Video Game / Dungeon Encounters

Dungeon Encounters is a Dungeon Crawling Eastern RPG co-developed by Square Enix and Cattle Call Inc. and released for the PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam on October 14th, 2021. It is directed by acclaimed Final Fantasy director Hiroyuki Ito, credited with the invention of the franchise's signature "Active Time Battle" system, with music supervised by Nobuo Uematsu.

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.

Directly contrasting the grand, sweeping adventures that eastern RPGs have been commonly known for, Dungeon Encounters aims to boil down the JRPG and dungeon-crawling genres into what is effectively a literal numbers game. 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 Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay; 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 Game Over!

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This game contains examples of:

• Advertised Extra: Valtoro is actually on the game's cover art; they can be seen as a tail and a shadow. Too bad they're so far down in the dungeon and when you get them they're of limited use.
• After-Combat Recovery: All allies recover their Physical Defense and Magic Defense after every fight. HP, however, does not heal after battles and must be healed at a shrine.
• All Myths Are True: Gracia's daughter, whom Gracia believed had gone insane, claims to have promised a fantasy creature named Valtoro that she would help him find his treasure before vanishing one day. Valtoro is not only real but can be recruited into the party.
• Amnesiac Hero: Sesspare is a woman who lost her memories and believes that she may be able to reclaim what she lost by exploring the labyrinth.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Since one of the requirements for you to add a character to your party is to be standing on the exact same tile as that character, the known exact addresses of every non-wandering character are always listed in the Composition menu. Discovering a Wanderer also adds that character's address to the menu in case you don't have room for them and need to drop a party member to pick them up. This is also helpful for curing petrified allies, as Gorgon Shrines require you to designate the exact tile where the petrified character is located.
  • Unlike Final Fantasy, where ATB Active is typically the default setting, in this game ATB Wait is the default setting. This helps ease players into the adventure from the start since combat tends to require more on-the-fly decision making than in Final Fantasy, especially once your Ability roster begins to build up and more options become available to you.
  • Once you find a Riddle event, you can double check it at any time from the Event Log menu without having to physically go back to it.
  • The 9th floor of every stratum contains a Two-Way Teleporter located right next to the descending stairs, giving you a checkpoint that you can use to quickly navigate to and from town without losing your progress.
  • The game always shows your address in battle. This doesn't seem helpful at first, but it makes sense after acquiring the Address Blade, which always deals damage equal to the floor, Y coordinate, and X coordinate of the tile you're standing on multiplied together, so getting into a fight and not knowing the address beforehand would otherwise force the player to waste a turn checking if it's a viable combat option for the given fight.
  • If you are absolutely, positively stuck without any way to get out of your situation without losing your team to a KO or worse, there's an option to Abandon Party so you can leave your team behind and summon a backup party without going suicidal.
  • In the event that you Game Over, you have the option to simply retry your last exploration from the village. The game even bothers to Hand Wave this with a Voodoo Shark explanation.
• Armor-Piercing Attack:
  • A small number of enemy attacks have the ability to deplete your HP directly without depleting your Defense first.
  • Katanas, usable by Houk Gao, have the HP Damage quality, which deals direct damage to an enemy's HP without depleting their Physical Defense.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Valtoro is acquired at Level 80, gets some really powerful equipment, and has a huge HP pool on acquisition, but its inability to use normal gear makes it very difficult to slot in since it's essentially just a sandbag that knows magic for essentially the entire main campaign. Its specialized gear is also only found only from Guide Dang It! rewards until endgame and post-game, and its own gear has such prohibitively high PP costs that by the time you're able to actually equip all of its gear at once, you'll likely have access to multiple copies of the Javelin (not to be confused with the cheap starter Javelin), a Physical weapon that hits all targets for 350,000 damage and virtually outclasses all of Valtoro's offense.
