Cladun: This Is a Review of the Game that Is an RPG

Cladun: This is an RPG isn’t your average RPG. First of all, the whole game is 8 bit and begins as your main character Souma and Pudding, his overly excited sister, fall into a mysterious world. As they proceed they meet up with a witch who decides to give in and show them how to survive in the world with the help of a mysterious black cat. As the story continues, suddenly more people start entering the world.

You are in a real-time action-RPG dungeon crawler, where your magic circle is the key to your survival. You select your main fighter from a list that include different class of warriors and mages and place them in the middle of the circle. As you level up more circles will be unlocked. The different magic circles will grant different customization options for you. You can equip different characters onto the magic circle, and they will act as your meat wall. When the wall’s HP is 0 your equipped character is KO’ed, and the next one will replace it until all your equipped characters are knocked out and you will resort to your main characters HP. Once that’s gone you’ve lost that dungeon while losing all items you collected. You get to keep the EXP you have gained and the gold you’ve collected from that stage, but if you pass, even all your unconscious characters get all the experience bonus, meaning unused characters get to level up if they are equipped, making it easy to create strong teams. Finding the balance of characters and their skills are what make this game or break it for you, using mages can help fight in the distance but when a group of enemies surround you, a warrior will be better suited so it’s a mix of learning and grinding stages, o it’s nice to level up different characters.

When you are short on characters or need a specific type of character, character creation comes into play. You can design your own characters to join you; you can even design characters from other series (Disgaea maybe?) just like 3D Dot Game Heroes. From that point on just toss them in your magic circle and power up your special character that can be shared online. Your imagination is the limit….well that and it has to be 8 bit.

Dungeons are the one thing you will see over and over. Similar to Disgaea games, dungeons are broken into what you could call chapters and as you pass a dungeon you proceed further down the chapter until you reach the next one. Once inside you have to navigate through the dungeon and find the escape gate, which isn’t always easy. Some requirements are necessary to access it, which includes defeating certain enemies or just finding the escape gate in a huge maze. Along the way you will find traps which have different effects. Poison traps, explosion traps, sleep traps, and arrow traps will cause you problems, and each are identified with their own logo. Using them to your advantage is important to take down enemies and finding the heart trap will restores life, but be wary of fire traps. Once you get burnt, you are in a fire state where your attacks become fire based even if you have an ice spell equipped, and burns your teammates even causing them to K.O. so wait for it to die down or find water.

Along the way you will see tons of enemies which a basic sword, axe or wand. At times enemies will only be weak to certain attributes, which your mages and swordsman must equip before hand or wait till you die and prepare to take on the dungeon again with the right skills. Unique skills will be available as you level up. All of them are important, but it will drain your AP so use it wisely. Running, sliding, and blocking are important to lower damage as an 11.68 (yes random decimal damage appears) can be blocked and turned into 1.24, very important difference.

Equipment is random in the game, you find it randomly generated in the dungeons by chests and downed enemies, and all of them have different attributes for armor and weapons but overall you are going to receive crappy equipment most of the time. Which is great mostly just to sell to shops, you can just use the money to buy more powerful, useful equipment. Something else you should notice are relics which can increase AP, HP and DEF for your character when equipped, this will help and is dependent on your magic circle.

Probably the most challenging dungeon crawling RPGS to date, Cladun mixes real-time RPG elements with Tactics-style game play similar to those in Z.H.P (Zettai Hero Project) with elements of Disgaea. enemies will move even if you don’t and is riddles with traps and confusing mazes. Oh, did I also mention you will be faced with tons of traps, and stage status effects, including burn and poison? But not all the status effects are negative to you; they can also hurt or heal your enemies.

Cladun This an RPG provides hours of challenges, frustration and over excitement as you proceed through those tough stages which makes this game worth purchasing for the challenge.

Available for the PSP via PSN now

Grade: A-