If you play games with any regularity, you'll know that they come in all shapes and sizes - from the family-friendly, local multiplayer fun of LittleBigPlanet or Super Mario 3D World, to the hardcore online shooters of Call of Duty and Battlefield to the downright strange avian dating sims, toast simulators and everyone's favourite roll 'em up, Katamari. Whatever you want from your games, the odds are there's one out there that'll suit you down to a tee - variety is the spice of life, after all. And seemingly, there's a fairly large contingent of players who enjoy a slice of titillation served alongside their games, with impossibly large-chested babes as far as the eye can see. It's OK, we won't judge.
It's this double-d sized elephant in the room we need to address first though, because while it's otherwise a perfectly acceptable role playing game, Dungeon Travelers 2 is rife with a little thing known in the industry as 'fan service'. Essentially a polite way of saying 'this game has copious quantities of boobs, upskirts and barely legal ladies in compromising positions', it's definitely a game for the more… open-minded player. From the enemies with barely-covered, implied-nipples to the 'boss' characters who are generally found trussed up and with their clothes ripped off following a fight, you'll probably see more boobs in an hour of playing Dungeon Travelers 2 than your average bra fitter will in a week. Which, by the way, many of these ladies could do with seeing as a matter of urgency as they're almost falling out of 99.99% of their clothes - we don't even want to think of the back pain involved in carting around those melons, seemingly unsupported, day in day out, while swinging a massive sword around…
Cover your eyes, kiddies!
But if you can look past the vast amounts of nubile, barely-clothed females, what you'll find is that Dungeon Travelers 2: The Royal Library & the Monster Seal (to give it it's full title), is a pretty solid dungeon crawling role-playing game, all things considered. Hailing from a genre which can famously be punishingly difficult, Dungeon Travelers acts as a pretty nice introduction to the way these games work, without many of the overpowered enemies and bosses that crop up in the more 'hardcore' titles. Essentially, you and your party of women (obviously) need to navigate from one end of the grid-based, labyrinth-like dungeons to the other, beating up monsters, searching for treasure and taking down bosses, gaining experience, new skills and items as you go.
Battles, in all their glory. Evil fruit!
But why are you doing this? Well, apparently, throughout the kingdom of Romulea monsters and mutants (essentially more powerful versions of the former) have been increasing in activity, possibly coinciding with a series of recent earthquakes, which have grown in frequency and severity all across the land. As a rookie 'Libra', an unusual character class that's capable of sealing away the aforementioned monsters, accompanied by your school friends Melvy and Alisia, you head into the dungeons scattered throughout the kingdom and see about suppressing the monster threat as best as you can - and discover the source of the monster outbreak is much more serious than you first thought. The story itself isn't really anything particularly revolutionary, serving as little more than an excuse to send you off into dungeon after dungeon and take down enemies after enemies, but the dialogue between characters and the humour it often injects provides a much needed break from the dungeon exploring grind, cementing Dungeon Travelers 2's place as a light-hearted, friendly take on the genre. The overheard conversations between a penguin and bear suppression team duo are genius too, with so many game-related jokes, animal puns and fourth-wall-breaking references to developers - whilst also, somehow, giving you a few tips and titbits to help you on your journey at the same time.
Beary witty...
As you explore the game's dungeons, wandering around each labyrinth's twisty, turny corridors, you'll get attacked by enemies at random. These encounters see you and your opponents - again, scantily clad witches, cat-eared girls and of course, nurses - taking it in turns to attack, sling spells and use special attacks, whittling their health down to zero to defeat them. And that's all there is to it really - although you may find things are a touch hard going to begin with, when you have but two party members and your healer Melvy is rather weak. But as your party grows, and with a little grinding (i.e. seeking out extra enemies and battles to make your characters stronger), you'll find it gets much easier, and the number of accidental party member deaths decreases substantially, letting you explore much deeper into each dungeon each time. One thing that does take a bit of getting used to though is casting spells, as they're not usually instantaneous - each one has a casting time associated with it before it can be unleashed, leaving the magic user in question vulnerable to attack for a short time, with the potential for their casting to be interrupted and cancelled (although admittedly not very often in our experience).
Like any real gentleman, the hero of the story, Fried Einhard (yes, that is his real name) likes to hide on the sidelines and let an army of women do the fighting for him. Apparently part of an elite class of book-savvy nerds, known as Libras, he has the ability to capture the souls of defeated monsters in his book, and then channel them into creating unique items known as 'Sealbooks'. Your party members can then equip these Sealbooks, and depending on the monster souls you used up to create the book, each provides the owner with different buffs, upgrades and useful bits and pieces - from upping stats like attack or evasion, to increasing certain elemental resistances, to letting them recover an amount of health each turn. Being a special kind of guy, Fried can equip his own fancier versions known as 'Grand Sealbooks' which confer party-wide boosts, whether it's increasing the likelihood of escaping from battles, upping the chance of landing a more powerful critical hit or making it so you encounter enemies more often (useful for levelling up faster).
Obviously the kingdom of Romulea has a SERIOUS clothes shortage going on...
As is fairly common with role-playing games, as each of your characters gets stronger and gains levels, you'll earn an amount of skill points, which can be spent on improving their current skills or learning new ones. From upping the damage of a fireball spell to a rallying war cry to bolster your party's attack to mastery of various weapons, you can pick and choose what you want to learn or improve with each level. Gain enough levels, and you'll then unlock the ability to change your character's class via a set of branching paths of different specialisations, turning your maid (yes, that really is a class) into a dancer adept at showering enemies in negative status effects, while your magic user can pick whether to go down the route of a healer or a more battle-focused spell-slinger instead.
We actually found ourselves pleasantly surprised by Dungeon Travelers 2 - after it's eye-rolling-ly 'here we go again' fan service-y intro, coupled with it's more hard-going first few hours, where our chief healer died every other battle, we weren't really all that into it. But as your party grows, and provided you're able to look past the copious quantities of boobs and backsides, it actually turns out to be a fairly solid dungeon crawler. Occasional difficulty spikes and the occasional anomalously strong enemy can knock you for six, but usually a small amount of level grinding - often the time it takes to return to base, heal and get back through the dungeon to where you left off - fixes it. It won't be a game for everyone, but for the more open-minded role-playing game player, it's actually pretty good.
Format Reviewed: PS Vita
