Dungeon Travelers 2: The Royal Library & The Royal Seal is a new dungeon crawler RPG from Atlus and Aquaplus. In this game, you follow Fried, a Libra (a team leader with special skills) in his quest to suppress the overflow of monsters in the world and take down the mutants that plague the land. Read below to see what we thought of this new game!
The kingdom of Romulea is in peril. Monsters are leaking out of every nook and cranny in the land, and to make matters worse, they have started an uprising against humanity.
Players take on the role of Fried, an adventurer from the Royal Library sent to stop the uprising. But early in his journey, he discovers a broken shrine along the way. This sets in motion the story of Dungeon Travelers 2, where Fried travels around the kingdom of Romulea, and through rescuing, defeating, or bumping into any of the 16 unique girls that can to join his party, Fried is on a mission to save the world!
Set in a first-person perspective with turn-based combat, players will encounter normal monsters as well as more powerful mutant girls who must be sealed away to prevent the spread of the evil monster scourge.
Dungeon Travelers 2: The Royal Library & The Royal Seal is a great traditional dungeon crawler in its presentation. I want to get things started by letting you know that the game just kept getting better and better the longer I played. Why do I mention this? Because if I’m going to be totally honest, I didn’t like the first hour. We begin with a very small team with members that don’t have any particularly useful skills, the monsters strike hard and we don’t have any money to upgrade our arsenal. But once the first boss has been defeated, we are introduced to the game’s upgrades mechanic that I’ll detail a little later, and this is where the game gets a chance to shine!
Fried, and his team are tasked with eliminating the monsters and mutants in the dungeons. The first thing to note is that the game stresses that not a single enemy is killed per se, and that each one of them will be sealed (captured) by Fried. Capturing monsters reduces their actual number in the dungeon (which leaves us the possibility to backtrack will fewer enemy encounters) and when we have sealed at least nine members of the same type, we can then transform them into a Seal Book which can be equipped by party membres, granting some benefits (or disadvantages!), but more importantly, those you won’t need or those for which you have duplicates can be sold at the store for a fairly good price.
The turn-based battle system of Dungeon Travelers 2 is easily the greatest asset of this game and where I definitively had the most fun! As you can see in the screenshot above, your team is on the lower end of the screen and the turn order is on the right side of the screen. The turn order gives us the flexibility to determine which enemy can be captured first to lower the number of attacks the party will need to defend against. Casting spells also takes some time, and you can see when the chant will end by the position the character moved to in the turn order gauge. At the center of the screen, you can see the enemy. Fan-service takes a huge part of this game, so be warned that it definitively will not be for every gamer. The enemies are all hand-drawn and are either weird fruit-like creatures, sorta animals or girls. Got it?
The difficulty of the battles surprised me at first (like I said, the first hour felt too hard), but becomes easier to manage as you progress. Leveling up gives us Skill Points which can be used to build each character by unlocking or upgrading skills in their special skill tree (each character in each class has his/her own skill tree, and getting this allows you to upgrade the character classes and thus learning new and stronger skills).
As for our equipment, each piece of equipment found in the dungeon must be identified before it can be used. I liked this idea as it requires us to return to the game hub often, especially since we can only carry 30 items at once (luckily, usable items can be stacked into groups of nine items). Once a piece of equipment has been identified, it can either be equipped or sold back to get more money. Selling unappraised items is doable, but since you’ll get only a fraction of the real selling price of the item, there are no reasons to sell an item you haven’t identified! A lot of items also have special passive skills, so it’s important to keep those in mind when changing equipment, because these passive abilities often very useful effects and you might want to, for example, equip a helmet that has 2 defense points below your current strongest helmet just because the “inferior” helmet grants you an extra 20 hit points.
The dungeons are all huge labyrinths that must be explored (see picture below, it’s the first -and smallest- dungeon). Of course, each dungeon is bigger than the previous one, and some also span multiple levels. One of the really nice touches in this game is the ability to save anywhere which definitively came in handy since it allows us to save our progress as we desire, especially right before a tricky boss! Finally, I’d like to mention that the battle themes were catchy and fun to listen, even after hundreds of battles!
Another fun element is that you’ll eventually run into traveling merchants in the dungeons that will appear at random, and they can definitely save you from meeting your end if they show up at the right place at the right time. The first one you’ll run into is at traveling noodle merchant that will sell you delicious dishes that can recover your HP and TP while curing some status ailments. The second one is a traveling ice cream merchant that, as you can imagine, is the rival of the noodle merchant (hot vs. cold, a fight for the ages!). Said merchant will also allow you purchase treats that will recover HP and TP and will also heal some status ailments as it also gets your party in a good mood, because, who doesn’t love ice cream? There’s also a proper traveling merchant that will sell you one use items along with unidentified pieces of equipment, some of which might be extremely rare. If you see her, be sure to buy something! Once you’ve found one of the traveling merchants as part of the game’s a story, said merchant will start to show up at random on every single dungeon you visit, which is great news for us since they provide some much needed support in dark times.
Final Thoughts
I honestly loved playing through Dungeon Travelers 2: The Royal Library & The Royal Seal! The first hour is so-so, but after you’re past that long tutorial, it immediately gets a lot better. I got totally addicted to the enjoyable battle system, and I kept playing every day. Even though my review has been completed, I’m still playing it every day! I definitively recommend this game to RPG gamers looking for a great dungeon crawler for their PS Vita.
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Cost: $39.99
PSN Game Size: 1.9GB
You can purchase Dungeon Travelers 2: The Royal Library & The Royal Seal from the PSN.
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