Review: Elrentaros Wanderings (Nintendo Switch)

A cute dungeon crawler, Elrentaros Wanderings takes you on an adventure between two worlds. You play as a young adventurer who explores dungeons, defeats monsters, protects the townsfolk and occasionally pays a visit to the school you attend in a different, less exciting world.

The majority of the game takes place in the fantasy world of Elrentaros. You camp outside town as you earn the trust of the locals. At the start of the game, there is one mysterious dungeon at the edge of town. As you progress, you unlock more until there are a total of six. The first five dungeons have various missions you can complete to gain coins, equipment, and special items that you can use to assist people in the town. The sixth consists only of boss fights.

Befriending the various townsfolk is a mechanic in itself. When you have spoken to them enough times, completed enough missions for them, and raised your likeability level enough, you can equip them as a support. This offers you boons to your dungeon runs equating to gifts you’ve given them.

The types of missions you have to complete fit into broadly similar categories. For instance, unlocking all the warp panels to the bonus rooms, completing the dungeon with equipment of a certain level or below, or avoiding or winning with a particular type of attack. This means that, later in the game, you might be able to guess your way into completing some missions on your first attempt (completing a dungeon without your HP dropping to 0 is a standard first mission), but it’s rare to get through them all at once. This gives you a reason to go back into each dungeon trying out different types of weapons and being cautious of different enemies.

Each dungeon in Elrentaros Wanderings is made up of a number of stages to explore and a boss battle. As you complete the missions, you unlock new variants of the same dungeons with more powerful monsters spawning in different places, with new missions and greater rewards. The dungeon layouts remain the same each time, so there is a risk that the game can get a bit repetitive, especially if you get stuck on a tricky mission that is blocking the story from progressing.

However, the dungeons are very beautifully designed, each with a distinct style, making them genuinely fun to explore a few times without getting dull. This is complemented by fluid animation and bold designs when it comes to the enemies you face and the moves they use. Monsters are unbearably cute, based on wild animals, with different creatures corresponding to different classic party classes, ranging from adorable little bunnies and birds to monstrous swine and floating octopodes.

The points at which new challenges unlock are staggered cleverly so you can’t jump straight to the next difficulty level of one dungeon without using a different dungeon as a stepping stone. This introduces a natural element of variety to the game that flows comfortably with the narrative.

Instead of leveling up your character, you pick up equipment with varying levels and special abilities that you can unlock. This means you can challenge yourself to try a harder dungeon using lower level equipment if you want to really test yourself outside of the story.

Dialogue in Elrentaros Wanderings is more of a visual novel than a truly interactive experience. There are a handful of dialogue options for your character, but they don’t have a huge impact on the story. But otherwise this aspect is crafted well enough. All the characters are well designed and written, with distinct looks, personalities and ways of connecting to the protagonist as you get to know them.

The sections that take part in the “real” world at school may as well not exist. There isn’t any action to it; it’s all conversation with very few dialogue options, so can be clicked straight through with minimal consequences to the overall game. It’s still well written and the relationships easily established, with a fun parallel to their visual equivalents in the fantasy world. But you spend considerably less time at school, and the lack of action means you feel less engaged in that world. At the end, you get the option to choose which world to stay in, but the choice doesn’t feel like one with much weight.