Dungeon Fighter Meh

[baines]

Finally tried the demo for Dungeon Fighter Live, the Xbox 360 port of Dungeon Fighter Online.

It was fairly disappointing. Very disappointing, when you consider that DFO felt like it wanted to be a console game. A friend described DFL as a bad SNES game.

Comments

[underthepale]

As it turns out, even DFO thought its rank system was terrible, given it was nearly impossible to get the much-needed S-Rank or higher, and eventually threw it out... For a system that makes it nearly impossible to NOT get an S-Rank if you're even vaguely of the level for the area. Likewise, most of the rank-based quests were first streamlined (in or around last year's Rebirth update) and then later removed (during this year's Revolution update).

So it's very likely it uses the new system. That's probably one of the few good things one can say about it.

[baines]

So how do you get access to the higher difficulty versions of a stage? Just beat the current difficulty? That's what I think it should have been from the start, if you want to force people to unlock it at all.

We didn't play enough of DFL to notice whether it was just unlocking the next difficulty through completion alone. It might have been. It didn't seem to make a big deal about Rank.

[underthepale]

Well the RANKS remain, they're just tied solely to Combo now. Combo is killing monsters via combo hits. The old requirements rermain (Expert, one clear; Master, Clear Expert with A or better, King, clear Master with S or better) but they're MUCH easier without those ridiclous Hit, Technical and Aerial stats that made the system impossible to comprehend.

Also there's difficulty sharing via account now. Has been for at least a year actually. It's quite nice.

[baines]

So if you get too strong, you might still need to equip an underpowered weapon (so stuff doesn't die too fast), but you don't have all the ridiculous other stuff to worry about?

The most annoying for me was that a solo player couldn't get more than 85%, as 15% of the final score came from team combos. That severely limited a solo player's room for mistakes. I personally preferred to solo, but there were some areas where it was difficult to find a group even if you wanted to (like the Apostasy(?) and sometimes even the ice mountains). Then you run across enemies that are immune to certain attacks (hard to juggle enemies that couldn't be launched), or you'd run into enemies that seem designed entirely around the concept of destroying score (like ones that used multi-hit moves that didn't actually do much damage), and you had to fight tooth and nail to make a high score.