Level-5 recovers one of its 3DS successes with an expanded and renewed version that puts on the table a particular concept of adventure and dungeon.
Level-5 is a company with its own label, one of those whose games breathe a special aroma for how they are designed and how they evolve with the passing of the hours. Snack World: From dungeon to dungeon – Gold edition is one of those titles: breathe the essence Level-5; And that is, above all, great news.
We are in luck to receive a title that never saw the light in the West after passing through Nintendo 3DS; however, since – as usual – the company has taken four years to bring the title to our land, it has done so with a remastering for the current console of the Kyoto firm, Nintendo Switch, and it does so with all extras of the “Gold” version released in 2018.
Pure dungeon can be interpreted in many ways; it can be through the method in turns, as in the Etrian Odyssey or the Mystery Dungeon series, or through the most casual action, in real time and with elements that remind almost more of the hack and slash. The case of the game that concerns us is closer to the latter. Level-5 has preferred to transfer the gameplay of Fantasy Life (with which it has many reminiscences) for the playable approach to the title, which is still a real-time action adventure where the exploration, cooperation and looting of materials are the axis on which everything revolves. This is a double-edged sword, as we will see in this Reviews.
Knowing the kingdom of Tutti Frutti
We had a great time with Snack World: From dungeon to dungeon during the first 15 or 20 hours; his problem is the second half, recursion increases and the game loses strength, causing that potential of ideas and creativity to be limited and small of the dreaded repetitiveness.
But let's start at the beginning, because these 35 hours of adventure (plus the other 15 hours we have dedicated to endgame) have a beginning when it comes to creating our character. The editor is basic, rather aesthetic, since there are no elements that directly influence the gameplay.
One day, for some unknown reason (what better way to avoid complex presentations in the plot), we woke up in the Tutti Frutti kingdom without remembering anything. Touch start from scratch. For more inri, a sultan wants to resurrect a powerful deodragon that tries to devour the entire kingdom. Knowing this fatal news, we will receive the orders of King Papaya and his daughter, Princess Meloni, who will essentially be the mission mailbox to advance in a story with completely crazy situations, talkative conversations and very nice moments, why deny it.
Make your hero a fearsome knight
The city is a kind of lobby with different locations: a Boutique to buy armor and weapons (jaras); a cafeteria to buy items and other locations that, from time to time, will even give us side missions. Level-5 is aware that we are going to enter these places many times, so we have made it quite easy to be able to deploy a menu that leads directly, as if it were a quick trip, to each location. This speeds things up a lot, because the grace of the equipment is not only to have the armor with more defense, but to wear the ones that best fit the elemental type of the main enemy of the mission.
That is, the game does not invite you to recycle what is no longer useful and sell a weapon that has been left behind the brand new sword you have made, but to save it to use the most convenient in each type of mission even if it has worse features. It is a very grateful game with the time invested in preparing that equipment and reward every hour invested: it is not wasted time.
And yes, we have said manufactured because we will have to buy recipes to unlock more jaws and armor if we do not want to spend all our money buying things that can be manufactured. To do this, you need to gather the necessary materials – some of them reserved as a random reward for the main and secondary missions – and materialize them from the corresponding menu. One more incentive to complete several of the missions several times, because if we do not touch what we need to improve that arc level … there will be no choice but to try again. There are all kinds of weapons; from physical to magical through arches, hammers, wands … The character, meanwhile, has attributes of attack, defense, magic defense, health points … All of them are important, but if there is something that can not be neglected are the defenses
Wasted potential: playable simplicity and repetition of mechanics
It is a pity, but the management system of all of them is wasted when it is based on pressing the attack button repeatedly and again, so we will have to worry about dodging (a kind of dash) when an enemy sends us and always be well placed to attack without being attacked. It works well, it's fun … but combos are missing, that a sword feels different from a big hammer beyond the weight. When we reach the final stretch of the game is when we can access those greatspots bigger than the protagonist himself, when the hyperbole becomes part of the game and the exaggeration is part of the magic of the trip. A pity to have to wait so many hours to reach that point, because if the first third of the adventure has a curve of difficulty according to the expected, without many complexities, there is a moment where there is a jump that does not give scope for action: you have to level to adapt to the power of the enemies.
To the mess
One of the biggest problems of Snack World is that it does not explain many of the fundamental things of resource management, the improvement of the character's personality attributes (hidden in a place of the protagonist's smartphone menu) or why the commitment title in which we wear clothes of a specific color. You have to be self-taught and sometimes it is very uncomfortable not knowing how to do some deeper things.
Dungeon, which is governed by a randomly generated design, has an indisputable incentive, and it is its unpredictability: it is always something new. A random design implies that there are unexpected situations, hidden secrets, hidden booties … It is the grace of Snack World: from dungeon to dungeon, make your hero have the best jaws with the most terrifying powers and the most profitable healing tonics. Something positive about the game is that it doesn't stop rewarding you with booties, materials and bonuses: all missions have a multitude of rewards. It is easy to search, it is easy to develop an improvement for a team and does not require more time than desired, except in some cases. The rule is basic: more missions, more chests and more rewards.
