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| Flashy, mindless fun. |
Long ago in a once-prosperous town, many adventurers would come and explore its deep labyrinth called the Golden Forest, in search of treasure and glory. However, as the monsters grew dangerous, few dared to venture inside and as time passed, the town faces an impending bankruptcy. Kind of heavy for a cute game, but it's not all gloom. It's up to you and four of your chosen adventurers to dive into the labyrinth and make a fortune for yourself and the town... while also facing the monsters that lie ahead. The story isn't all that particularly deep though its interesting enough for you to learn about some of the town's residents as well as some backstory to the game's world. In other words, the gameplay is where all the fun is.
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The story is alright with some cool characters
but doesn't get any interesting than that.
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Lapis x Labyrinth is a 2D action-platformer where you hack and slash through waves of enemies in order to collect treasure. You can take up to four adventurers at a time, each specializing in a unique skill. For example, the Destroyer class is super slow but compensates with some powerful attacks, the Knight has a great mix of offense and defense, and the Bishop is able to heal the party but has low defense. So there's a good deal of fun in experimenting to see which class combination can easily fit your playstyle. A cool idea that I liked about the game is that all party members' heads are stacked on top of each other, pretty odd but looks adorable nonetheless.
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| The gameplay is simple to grasp and a blast to play. |
The main goal of the game is to go about every level looking for treasure while also keeping an eye out for purple gems, which unlock the portal for the next floor. As you move down level after level, you'll start to notice that enemies and the environment start to become deadly, meaning that you have to tread carefully. Fortunately, you can get a few buffs back at the town in the form of meals from the lunch lady. These range from your standard attack increase to elemental resists. Also, there's a dojo where you can increase your adventurer's health and attack points as well as a merchant who will trade you some handy stat-buffing enchantments. At the end of each level is a boss fight that's relatively easy to beat though on later levels they'll tend to mop the floor with you.
What makes the game all the more fun and addictive is its tendency to constantly shower you with treasures in an over-the-top manner. Occasionally, you'll enter what's called Fever Mode, a state where the game kicks things up a notch by having everything including monsters and blocks drop huge chunks of jewels. The jewels are bright and colorful, coming in bulks. Hell, even the treasure chests contain treasure chests inside them! It's a brief yet super fun instant of gratification that never felt old and instead encouraged me to try to loot each level clean. It's worth noting that your time in each level is limited. You have up to 4 minutes to grab all the treasure you can and locate the next portal before the game ends. Should you stick around after the time limit, a giant phantom will appear and start chasing you. Touching him will result in an instant game over and all of your hard-earned progress will be lost. Most of the times he outright spawned on me-- killing me instantly-- which sucked. So in short you have a narrow timeframe to get some treasure and get out.
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| Loot, loot, and loot! |
Granted, while much of the game was an endless amount of fun, there are a few annoyances that sets it back. For starters, every time you have to change a party member, you must re-equip all of your weapons, gears, enchantments, and foods, onto your party again as the game resets that, even if it's just swapping one member. Moving on, the levels tend to fall on the repetitive and familiar side halfway through the game, which took out some of the surprise in exploring a new area. In a way, I felt that it accelerated some of my boredom overtime despite the game being a pretty fun time. The game took me over 16 hours to beat which was fine by me but considering its $30 asking price, the rather short runtime might please or disappoint some players. Still, the game offers some replay value in the form of an extra hard dungeon, which is a remix of all the monsters and levels you've faced, only more harder this time around.
There isn't much to say about Lapis x Labyrinth's visuals expect that I reallt liked the hand-drawn character midels and the colorful backgrounds. Each area of the labyrinth has a distinctive feel to it that seperates it from the last one. The same also applies to the enemies, who all come various shapes and sizes. Some of them were pretty neat in design like the gigtantic dragons and grossly oversized hornets. The soundtrack is okay with catchy tunes fitting the game's chibi art-style. Nothing really caught my attention except for the fever mode track, which is a blast to hear once you've hit jackpot. One aspect that I didn't like was that the voicework was in Japanese and throughout the game I couldn't understand what my characters were constantly yelling about, but I guess that's something minor.
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The flashy visuals and catchy soundtracks are
easily one of the game's highlights.
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Lapis x Labyrinth is one of those easy to pick up, hard to put down games. You're not playing it for the story, but for the addictive hack-and-slash gameplay. I loved the concept of jumping into a dungeon and looting it dry before time runs out. The game doesn't fall short on that since it manages to hook you with its flashy looks, almost like a slot machine (but obviously without the taking all your money part.) It does have its issues and if you're if you're a fan of flashy button-mashing games, then you might just look past them and have some mindless fun.
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