Look it’s a full party! Facing the wrong way…
In the dungeon, all monsters are visible on the “field” and in your mini-map. An interesting feature is the fact that monsters have a field of view around them ala cone or circle shape. Along with this is the ability to sneak using the square button. While sneaking the enemies field of view is shrunk, but your characters movement is halved. The point of sneaking is if you can attack the enemy from the side or behind you will get an instant damage bonus to all enemies present in battle. Or you can just use sneaking to get past monsters you don’t want to fight.


Bah, sneaking is for lamers

This is exactly why sneaking is important
Although fighting as much as possible is recommended, since the monsters are rather strong at start, plus you need to collect as much “loot” as possible since the shop in town is over priced.


The shop keeper peddling his over-priced garbage

Not to mention slow to get the better items in till after you have cleared an area where you can find those as drops from monsters.
One good feature is the fact that loading times for battles are almost instant, which helps keep the pace of the game flowing while dungeon crawling.




Two in battle screenshots

Also the fact that you will be fighting a lot, makes the quick transition into battle a real godsend. On the other hand though the game seems to have some loading issues related with the Guild Hall when you swap out, add or remove party members. This part is where some users might get irritated, although you shouldn’t have to be swapping members in and out frequently unless you are using them as “mules” to carry the spare items you want to store away. Speaking of item space and such, there is a slight problem for those who like to collect things. The game itself does not have any sort of storage space for the items you collect, which is why the “mule” route, equipping extra items on unused characters is being used. For the whole 6 member party you can only carry a max of 30 items, so at times its rather difficult to figure out what items you would like to drop or sell to make space. Thankfully though the characters are able to carry a second set of weapons that they can switch to during battle, also can hold up to 6 (useable) items for use in battle, which helps clear up the party inventory space.

In battle the controls are rather simple and easy to learn. The buttons that you will use the most is, Attack, Special Attack and the in-battle menu where you can select spells, commands, and items to use. Plus by pressing the select key you can switch between all the different party members in the battle. Switching between your members is an important part of the battle, since for crucial battles you might want to control your magic user to prevent it from casting worthless spells, wasting valuable MP. In relation to this, for the mage try not to equip it with spells you don’t think would be useful, since while its cool having a large library of spells to select from, unless you want to control the mage manually, the AI does not discriminate between which spells are better for what situation, so it will pretty much cast whatever it feels like.