Dungeon Antiqua quick thoughts
Picked up Dungeon Antiqua as part of my 2024 winter sale dungeon haul which also included Kowloon High-School Chronicle and Dungeon Encounters. I got this game in particular because of an article on Automaton detailing how it was mistakenly flagged as a virus and blocked on Steam.
Not to be reductive, but it is pretty much just Wizardry but with a Final Fantasy aesthetic. The classes are the same, the multiclassing works the same, et cetera, and I'm cool with that. I quite enjoyed Wizardry when I played it recently (didn't end up writing about it though, oh well), so I was primed to meet this game on its own terms. It's solid!
(Aside: this game is just reinforcing my belief that the retro RPG market has fully stratified into either SKALD/Scarmonde-style "looks aggressively antiquated on purpose" or Sea of Stars-style "looks like a fangame that someone's been obsessively working on for 20 years" with no middle ground.)
The Crawl: take your party into the dungeon. Come back up with loot and experience. Repeat. You're expected to go into the same dead end rooms every time to hunt for randomly generated treasure chests, run fetch quests for NPCs, et cetera.
The dungeon itself feels a bit slight; I could have used maybe one or two more "regular" areas before the endgame challenge floors. You're not really incentivized to keep putzing around the upper floors once you've gotten deeper other than a couple locked doors that you have to backtrack to after finding keys. One spell lets you scroll through the whole map and plant a flag, allowing your party to auto-navigate to that tile, and I think literally every dungeon crawler should have this feature. What a fucking great idea.
Another fun twist (and thinking on it, it's possible Wizardry did this and I simply never noticed because I never tried) is that once you sell an item to the store, the store will stock that item forever. This works for everything except the final ultimate bits of gear, including elixirs (panaceas) and perma-stat-upgrade items. You're really only limited by your willingness to grind gold (or edit your save file). You've got to weigh whether you need that really good armor to keep your grinding smooth or if you can give it up for the promise of outfitting the entire squad... which might feel more impactful if the game wasn't like, 4-6 hours long.
That said, I would not consider a short play time as a downside in this case. It feels appropriate considering the extent of the mechanics. Easily worth the asking price, I think.
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