Review of Amayui Labyrinth Meister
| Subject | Amayui Labyrinth Meister |
| By | Helpfulness: 3 Vote: 7.7flvbycjctnheheh on 2021-11-11 last updated on 2021-11-19 |
| Review | I've played all Meister games to date, and enjoyed each of them, as you can guess from my Kamidori review. This new addition to the series is fun but long-time players are likely to be left unsatisfied with the new changes. First things first, obviously you already know the general gist of the gameplay if you've made it so far, after all it's a sequel to Castle Meister. In general, Amayui 2 is the most "casual" Meister game to date, and I hope that it stays this way and the next game would be more "hardcore". CRAFTING You no longer need to craft furniture to improve character stats or to make farming easier. Instead, you just need to clear dungeons and unlock bonuses, which are then just can be activated effortlessly. In a way, it does make the game less grindy, unless you are a completionist who wants to max out all of your equipment. In this case, you'd need to grind even more than in any of the previous entries because it's this unbalanced. First, you create armor/weapon/accessory for each character, most of which require the same materials which you rarely have enough. Then, you need to upgrade them by using the same materials yet again. It's not much of a problem in the first part of the game, but becomes annoying closer to the end of the first playthrough. But there are good news—you don't really need to max out all items to complete the game. And now, to the next part of the review... GAMEPLAY When it comes to combat, then Amayui 2 made one step forward and two steps back compared to its predecessor. It adds equipable magic (Genma) and also Unity—an ability to make two characters join hands so that they move as a single unit. Both additions add some tactical options and make the game easier to navigate. But at the same time, both of them also remove some tactical depths from the game, especially the Unity. If in the previous entries of the series you needed to think about character placement, now you can just steamroll everything without much thought. More than this, only you the player use Unity and Genma stones effectively, while enemy units don't. Another new feature is the ability to catch monster girls, but this part of the game is truly underwhelming. The monster girls have fewer skills than your main units, they only have inferior Unity bonuses without even unity attacks and overall only a couple of them are worth using at all. It's like Eushully has added them in the game only for h-scenes, except for this one girl with double-action. And obviously,y other than her, every monster girl is complete garbage after your first playthrough as everyone else gains double-action at level 50. In general, it's obvious that they've tried to make the game more friendly for casual players, but they overdid it too much. There's a magic shop that for some money allows you to seriously increase your EXP gain, stat growth, drop rates, and a number of materials you gather. The problem with this—the bonuses are too available, and EXP gain, in particular, is dirt cheap. If you use it, then your characters are going to be overleveled even with zero grinding, which makes the bad balance even more prominent. Of course, it's also awesome that you no longer need to equip everyone with stat growth rings late-game and that it's easier to gather the materials. As someone who's played all previous entries on Hard, I found the game seriously lacking any challenge. This time, equipment gives even more ridiculous bonuses than before, plus you have stat bonuses from Unity, plus improved stat rolls thanks to magic shop. In the end, even without using the EXP bonus from the magic shop, even without abusing easily available healing items, I still barely died in this game while playing on Hard. There was no mission I would consider really difficult. Most enemies are dead just after one exchange while some of the more tanky characters receive mostly one damage from attacks. For this reason, you don't really need to grind for new equipment more than necessary. You will be OP anyway, as long as you use your brain. Funnily enough, but the first chapter of the game was by far the hardest and perhaps even impossible on Hard. I only hope that there are at least some decent challenges in the second walkthrough I haven't started yet... STORY Surprisingly enough, but the story has been better than I expected. It's rare for a game to have "raising a daughter" as a part of the plot. Though the motivation of Lilu and her story overall is kind of meh, the main antagonist is on the better side, possibly the best in the series. Just pure evil but with her own philosophy and depth. Overall, though, it's a rather wholesome PG-13 adventure/slice of life fantasy. It has some emotional moments at the end of the story, and some fun events in the middle. Not outstanding by any means, but a solid story nonetheless. OVERALL For me, it's always easier to complain and rant about things I found not satisfying enough, so perhaps from the review you'd assume that I didn't like the game, but it wasn't the case. It's still better than most TRPGs I've played. If you've enjoyed the other Meister games then you'll like this one as well. Though if you are a more hardcore player like me, you'd be left disappointed with the gameplay changes, which make the game ridiculously easy even on Hard and even with self-imposed restrictions. Still worth it. upd. I've completed my second playthrough and there are two things I can say about it. First, the game is still as easy as ever, to have any sort of challenge I decided to remove all armor pieces from my characters and I still destroyed everything. The only challenge I had even without armor (I still kept all other equipment) was on those maps where party was forcefully split and I needed to use some underleveled characters like Deet. Thankfully I had the double-action monster girl to carry those maps. Second, the plot is actually pretty neat and I liked the last couple of chapters in terms of story - at least compared to other Meister games it was solid. |
| 3 points |