whatsarobot I picked up Beyond the Labyrinth after seeing it here and started playing it, and it has amazing music and a beautiful atmosphere, but unfortunately it seems to not be a very good game.
First here’s a great track from the OST.
My save file has six hours, but I’ve played a bit more than that due to game overs.
So the thing about the game is, it has a unique battle system. All attacks have one of three types and a rock-paper-scissors relationship, and in battle you have to choose the action for your characters based on their types while paying attention to turn order (ATB style). The problem is that every battle is kind of the same.
The PC party characters are all identical. They have a color (the type mentioned above) which you can change, and you can upgrade their maximum attack strength and HP. That’s it. In battle, for each character you choose whether to do a strong attack with long ATB recovery time, or a weak attack with short ATB recovery time, choosing from increments of 10 time steps. You basically want to hit enemies hard, and defeat them before their move, but you have to be careful because if you hit someone with the color they’re weak to, the next character (NPC or monster) of the same color (as the attacked party) to take a turn absorbs all the damage as HP. So if you use a Green character to hit a Blue character for extra damage (because they’re weak to it), but then they take a turn next, they re-absorb the damage and you basically wasted a turn. This is a neat system, but in the time I played it definitely doesn’t have enough variation to stay interesting.
There are different types of enemies that call for somewhat different strategies, but enemy types are introduced slowly and reused extensively. Sometimes there are different configurations of enemy groups but it doesn’t make much difference in strategy that I can tell.
At my point in the game there’s one mechanic I don’t have yet - shielding the girl - but unfortunately this just makes it easy to get game overs because there’s nothing I can do to mitigate attacks on the girl yet.
The other thing is that everything is slow. Walking around the dungeon is slow. Every attack in battle has an animation, which is slow. So everything takes a long time.
And on top of that, after the first 15 minutes where the game transitions from famicom-style graphics to the 3D stuff, the entire plot as far as I’ve gotten is “this girl fell down a hole, it looks like a wizard built this maze, I wonder why”.
It’s a real pity because the atmosphere is so good, but I’ve found this game a pretty frustrating experience.