• Boss in Mook Clothing:
  • The Treasure Hunter fiend is a cross between this and a Metal Slime. 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 10,000 PD/MD/HP, values that you most likely can't (and shouldn't) overcome for how early you can fight them. While they don't deal damage, they only ever steal your Gold in either 100, 10,000, or (if you're really unlucky) 500,000 Gold increments. For the record, 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.
  • Anything with the "F" as the starting digit in general tends to be this (aside from FA and FF, which are actual bosses). Shout-outs to the Black Hole, Supercomputer, and Black Hole/Supercomputer encounters, all of which are treated as normal encounters but are able to completely annihilate you if you aren't completely equipped to deal with them.
• Breakable Weapons: Equipment itself is not breakable by normal means, but a few enemy skills have a chance to destroy your equipment if they connect, rendering a character far weaker and more susceptible to getting killed. You can get a skill that gives you immunity against this.
• Cherry Tapping: Your unarmed attack deals 1 point of piercing damage. You can exploit this with some enemies that only have 1 HP like Mummies, Zombies, and Ghost Ships to get some cheesy kills off them when they would otherwise pose a threat.
• Combatant Cooldown System: The Final Fantasy Active Time Battle system is used in this game. Unlike the more recent Final Fantasy games, which use a version of the system adapted for action-based gameplay rather than turn-based, Dungeon Encounters uses the classic version of ATB used in games such as Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy VI.
• Company Cross References: Aside from the obvious use of ATB, the game contains a few other Final Fantasy references.
  • The menu interface is basically identical to that of a Final Fantasy game.
  • Behemoth and Tiamat appear in the game as enemies, the latter taking on the appearance of a red three-headed dragon.
  • Multiple weapons in the game are named after Final Fantasy staples, such as Save the Queen and the Chirijisayagata (after the Chirijiraden from the Ivalice games).
  • The game has a Javelin weapon and an Escutcheon shield that are ranked the weakest in their class but have extremely overpowered variants with the same name, alluding to the Javelin II and Escutcheon II in Final Fantasy Tactics.
• Dead Guy Junior: Jufren is a dog that Jorath befriended when coming to the Academy. Jorath named the dog after his twin brother, who he cared for after the latter fell ill before passing away.
• Defeat Means Friendship: 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 cues the credits, and after the credits roll you can pick up Everethe and send him back to the Academy like every other playable character.
• Disc-One Nuke: The Cutlery Set. It's a Ranged weapon that has a 55% chance to One-Hit Kill the target via consumption, and it can be found on Floor 15. The catch is that only Sir Cat can use it, but once you get the ability to warp around more you can quickly pick him up and start gobbling down your foes with a super powerful fat cat.
• Dual Wielding: By default, all characters have two weapon slots to work with. While you can slot in one weapon and one magic, you can just as easily slot in two weapons or two magic.
• Dungeon Shop:
  • You can occasionally find pseudo-rest areas with helpful resources and shops just like on Floor 0, in addition to "specialty" varieties such as a jeweler and a boots shop that you wouldn't find in town.
  • 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 Rare Candy potions or a shop that only sells "secret" items. There is also a shop in the game that doesn't sell anything but buys items you sell to it for thrice its normal value.
  • Floor 98 is home to a near-exact copy of the Hub Level on Floor 0, but infested with extremely powerful enemies.
• Eldritch Location: The dungeon seems to be one considering it is home to entire ecosystems of various kinds, and the last 10 floors are essentially a hellish voidscape.
• Excuse Plot: 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 and the single text box that appears after rescuing Everethe. Characters have an "info" tab that gives a little Flavor Text blurb explaining their backstory, but for all intents and purposes, every character is interchangeable with one another.
• Fixed Damage Attack: Swords, spears, bows, and Mali- class spells all deal a fixed amount of damage. They often have lower base attack power and cost more PP to equip than their Randomized Damage Attack counterparts but are more reliable for gaining easy one- or two-turn kills.
