Although the JRPG has remained the de facto king of the RPG space for the past few decades, it could be argued that the popular genre would never have existed if it weren’t for DRPGs. What began eons ago with titles like Ultima and whose aim was to bring the traditional D&D gameplay experience to the screen gave way to more accessible dungeon crawlers such as Etrian Odyssey and Demon Gaze. In 2018, Nippon Ichi dabbled in the subgenre with the enjoyable Labyrinth Of Refrain: Coven Of Dusk, and now they’ve decided to continue that experiment with Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society. Although clearly designed for a relatively narrow audience, it exists many love Labyrinth of Galleria.
Labyrinth of Galleria puts you in the role of Eureka, a bright-eyed young girl who answers a job ad that sees her visit a stingy abandoned mansion in the woods. Here, she is greeted by the witch Madame Marta, who quickly connects her with a lovable green spirit that Eureka calls ‘Fantie’ and prompts her to use her spooky new friend to explore the vast maze beneath the Galleria Castle in search of powerful magical artifacts wanted by the castle’s mysterious owner. No human can enter the maze and return unscathed, so Marta teaches her how to use Fantie’s powers to bring various dolls to life and direct them to explore the dungeon for her. Eureka thus embarks on a vicarious quest into the depths below, while slowly learning more about her eccentric employers.
While the narrative doesn’t seem to be much of a focus here, the various visual novel-style cutscenes at key milestones do help to infuse Labyrinth of Galleria with quite a bit of charm. The writing and voice acting for most of the scenes are cute but not creepy, and there are some genuinely dark and sudden twists that help elevate the story beyond simply being a pretty-up for dungeon-crawling action. We won’t spoil anything, but suffice it to say that this plot goes where you wouldn’t expect, and we applaud the developers for their willingness to shake up convention and keep the player guessing.
Gameplay in Labyrinth of Galleria follows a typical DRPG structure where you explore dark dungeons from a first-person perspective. Each step will advance the time by one unit, which usually just means the enemies take another step and you gradually fill out a dense but simple map that makes revisiting easier. Along the way, you’ll find treasure to build your party, enemies to defeat, and stairs that will take you to other floors full of all kinds of good and bad things. It’s a fairly simple setup, but one that remains consistently appealing, especially when you factor in the special abilities. For example, you get a wall breaking ability early on that allows you to break through most walls like Kool-Aid Manand this creates all kinds of new strategies for avoiding enemies or discovering new or more convenient routes through the dungeon.
Or, in another example, some parts require you to use an ability that allows you to go underwater, where you have to control your air. There always seems to be something dangerous around every corner, whether it’s a powerful enemy out to ruin your day or a trap that will cripple most of your party, and this leads to a mesmerizing tension as you push deeper.
Every few minutes you’ll get into fights with enemies (although you can avoid them if necessary), and the combat here takes a standard turn-based approach. The main gimmick is the Coven system, which allows you to end up controlling dozens of characters at once by letting you drop a small group into each of your party locations. Covens act as a sort of formation for a group of characters and all act as if they were one character, and they can be tweaked and experimented with to suit a range of roles and action types. Sometimes you’ll want a DPS-only crew, while other times you’ll want to mix in a tank or two to add more options and increase survivability. It’s a lot to get to grips with, but we felt this unconventional take on extended team building added a lot to the otherwise routine combat.
In fact, once you start getting into the weeds, it’s easy to see Disgaea’s influence on Labyrinth of Galleria incredibly in-depth character customization. Every character you create is drawn from the same broader set of base classes, but they can be differentiated by changing things like their ‘attitude’ or ‘nature’ to change parameters like certain stats or XP gains. From this they can then be assigned to a Coven who in turn can be assigned a Pact which will determine the active skills they can use and progress independently of, sort of like the job from Final fantasy games.
Building an effective team is therefore a matter of trial and error to find the niche you want each character to fill. And this goes beyond the typical blanket decision of whether you want a character to be DPS or Tank, as there are tons of different types of DPS or Tank units you could make.
Fortunately, most trash mobs don’t really test your team composition too much, but each boss acts as a rough skill test that will happily send you back to the drawing board every time you fail. And while grinding can help alleviate poor planning on your part, it’s not as reliable a method of forcing progress as in other RPGs. Labyrinth of Galleria is most reminiscent of Disgaea in that its gameplay is as much (if not more) about what you do in the team-building menus as it is about playing game. There are few things more rewarding than seeing a well-oiled team take down opponents after countless painstaking attempts to compare gear stat tables and weigh the merits of swapping team members and pacts between Coven, but the flip side of this is that those who aren’t I’m not as drawn to min-maxing in an RPG, it might feel a bit left out. Labyrinth of Galleria is a game for those who like to stare at spreadsheets and adjust numbers to see how it affects other numbers; if that’s not you, then this title will probably have a hard time holding your interest.
Even if you gel with this more analytical approach to the RPG, one big gripe we have with the gameplay loop is that some of the mechanics and progression-based milestones can be a bit opaque. For example, one early quest required us to find and return certain treasure. He didn’t tell us what floor this treasure was on, nor did he have any hints or clues that would give us even a general idea of where to start looking. After spending an hour or two going time too deep in the dungeon for that point in the story, we eventually gave up and resorted to an online guide, which showed us that the treasure was hidden in a secret room behind a completely unmarked and otherwise plain wall that we had to break through.
While we sincerely appreciate that Labyrinth of Galleria is a wonderfully dense and complicated game, it’s not uncommon to come across instances like this where we wished it was a little less obtuse. This is the type of game that expects you to try to knock down every wall in the dungeon until you find the one that allows you to progress further. It could be argued, of course, that the first full playthrough is actually a ‘tutorial’ for the next part, but if you’re not ready and willing to approach it on those terms, you’ll probably feel that Labyrinth of the Gallery is clunky and confusing at times.
In terms of presentation, Labyrinth of Galleria applies Takehito Harada’s signature anime art style to brilliant effect, with each character looking sharply drawn and brightly colored. Additionally, in various cutscenes, the backgrounds feature beautifully detailed, painted locations that often have the perfect otherworldly spookiness. And while the 3D dungeons fall slightly short in visual excellence, they still do a great job of projecting an oppressive and endless kind of presence onto the player that adds to their mystique and intrigue.
The soundtrack matches these visuals perfectly with a special brand of goofy Halloween-esque track that helps set an effective tone. It’s creepy, but not scary; silly without being stupid. And while some of these songs can seem a bit repetitive given how long you spend crawling through some dungeons, we felt that overall the music did what it needed to do.
Conclusion
Labyrinth of Galleria: Company of the Moon does a fantastic job of providing a dense and devastating journey into the depths of dungeons, though it sometimes does so at the cost of accessibility. An attractive art style, expansive team-building options, and a genuinely surprising story combine to make this a worthy copy, but with the big caveat that much of its appeal is lost if you don’t enjoy minimal maxing in RPGs or don’t have the patience to fully digest and understand all his systems. If that does sound like it’s up your alley, the Labyrinth of Galleria is absolutely worth your time and money.
