints = the total Soul Rank of all your party members. Even better, a higher soul rank means more EXP both for the MC and her troops. That 20% under her name is the EXP bonus she’s getting, as against 10% for Saul. That was an early screenshot. Right now she’s up to an 80% bonus and my rank 6 characters are getting a 50% EXP bonus.

Here’s my love shack bedroom where all the loving conversation takes place.

The exclamation mark on Lolon’s head means she has something she wants to talk about. The premise is that you’re the teacher and they’re your students (hence the title Students of the Round), so whenever anything happens in the story that bothers them you can call them in for a chat to help them work through their issues. You can also cook and share your meals with them but since the game was too cheap to show actual images of the food, we’ll skip that part.

I forgot to mention, you can choose either a male or a female character as your player character. I think the game really wants you to choose a guy, though. I say this because the female students get all blushy around you and even get ‘seductive’ closeups when their rank is high enough, but the guys are just like meh, whatever, no matter what you do for them. Btw the cutesy character portrait is an option you can enable/disable in the menu.

I usually keep it disabled because it looks really out of place given the rather dark mood of the game. See my stats above? Apart from your starting stats, everything else is self-distributed, and you get one (1) measly point every time you level up, even though at level 41 it’s going to take MC around 42,000 EXP to level up… in a game where you’re lucky if an encounter gives you 1,000 EXP. Even stats like Luck are important, so you can’t just focus everything on one master stat. Otherwise you might be a tank with 500 HP, but you’ll be hitting for 1 damage. Or you might hit for 200, but you can’t connect ‘cos your Dexterity stat is too low. Sure you can ignore Strength for a Magic character or Magic for a melee character, but that’s still 3 to 4 stats you need to distribute stuff to on a regular basis. I rather like games like this where every level up is extremely important.

Last thing I should mention, the trap system. Look at this map.

Ah, self-drawing maps. Every time I look at one I am reminded anew that I could never play a game like Etrian Odyssey or anything that requires me to draw my own map. Lazy developers. But I digress. I wanted to talk about the blue T mark, which is a Trap Point for monsters. You bait one with tasty food and drink, go away for a bit, come back and Aha! Gotcha! Unused traps are Red, used ones are Blue. And you can use them over and over again as long as you’ve got bait.

Advantages of trap points: actually it’s not really an option. Most dungeons have at least one stage where you’re required to clear all traps around in order for some boss or other event monster to appear. But even where traps are optional, they’re the only way to get cursed chests and thus free equipment, so I’ve been doing all of them at least once. Chest encounters are also fairly strong in case you want to level up weaker members or you’re just a few points away from a level up. Lastly you do get rewards, some of them very good, for clearing all traps in a section of the map.

Phew! That Quick overview wasn’t so quick after all. I’m starving! I’m up to 27 hours and 11 minutes in Entaku no Seito and I feel like I’m quite close to the end, maybe one or two more dungeons to go. Now that I’ve gotten all the descriptive stuff out of the way, next time I’ll talk about my impressions of the game itself (assuming I’ve finished the game by then).

Related posts:

Entaku no Seito – Haha! Take that, last boss! Entaku no Seito – Forgot to mention one massive flaw Tips for not sucking at Entaku no Seito’s postgame Basic walkthrough for Entaku no Seito a.k.a. Saviors of Sapphire Wings