• Forced Transformation: Your characters can get "cavied", in which they transform into guinea pigs. A cavied character has a much higher chance of missing their attacks. The only way to cure Cavy is to teleport all the way down to Floor 97 and tiptoe around extremely high-level post-game enemies to activate the single Cavy Shrine in the game.
• Green Hill Zone: Floors 10 through 19 are depicted as an open, grassy field. Sunlight streaming through the trees and the sounds of nature can be heard despite the fact that it is underground.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • The Math Riddles and Map Riddles can be extremely frustrating to figure out by yourself; the former because the given hints are incredibly vague and tend to require lateral thinking, the latter because the game only shows you a tiny piece of the map where the treasure is located and expects you to go off that. The latter is thankfully easier since each stratum has a specific layout and you can narrow it down from there based on the map piece given, but the math puzzles aren't nearly as kind. Some of the more devious ones:
    • Math Riddle 7 is the factorial of the number 9.
    • Math Riddle 8 is the digits in the square root of 2.
    • Math Riddle 9 is squared numbers, but with their digits split into individual values.
    • Math Riddle 10 is atomic numbers.
    • Math Riddle 12 is a cyclic number.
    • Math Riddle 13 is a list of perfect numbers split up into double digit values.
    • Math Riddle 14 is the number of seconds in a week. Japanese calendars use red to indicate Sunday and blue to indicate Saturday, corresponding to the given hint.
    • Math Riddle 15 is a list of Super Bowl winning scores, starting from 1995 (Super Bowl XXIX) and ending with 2021 (Super Bowl LV).
    • Math Riddle 16 is the coordinates for Devil's Tower, Wyoming as seen in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
  • Interacting with a certain event on Floor 89 will give you the Address Blade, a 99 PP Sword with 1 damage. The game does not tell you what you're supposed to do with it. Its "true" damage is the digits of your current address multiplied together.
  • 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. It's on 98.69.31, a hidden tile segregated completely from the rest of the floor. The only way you'll know that there's something off about Floor 98 is noticing that it is a copy of the Hub Level but with one extra tile, and the only possible way you could see the hidden tile is with Illusion Clairvoyance and Eagle Eye, and only if you stand in one specific spot on the main floor (where Two-Way Teleporter 9 would be) 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 its 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.
• Katanas Are Just Better: There are two Katana-type weapons in the game. Both of them allow the wielder to attack an enemy's HP directly without depleting their Physical Defense.
• Hub Level: The village, also known as Floor 0. There are no enemies here, and pretty much every helpful resource and shop (except the jeweler, boots shop and gun shop) can be found here. It is also the only floor with the Academy event, which you must deploy new parties from in case you lose or abandon your current party. Once you get far enough in the dungeon, you can also use Two-Way Teleporters to link the village to deeper parts of the dungeon as a form of checkpoint system.
• Instructive Level Design: 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 that (at the time) 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.
• Interface Spoiler: The game outright tells you the name of every single event in the game from the outset in the Event Log. This lets you check for items and abilities that you potentially have yet to claim and see the existence of things that you would otherwise not know about since the game never tells you.
• Lazy Backup: Zigzagged. If you lose your playable party, you will be prompted to summon another party from the Academy to continue the exploration. The keyword is "from the Academy"; the playable roster must start from the Academy, no exceptions. If there are no deposited characters there and you wipe, it's Game Over, even if you know you still have usable characters and they're still in town!
• Lethal Joke Character: Professor Cavy, a guinea pig enemy only seen on Floor 99. It almost never shows up, but if it does you're in for a wild ride, as Professor Cavy has 9,999,999 in all stats and 150 SPD.
• Lethal Lava Land: Floors 30 through 39 appear to take place near an active volcano. Unlike the previous three zones, the paths in this stratum are far more linear, much like a massive, winding hallway. Enemies will often be placed directly in your path, forcing you to either confront them or use navigation skills to avoid them.
• Mechanically Unusual Fighter: 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.
• Necessary Drawback: 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/Descension 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.
