Nippon Ichi Software knows how to twist the formula of a genre, whether it’s an SRPG or a first-person dungeon crawler. install it with Chorus Labyrinth: Coven of Dusk in 2018. The game went completely under the radar upon release, including me. It would be a real shame if the same thing happened with its sequel, Galleria Maze: The Lunar Societyas the game features some really interesting twists on the first person dungeon crawler formula.
Gallery Maze follows Eureka de Soleil, a cheerful girl who has taken a job at Galleria Manor. Eureka is tasked by Count Bismont, the owner of the mansion, to help Madame Marta, a witch in his service. Eureka and Marta summon Fantie, a spirit attached to Lantern of Phantasmagoria, and the role the player fills. Your mission as Fantie is to collect the nine curiosities of maze art under Galleria Manor, which are nine extremely rare magical artifacts. This is where the twist comes in. Humans cannot enter the maze, as the entrance is a dining cupboard that kills anyone who dares to try to exit. The solution is simple. Create magical puppet soldiers, called Manania, who will explore and fight for you.
Character creation can be as simple or as complex as you want. Initially, the game features six different classes or facets, such as Aster Crow, Shinomashira, Theatrical Star, Peer Fortress, Wonder Corsair, or Rapid Venator, but these options expand as you play. Each facet plays a particular role as a DPS, stun, support, tank, or jack-of-all-trades. You can only create three characters at first, and you’ll be stuck with a maximum of five people for about the first ten hours of gameplay. Having limited options from the start can be daunting! However, the game does a great job of providing many important tutorials that can be viewed from the pause menu. I found this very accommodating, as the early hours of the game can be tricky if you go where you’re not supposed to go, which is very likely to happen due to the open nature of the maze.
When it comes to exploration, the maze and its subsections work as you’d expect, with branching hallways, rooms, and paths that can lead to treasure or ambushes, and possibly progress further down. Sometimes you’ll come across a particular area with a cheat, like unbreakable walls or underwater sections where you have to manage your oxygen to keep your party from drowning. Enemies appear in the maze as floating orbs that you can contact to engage in combat.
Combat can be unpredictable, as you’ll often default to single attacks or auto-battles for regular encounters. Bosses are the highlight. A balanced party and the use of Donums, the equivalent of magic or abilities in this game, are key to resolving these encounters. Around 10 a.m., the game introduces the Pacts. These are particular formations that allow more than one party member to join a coven, with a maximum of five coven slots. This means that you can eventually have a party of up to fifteen characters, three per coven. However, to achieve a balanced party, the average team will be around ten characters in different roles and different Pacts.
Donums are an interesting twist on a magic or ability system. They aren’t very straightforward, skill-wise, as they depend on the Covenant a Coven is using. This means that you have to be very careful when placing your magic users in a Pact with their corresponding magic Donum, and your tanks in a Pact with Donums that increase defense and create aggro. Eventually, you’ll be able to transfer Donums between pacts, adding a lot more decision-making to the mix. Release Abilities are special Donums that trigger a Covenant-exclusive special ability, and they can really save your head when you really need them.
However, if you want to avoid fighting the same HP sponge enemies, or if you’re revisiting areas for treats, there are easy ways to avoid the fight. The game offers plenty of tools to deal with both enemies and the environment in the form of Fantiebilities, from decoys and traps to enemy bait, to abilities that allow you to break down walls or disperse illusions. I particularly liked the Veil of Mist ability which lets you turn invisible for combat. This is especially useful when facing powerful enemies who will relentlessly pursue you.
The maze is an incredible playground full of treasures. Soon after unlocking the Wall Breaker ability, I was eager to explore all the new possibilities the game has to offer. Other notable traversal abilities include long jump and high jump, which can be tricky! It’s not obvious where you can use them unless you use Shine Light to see usable places on the map.
That’s when I felt the game was a bit bloated with systems and mechanics. Sometimes, Gallery Maze he cared too much about teaching me new systems that I had never had time to fully use or learn. Instead of engaging with a handful of them and exploring their full potential, the game keeps throwing new things at you, which adds a lot of nuance to decision-making in combat and exploration. but can be distracting. I had trouble progressing through the main story immediately after being introduced to the high jump, as I had forgotten that I could use Shine Light to see which parts of the map had been opened up.
After clearing certain obstacles or completing important objectives, the game will provide a short interlude that will move the plot forward. The story is told through short visual novel sections. These are very light and easy to follow, and a nice way to interweave exploration and maze battles with building your characters, the world, and uncovering the mystery of Galleria Manor. The character sprites come from Takehito Harada, well known for his work illustrating the Disgaea series, and along with the beautiful background artwork, it provides the perfect atmosphere for these interludes. There are also many quality of life options during these sections. Arrows indicating which on-screen character is speaking, one-button voice repeats, a text log, and skip options are some of these additions.
In terms of accessibility, the game offers a robust and extensive settings menu with plenty of options. These range from numerous audio options, from regular BGM, sound effects, to enable or disable the voice of the puppet soldiers, combat speed options and settings for the visual novel sections. The Japanese and English voiceovers are excellent, but I found the English voice direction particularly charming. Eureka is really sweet and full of energy, while Madame Marta is a cunning and charming witch with a lot of sass, and Count Bismont is a very aloof and disagreeable nobleman.
Galleria Maze: The Lunar Society It scratches a particular itch I’ve had for a while. While the game starts out as standard fare for the genre, it quickly shows that there are plenty of tricks up its sleeve, mostly in exploration and how to approach diving through mazes. There were times when I felt like I was playing a puzzle game as I explored the maze, only to suddenly remember that it was an RPG with a deep combat system, all surrounded and carefully enveloped by a whimsical, and often terrifying story, not unlike that. classic fables.
Galleria Maze: The Lunar Society It will be released on February 14, 2023 in North America and February 17 in Europe for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Switch, and PC via Steam.