I love the whole tabletop RPG gimmick, which doesn't stop at dice-rolling but gives you figurines as your characters, complete with their feet stuck on a base. I love the strategic feel of the battles and the genuine satisfaction of learning each enemy's weaknesses, allowing me to dispatch them in a couple of minutes instead of half an hour. I love the feeling of playing an RPG through to the end in a mere few hours. This major design flaw is all the more infuriating because I actually enjoy the game. I had no way of knowing I had to keep fighting the skeletons of the Geyserm Waterway more than the five times I had already, until I took to twitter and got some guidance from a luckier reviewer and, with someone else in my predicament, figured out that the enemies had to be killed in a specific order (archers, then mages), for the item to ever show up. I spent at least two hours (out of ten hours total of playtime) going around in circles, fighting enemies again and again, reading the manual, checking the menus to see if I had missed something, some command, some spell I could use to light up that room. This key item can only be obtained by killing monsters in a specific room, the Geyserm Waterway. In the second chapter, there is a darkened room that you cannot get past without a key item. Given that the same enemies inhabit the same rooms each and every time you land in them, you generally don't have to repeat battles beyond the first time you explore a room unless you want to, with one notable, tragic exception. Some of the loot will be consumables such as health potions, while some will be gear, and that gear is what modifies your stats and gives your characters their spells. Each piece of loot has "burden points" attached to it, and depending on how well you did in battle, you can burden yourself with more of them. Instead, nearly every battle end with you choosing one new skill for each of the three characters in your party, and there is also a lot of loot to choose from. Your characters don't gain levels, and their statistics don't change the more you battle. Instead, they occur each and every time you stop in specific rooms on the map, and so they can (in most cases) be bypassed after the first time you've fought them.
Every little bit helps, but in truth, using buffs to increase your accuracy or power will be a much more effective way to increase your chances.īattles in the game are not random. In other cases, you gain a bonus die for chaining up attacks into a combo, and can then use your bonus dice collection to increase your odds of hitting the enemy and the damage your attack will cause. In some cases, such as attempts to debuff an enemy (slow him down, lower his attack or defense, etc.), rolling the dice is mandatory and determines if the spell succeeds or fails.
You choose your attacks, skills, or magic based on their potency or effect, just like you would any RPG. The dice actually do not come into play with every move. I was overwhelmed at first but, after some practice and going over the in-game tips, the battles become second nature. Thankfully, despite having systems upon systems upon systems, the game really isn't as complex as the string of tutorials at the beginning would have you believe.
Having never really played either a Matsuno game or a tabletop RPG before, I naturally thought I was the best person to review it. Going into it, all I knew about Crimson Shroud was its pedigree and the fact that its battles are dice-based. It is now being offered on the North American eShop as a bite-sized, standalone role-playing game. Part of the Guild 01 compilation published by Level 5 in Japan, Crimson Shroud was developed by the illustrious Yasumi Matsuno, of Final Fantasy Tactics and Ogre Battle fame.
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