History VideoGame / DungeonEncounters

** Multiple weapons in the game are named after ''Final Fantasy'' staples, such as Save the Queen and the Chirijisayagata (after the Chirijiraden).

** You can get Save the Queen and Excalibur as Sword-type weapons. Unlike their ''Final Fantasy'' appearances, they aren't considered special by any means and are merely "strong" mid-game drops.

* PreexistingEncounters: All battles are marked as black hexadecimal values located on the map. Each hexadecimal value corresponds to a specific enemy encounter spread, which can be checked in the Battle Log. Rule of thumb is that higher hexadecimal numbers correspond to tougher battles.

''Dungeon Encounters'' is a DungeonCrawling EasternRPG co-developed by Creator/SquareEnix and Cattle Call Inc. and released for the UsefulNotes/Playstation4, UsefulNotes/NintendoSwitch, and PC via Steam on October 14th, 2021. It is directed by acclaimed ''Franchise/FinalFantasy'' director Hiroyuki Ito, credited with the invention of the franchise's signature [[CombatantCooldownSystem "Active Time Battle"]] system, with music supervised by Nobuo Uematsu.

* BossInMookClothing: The Treasure Hunter fiend is a cross between this and a MetalSlime. They appear on hexadecimal value FC and are Lv. 1 enemies that drop 50,000 Gold on defeat and are only actually present on their tiles a portion of the time. If you ''do'' encounter one, you'll find that they have a whopping '''10,000 PD/MD/HP each'''. While they don't attack, they only ever steal your Gold in either 100 or ''10,000'' Gold increments. For the record, if your Gold is stolen it is possible to have ''negative money'', preventing you from buying anything until you earn all that lost cash back. You also can't defeat it in a war of attrition since it will run away after a while.

Directly contrasting the grand, sweeping adventures that eastern [=RPGs=] have been commonly known for, ''Dungeon Encounters'' aims to boil down the JRPG genre into its purest form: dungeon crawling, fighting, and prevailing against all odds. Players assemble a team of up to four characters and dive into a 100-floor dungeon represented as a grid of squares, filled with various kinds of enemies. As you chart your way through the dungeon, you will encounter events and foes, represented by hexadecimal values on the floor, each corresponding to specific battles and events. Battling foes allows the player to level up their characters, gaining HP and Proficiency Points that allows them to equip stronger gear. Charting enough of the dungeon allows the player to equip Skills that they find while exploring to make combat and exploration easier. A key element of the game is the enforcement of UnexpectedlyRealisticGameplay; for example, Petrified characters must be left behind, and if the party wipes, they will be stuck and the player will have to deploy another party from the village to rescue them. If the player runs out of usable characters, it's GameOver!

** The location of the Perfect Camouflage ability, which allows you to completely ignore enemy encounters unless you interact with their tile. The game tells you that it exists, but never tells you how you're supposed to find it. Even worse, it's on a tile that is otherwise blank until you specifically interact with it. [[spoiler:It's on 98.69.31, a hidden tile segregated completely from the rest of the floor. The only possible way you could see it is with Illusion Clairvoyance and Eagle Eye, and only if you stand in one specific spot on the main floor and check the bottom left corner of your screen hard enough to see the black outline of the tile against the red-and-black floor. Even then, if you aren't using Teleport to warp to the tile directly, you'll have to guess it's location from a higher floor and use Greater Descension to drop down since there's no floor directly above it and there's no floor below, and it's far enough from the main floor that estimating where exactly you need to drop can be very challenging.]]

* AdvertisedExtra: Valtoro is actually on the game's cover art; he can be seen as a tail and a shadow. Too bad they're so far down in the dungeon and when you get them [[AwesomeButImpractical they're of limited use]].

** The location of the Perfect Camouflage ability, which allows you to completely ignore enemy encounters unless you interact with their tile. The game tells you that it exists, but never tells you how you're supposed to find it. Even worse, it's on a tile that is otherwise blank until you specifically interact with it. [[spoiler:It's on 98.69.31, a hidden tile segregated completely from the rest of the floor. The only possible way you could see it is with Illusion Clairvoyance and Eagle Eye, and only if you stand in one specific spot on the main floor and check the bottom left corner of your screen. Even then, you'll have to guess where to use Greater Descension from a higher floor and drop down since it's so far away that guessing its exact location can be very challenging.]]

** The location of the Perfect Camouflage ability, which allows you to completely ignore enemy encounters unless you interact with their tile. [[spoiler:It's on 98.69.31, a hidden tile segregated completely from the rest of the floor. Illusion Clairvoyance won't help you either since it's a black outline on red-and-black flooring.]]

* MechanicallyUnusualFighter: [[spoiler:Valtoro, the dragon that you can find petrified on Floor 78. It has the second-highest starting level of any character in the game, but due to being a dragon it is unable to equip conventional weapons or armor. In return, it has access to four items that only it can equip: the ultimate weapon Dragon Whisker, the ultimate magic Megamalafluxare, and the powerful Dragon Scale and Graphene Webbing armors.]]