• New Game Plus: If you get a Game Over, one of the options available is to start the entire game over but with your characters' levels retained.
• Nintendo Hard: The start of the game is relatively kind, but after you dig down the first few floors the game slowly begins to reveal its "retro game design" roots. The game will push you to keep your equipment in absolute top shape (and you may have to resort to Item Farming when the shops fail you) just to survive and enemies get progressively more devious and unforgiving the farther you get.
• No-Sell: You can acquire some skills that allow your party to negate status effects or certain enemy abilities. While they're a bit on the expensive side, many of them (such as banishment and petrification immunity or immunity to having equipment broken) will save your life.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The fact that there is no music of any kind and only ambient noise in the dungeon overworld lends itself to the alien feeling of the dungeon, which only increases the farther down you go. It gets to the point where the last ten floors are accompanied by what can only be described as a otherworldly droning noise, making the place seem even creepier than it already is.
• One-Hit Kill: In multiple flavors, including consumption, banishment, petrification, or the usual instant death. When used on you, they instantly incapacitate a party member in one of various ways: consumption removes the party member from the party and forces you to kill enemies to get them back, banishment removes the party member and forces them into Wandering status, petrification requires you to leave them behind and use a Gorgon Statue to cure them, and instant death is (ironically) the least punishing since you can just revive them. When you use them, however, all of them instantly kill, but every enemy is immune to specific types of death effects.
• Only Smart People May Pass: 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 hint card with a puzzle that is designed to lead you to a specific address in the dungeon to get a reward. The Math Riddles, compared to their Map Riddle counterparts, tends to test your ability to recognize patterns and relationships between a specific group of numbers.
• Opening the Sandbox: The game starts out fairly linear for the first 1/3rd of the dungeon, but once you pick up Greater Ascension and Greater Descension and various other navigational tools such as Conjured Waypoint and Fiend Shuffle, you can start teleporting around the entire dungeon with relative impunity and go virtually anywhere you want as long as you have the ability charges to make your way around and avoid combat.
• Pre-existing Encounters: 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 - and the game is not afraid to plonk very high black numbers very early in the dungeon to tempt the suicidally curious.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: The entire soundtrack is a remixes of classical music.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The playable cast has some weird faces in it. While the majority are humans, you also have an anthropomorphic jaguar-man, an isekai protagonist, a dog, a flying robot-drone, a giant cat that looks like a cross between My Neighbor Totoro and a Moogle, and a dragon.
• Randomized Damage Attack:
  • The weapon and spell categories in the game are split into "fixed" and "random" damage categories, which serve as counterparts to each other. While Swords, Spears, Bows, and Malio spells are fixed damage attacks, Blunt weapons, Guns, and Malaflux spells sport randomized damage. There is no lower limit to their damage variance either; while Random weapons have a higher maximum damage output to compensate for their lack of consistency, they can roll any damage value between 1 and their given maximum value on any damage roll.
  • Most enemy attacks are of the random damage kind, compared to the player having access to both fixed and random damage sources.
• Randomly Drops: Enemies have a "drop" table and a "shop" table. The main difference is that while items from the drop table will go directly into your inventory, items from the "shop" table will be deposited in the relative shop if they "drop" and you must buy them from the shopkeeper. The game neglects to tell you when the latter occurs, which can be quite annoying as items dropping directly tends to be much rarer.
• Rare Candy: Mystery Compounds are the only consumable items in the game and permanently raise a character's maximum HP or PP, which can otherwise only be raised by leveling up. Mystery Compounds A, B, and C raise a character's HP by 10, 25, and 50 points respectively, while Mystery Compounds D and E raise a character's PP by 1 and 5 points respectively.
• Recursive Reality: There is a game shop on Floor 95 that will sell you a copy of "Dungeon Encounters" for 2999 Gold^note The retail price of the game is $29.99, implying that Gold is roughly equivalent to yen in value. You can equip it to gain +75% Critical Hit Rate.
