Tsurugi no Machi no Ihoujin (Stranger of the Village of the Sword) is a 2014 first-person dungeon crawler from Experience Inc., makers of other fine dungeon crawlers like Entaku no Seito, Operation Abyss and Demon Gaze. I’m going on hearsay for the last two, but I played far more Entaku no Seito than was good for me a few months ago and loved it, so even though I normally like to leave some space between games of the same genre, I just couldn’t wait to dive right into Tsurugi no Machi no Ihoujin.
It’s just coincidence that I started Entaku first instead of Ihoujin, but in retrospect it was a lucky break because Ihoujin is much harder and I might very well have dropped it if I’d played it first. I’m actually playing it on Beginner Mode, which helps a lot (I’ll switch to Normal once I have 5,000c to spare), but it’s still a much less beginner-friendly game than its predecessor. The chief elements that make Ihoujin harder are:
1. No saving anywhere. No savepoints in dungeons either. Like most traditional crawlers you can only save in town. Contrast this with Entaku where I saved compulsively every five minutes.
2. No warp-out spell. There’s a warping item, but it costs 1,000c to buy and I accidentally sold the only free one I got! There are set warp-out and warp-in points in each dungeon, but finding and activating one is an adventure all of its own.
3. Possible perma-death. In addition to their HP all player characters have 1-3 life points. Get KO’ed, lose a lifepoint. Get resurrected and KO’ed again? Lose another lifepoint. Lose all your lifepoints and that character is gone for good. You have to either pay a lot of money to recover lifepoints or check the character into hospital for a while until they recover. Or just let them die and roll a new character if you want to get traditional.
And I might add a fourth, personal one: Immediate reclassing is possible. Why does this make the game harder? Because there’s just so much choice and it’s so confusing. I really don’t like games with job classes… I never know what to pick. I suppose I could just stick with one all the way like I did in Entaku, but the other classes have good abilities, especially when it comes to equipables. Right now my main character has gone from Samurai for Double Wield to Dancer for Tri-Step to Knight so he can equip heavy armor. I think I’ll leave him there for now ‘cos it’s just too confusing. Besides I only have 3 reclasses left, can’t waste them.
Btw, these are just my early impressions after 10 hours of play. After those 10 hours I’m only barely out of the tutorial dungeon and starting to explore my first real dungeon. I wouldn’t be surprised if I logged 99 hours easily at this rate. Here are some screenshots I’ve taken along the way. First, introducing my main character.
Meet Makoto Kisaragi, Mako-chan for short. You can just feel the wildness overflowing from him, can’t you? The game allows you to upload your own avatar images, or even use those from older games like Entaku, but as soon as I saw Mako-chan it was love at first sight.
A little more about Mako-chan. He’s male, he’s human and he’s 60 years old. You can pick any age and gender you want for any avatar you like, nobody will bat an eyelash. The older your character the few lifepoints they have but the more bonus stats points they get at creation. As the main character Mako-chan can’t be annihilated no matter how often he’s KO’ed, so it makes sense to make him 60+ years old so he can get 9-12 bonus points at the start. Mako-chan’s starting stats and equipment:
He’s not wearing any underwear ’cause he’s just wild like that.
Mako-chan’s first battle:
He got killed, but I’m not gonna show you that part. The menu commands are in English so it’s quite import-friendly once you figure out what each skill does. After that your job is just to roam dungeon after dungeon exploring every nook and cranny and looking for special marks to kill. Your adventurer notebook gives hints about where to find them and conditions to make them appear:
Yup, that last one is Mucab, the first boss from Entaku no Seito. He’s still as crazy about chocolate as ever, so I need to find some so I can lure him out with it. The point of killing marks is to take a crystal from them and give it to one of the three factions in the town. 
In return you get new battle abilities a.k.a. Divinity Skills. That, and you get one of three endings based on whichever faction you’ve given the most crystals to at the end. Right now I’m thinking of playing three times and doing all three routes, but that will depend on the game staying fun all the way through.
Eh? Story? What story? Your plane crashed in a strange world, you’re the only survivor and the only way to possibly get home is to kill lots of monsters and give their crystals to strange people who don’t have any ulterior motive at all, no sirree. See why I say dungeon crawlers don’t need stories? Now back to the game!
It’s a pretty great game albeit a bit short compared to Entaku. Keep in mind the Entaku we played the PSP version which was like the 3rd re-release with additional contents while Tsurugi on PC is the original release. I was really tempting to get a Vita to play the enhanced port but managed to stop myself. Not unlike Entaku, Wizard/Cleric combo is ridiculously overpowered and having one or even two of them makes life alot easier. As for the other characters, I highly recommend having one character that has level 6 ninja for ambush that completely by-pass enemy defense. Just remember that you have to get a class to 13 to unlock an extra skill slot. In the end, like you said, it’s really about what of skill that you want more than anything else.
Thanks for the tip. I think I’ll make everyone take a course in Dancer (for the unlimited range thing) and Ninja (for ambush like you suggested) and call it a day, at least for this first playthrough. If I end up replaying it – which is likely because I’m really liking it – I can experiment some more at that point.