''Dungeon Encounters'' is a DungeonCrawling EasternRPG co-developed by Creator/SquareEnix and Cattle Call Inc. and released for the UsefulNotes/Playstation4, UsefulNotes/NintendoSwitch, and PC via Steam on October 14th, 2021. It is directed by acclaimed ''Franchise/FinalFantasy'' director Hiroyuki Ito, credited with the invention of the franchise's signature [[CombatantCooldownSystem "Active Time Battle"]] system, with music composed by Nobuo Uematsu.

The plot of the game is as follows: one day, an utterly massive labyrinth from deep underground appears near a village and begins to spawn all sorts of fiends, causing havoc in the surrounding area. When the kingdom's attempts to enter the dungeon and stop the spread of the monsters fails, the local village, desperate to put an end to the terror, establishes the Academy to train civilians in the art of battle and sends out a call to the best and brightest adventurers in the land to conquer the dungeon once and for all.

** There are a handful of unique shops scattered throughout the game that sell items that you can't find anywhere else, such as a shop that only deals in RareCandy potions or a shop that only sells "secret" items.

* InstructiveLevelDesign: The game's first attempt to outright teach the player that exploration skills are more versatile than they first appear when used in tandem with each other shows up in the fourth stratum, at Floor 45. In this area, it's very likely that you'll meet enemies who will Cavy your characters. Luckily, there's a teleporter that will take you to a Cavy Shrine to cure them... in ''Floor 97''. The entirety of Floor 97 is a single straight path to the Cavy Shrine populated by enemies you have absolutely no business getting anywhere close to, much less challenging to battle. This clues the player in to the fact that they have ways to navigate the map without ever getting into a fight, and that with creative skill usage the game isn't as linear as it initially appears.

* NecessaryDrawback: You can get the Teleport skill near the bottom of the dungeon, which allows you to manually teleport to any tile in the dungeon if you have its coordinates. This would normally make it better than Ascension/Decension skills, so it comes with a pretty nasty caveat: specifying a tile that doesn't exist will cause the game to throw an error message before plunking you on a random tile anywhere in the dungeon as if you had used Gambler's Teleport, and if you had any party members with you you'll ''lose them'' and need to relocate them with Wanderer Tracking. By comparison Ascension and Descension skills are safer and more reliable since they can't backfire on you, but if you're exploring with a single character and know exactly where you need to go, Teleport is the more viable option.

* OnlySmartPeopleMayPass: It is possible to find events called Math Riddles, which are clues to finding unique treasures hidden in the dungeon. With each Math Riddle, you are given a card with a series of digits with a specific pattern to their incrementation, with three empty spaces on the card. To solve the Riddle, you must decipher the number pattern and use that knowledge to fill in the empty numbers, which will give you an address where a treasure is located.

* NecessaryDrawback: You can get the Teleport skill near the bottom of the dungeon, which allows you to manually teleport to any tile in the dungeon if you have its coordinates. This would normally make it better than Ascension/Decension skills, so it comes with a pretty nasty caveat: specifying a tile that doesn't exist will cause the game to throw an error message before throwing you somewhere random as if you had used Gambler's Teleport, and if you had any party members with you you'll ''lose them'' and need to relocate them with Wanderer Tracking. By comparison Ascension and Descension skills are safer and more reliable since they can't backfire on you, but if you're exploring with a single character and know exactly where you need to go, Teleport is the more viable option.

* BalefulPolymorph: Your characters can get "cavied", in which they transform into guinea pigs. A cavied character has a much higher chance of missing their attacks.

''Dungeon Encounters'' is an EasternRPG co-developed by Creator/SquareEnix and Cattle Call Inc. and released for the UsefulNotes/Playstation4, UsefulNotes/NintendoSwitch, and PC via Steam on October 14th, 2021. It is directed by acclaimed ''Franchise/FinalFantasy'' director Hiroyuki Ito, credited with the invention of the franchise's signature [[CombatantCooldownSystem "Active Time Battle"]] system, with music composed by Nobuo Uematsu.

* ExcusePlot: A weird trope for a JRPG to have, but the plot of the game is virtually nonexistent. The only story the game has is the introduction that explains why adventurers are going into the dungeon. Characters have an "info" tab that gives a little FlavorText blurb explaining their backstory, but for all intents and purposes every character is interchangeable with one another.

* CompanyCrossReferences: Aside from the obvious use of ATB, the game contains a few ''Final Fantasy'' references of its own.

* DefeatMeansFriendship: [[spoiler:Everethe, the final Wanderer, is actually not "wandering" but is being kept as a thrall by the final boss, Panoptica. Facing and defeating Everethe and Panoptica in combat frees Everethe, and sending him back to the Academy cues the credits.]]