• Retraux: The game seems deliberately designed as a statement on the "classic" style of JRPGs that many franchises have moved away from over the years, as it whittles down the format to just the core gameplay concepts present in the genre and harkens back to the dungeon crawling and difficulty that the era was known for. It also uses the original version of Active Time Battle that the Final Fantasy games used to tout before the franchise shifted towards hybridized versions of the system in the early 2000's.
• Rock Me, Amadeus!: The entire soundtrack is rearranged versions of classical music. All of the battle encounter music is essentially Uematsu going as hard as he can on the electric guitar to pieces like "Flight of the Bumblebee".
• Rōnin: Houk Gau is more or less a samurai without a master who resorted to Walking the Earth after the death of his previous master left him without a purpose in life, leading to him coming to the Academy. His unique character gimmick is that he can equip the two Katana weapons in the game that give him piercing damage attacks.
• Save Scumming: Averted. Unlike most RPGs, the game enforces an auto-save system and no form of manual saving. If bad luck befalls your party, there's no going back; you'll have to rescue them yourself.
• Schmuck Bait: See that black number tile that's a way higher hexadecimal number than anything else you've been seeing on the past few floors? Go ahead and step on it. What's the worst that could happen?
• Shifting Sand Land: Floors 20 through 29 are an arid desert region. The gimmick of this zone is that it is much more labyrinthine in design, with many obtuse pathways and dead ends.
• Shout-Out: Math Riddle 16 simply shows the numbers "104 a 30" and "b 36 c". The answer is 44.40.10, referencing the coordinates that appear in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
• Situational Sword: The Cavy Sword. If the user is cavied, it does damage equal to the user's level cubed.
• Spell Levels: Reminiscent of the earlier Final Fantasy games, spell tiering is indicated by a number next to the name of the spell; higher spell numbers indicate bigger damage. There are four versions of offensive magic: Malio (fixed damage, single target), Maliflux (random damage, single target), Maliare (fixed damage, all targets), and Malafluxare (random damage, all targets).
• Stylistic Suck: To emphasize the game's focus on gameplay, the game's graphical design takes on an extremely minimalist approach. The entire dungeon is represented as a 3D character model walking over a grid of squares with nothing to distinguish the environment besides the floor texture, lighting, and ambient sounds. All possible events and encounters are represented as hexadecimal numbers stuck to the floor rather than using icons or any sort of eye-catching graphic. Characters in battle are only represented as portraits against a static background and what animation exists for combat is essentially the bare minimum to represent what is happening.
• Swallowed Whole:
  • A possible fate for your party members is the Consumption status, in which an enemy literally eats a character and removes them from the party. They won't come back unless you beat up the same type of enemy that consumed your ally, which has a chance of regurgitaing your character.
  • Sir Cat can do this to enemies with the Cutlery Set. Unlike when enemies do it, it's just a flat-out One-Hit Kill on enemies.
• Taken for Granite: Petrification is a possible status effect. Petrified characters are effectively KO'd and can't be cured without the use of a Gorgon Shrine. If you lose a party member to Petrification, you can't move around with them and must leave them on the tile that the battle occurred. If all party members are Petrified, it counts as a wipe and you'll be forced to summon a backup party.
• Trap Door: The lower floors of the dungeon feature Pitfall tiles that will activate if stepped on and drop your party to the next tile below that one. If there are no tiles in the dungeon that are below the tile you're standing on, you will lose your party via "falling for eternity" and they will be randomly scattered around the area where you lost them, forcing you to summon a backup party and pull them out with Wanderer Tracking. Pitfalls are also normally invisible, but you can find and equip a navigational skill that reveals their presence.
• Trapped in Another World: McAllie is a kid from the modern world who was transported to the world of Dungeon Encounters after putting on a VR headset, believing that he's in an incredibly realistic video game.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: You cannot move around with a Petrified party member and must leave them behind. Did you expect to be able to lug around a person-sized statue?