The Lazy Demon Lord's Guild Life (Free Hack and Slash RPG) - Introduction, Impressions, and Strategy Notes

Preface

It's a typical hack-and-slash RPG where you form a party and explore and conquer dungeons.
In many hack-and-slash games, players create their own characters and form parties.
Wizardry is an example of this in the past, and more recently, the Etrian Odyssey series would be a good example of this in console games.

However, this work is different from those works,We will be using characters who have already appeared in the work and have established their own unique personalities as party members.
This might be a little different from what people who prefer old-school, hardcore hack-and-slash dungeon RPGs are imagining.
However, the gameplay is challenging and not easy.

The completion time is approximately 50 hours or more.

Game Overview

The story follows the Demon Lord Lindworm (Lim), who is transported to another world by the hero's party, as he ventures into a dungeon in order to return to his original world.
Initially, the protagonist, Rim, will be the only one to venture into the underwater world, without any companions.
The character graphics are beautiful, and the game features an abundance of cute and charming artwork.
As your exploration progresses, you'll gain more and more companions, and you can form a party of up to four people in town (latest version).

The dungeons are randomly generated in a roguelike style.
The atmosphere changes with each floor, but the placement of items and enemies also changes from time to time.
Occasionally, there are special floors, such as maps with a large number of enemies or maps with shops.

The battles are standard command-based battles.
The pacing is quite good, and you can even auto-battle by holding down the Shift key.
This feature will be a welcome addition for those who find regular combat tedious.

In this game, leveling up is done manually in town.
By engaging in battles, you gain shared experience points (mana) for your party, which you can then allocate in town to level up.
You can either level everyone up evenly, or you can focus on training one character at a time.

In town, you can find shops where you can accept quests or buy and sell items.
Among them, the Equipment Enhancement Workshop is somewhat unique.
Upgrading equipment is an important means of making your character stronger.
The strengthening method involves first consuming unnecessary equipment to extract something called "Fict."
You use that Fikt to strengthen your equipment.

You can find quite a lot of equipment inside the dungeon, but apart from rare items, most of it is useless.
However, even with that unwanted equipment, you can extract Fikto, which can be used to enhance your current equipment, so it helps maintain the motivation to collect them.
Furthermore, once you've enhanced an item, that enhanced state will be retained when you pick it up again in the future.
For example, let's say you've upgraded a weapon called a "dagger" to +5.
So,Daggers you can find in dungeons from now on will also have a +5 bonus.
The idea is to strengthen the "types" of equipment rather than individual pieces.

Additionally, you can change the difficulty level in the configuration settings.
You can change the difficulty level at any time, so if you find it difficult, you can switch to easy mode, or if you find it easy, you can switch to hard mode.
Making the difficulty level harder increases the experience points you gain, so you can use this to your advantage by increasing the difficulty level when fighting weaker enemies (though this might be considered unorthodox).

thoughts

My impression from playing on normal difficulty was that it's a fairly high difficulty level.
The bosses at key points in the dungeon were quite tough, and if you weren't properly prepared, you'd often be wiped out.
If your entire party is wiped out, the money and experience points you've earned will be halved (though this can be reduced by possessing a certain item), so you can't just blindly charge in; a certain degree of caution is required.
Since there are limited places to save, facing a boss for the first time is quite nerve-wracking.
Basically, if you level up before challenging them, you can defeat most bosses without any problems.
However, with my play style, I got the impression that I usually needed to level up during boss battles when naturally progressing through dungeons.
Because I felt like I was constantly being pressured to level up, the proportion of time I spent feeling like I was doing chores felt a little too long.

The interactions between the characters are often lighthearted and create a peaceful atmosphere.
However, contrary to that atmosphere, the gameplay itself was surprisingly challenging.
While the game's appearance might not suggest it's a hardcore title, I think it's a game that I can recommend to players who enjoy challenging games.