The design of the dungeons is repetitive and simple: there are switches to activate, to find a key that allows us to find the exit door and those that are a corridor full of enemies. The missions, except in a single case of the whole adventure, always have two floors and the confrontation against the boss. Missed, a missed opportunity to do something braver and take advantage of how well executed the idea is initially. The best, though, are the final bosses, with a camera-to-shoulder perspective where real-time strategy is accentuated and frenetism grows by leaps and bounds. There are truly original and well thought out bosses; although, again, after the hours are repeated with different colors, without changes in their patterns.
We cannot fail to mention the Pix-e Pod, a Smartphone in which many of the character's management tasks are performed and that also gives meaning to the name of the game: snacks. The title also has a certain Yo-kai Watch component by allowing us to use some plastic cards that we will obtain when taking photos of the monsters and characters. That is, we collect them and they will be our companions in the adventure. We can carry up to three main ones, while the secondary ones are invocations. When we finish with an enemy, it will disappear unless we are lucky – it is also something random – and we have the opportunity to catch it with a simple minigame that lasts just a few seconds. The slogan "get along with everyone" fits very well with the style of Snack World, it is a success.
The location of the game is one of the best we've encountered in recent times on Nintendo. It is no longer just the desire of the Spanish translation team to translate phrases made and expressions of the Cervantes language, but they have managed to get a young language, with which the smallest of the house can laugh, but also marry an adult audience; very similar to what we already saw in the —excellent— Yo-kai Watch locations, which they drink from the same source, after all. So that we can get an idea, Snack World is at the level of Animal Crossing in location, and that is saying a lot.
Multiplayer: an injection of life for Snack World
Experience wins many integers if we play in multiplayer mode. These types of titles, as you may have imagined, claim that we play cooperatively, not only for giving an answer to those who seek to enjoy and explore in company, but also for a matter of design of the title itself. Level-5 has conceived the secondary missions to be completed with more than one person; That is why they have a greater amount of NPC on screen and, no doubt, the difficulty is also increased. On many occasions, especially in the higher CMs, the recommended levels to complete a mission fell short if we went alone – something that does not happen in history missions, where the recommended level to complete them was accurate – so we had to Try to find someone to play.
Luckily, Nintendo gave us the code of this Snack World with several weeks of margin and, like other colleagues in the press, with whom we have spent – everything is said – many hours together. Surely this has been the best part of the video game, the fact of sharing the trip and cooperating, with verbal communication, to see where we were going, where a switch was hidden or if, in the worst case, one of us stressed the knee and we had to go to his rescue.
There is a raffle to exchange tickets in exchange for objects; some very valuable
Therefore, it will be from the launch of the game when we can know if the true juice (worth the analogy) of Tutti-Frutti resides in its online slope over the weeks, if Nintendo adopts the model seen in Japan with new codes Free downloadable events and content, because to be able to glimpse new goals and powerful bosses to face is the hook that can keep all those who launch to give the game a chance.
It is, in a way, the Monster Hunter philosophy, where the end credits are only the beginning: the really funny thing comes once the campaign is complete. The problem, in this case, is that it becomes very heavy to have to complete such a number of missions, including the stages where those peaks of difficulty are experienced and we are forced to overshoot, to reach that reward.
We have performed this Reviews thanks to a digital code for Nintendo Switch supplied by Nintendo.
CONCLUSION
Snack World: from dungeon to dungeon is a good video game, the evolution of Fantasy Life focused on action and not so much on trades; with elements of the dungeon crawler and the development of some JRPG based on the improvement of weapons (jaras) and armor, but with a drawback that hurts this staging: simplicity and constant repetition of tasks. Its combat system, simple and shallow, prevents us from making big differences between classes. The design of the dungeons, little used, is fresh and addictive in the early hours, but it does not know how to renew and can get tired. We are left with its great approach when facing the fighting with final bosses, the large amount of armaments, missions and contents, which can give us for tens of hours if we take advantage of the multiplayer mode. If we know how to forgive your problems, Snack World is one of the funniest cooperative games in the Nintendo Switch catalog; Especially recommended for people with a lot of time ahead and with less experience in this genre, which tends to be deeper than in this Level-5 alternative. Notable, although less remarkable than we would have liked.
THE BEST
- Pure essence Level-5: personality, simplicity and fun
- Multitude of contents: missions, catchable characters, jaras …
- Multiplayer mode, an incentive to explore
- A location of ten
WORST
- Repetitiveness in your dungeon design
- Bad explanation of some basic functions
- Simple and, in the long run, boring combat system
- Unexpected difficulty peaks that force repeat missions
Good
It meets the expectations of what a good game is, it has quality and does not present serious failures, although it lacks elements that could have taken it to higher levels.
