Reading Report: 12 July 2026

My party in DUNGEON ENCOUNTERS

A bit of a thin week in terms of actual Japanese to comment on. I continued reading Dungeon Meshi and got to a point in Dungeon Encounters where the game's pace accelerated rapidly, and then I "completed" it (sort of). So enjoy some thoughts on Dungeon Meshi and Dungeon Encounters.

ダンジョン飯

Volume 4 and 5 feel like the big pivots between the Falin arc and whatever is happening after that. The tone in this manga has really shifted into the serious, and I feel more engaged, but I also feel like it's missing a bit of whimsy it enjoyed in the first few volumes. Marcille resorts to using old magic to revive Falin, and ever since then the party have received nothing but ire from fellow dungeon crawlers. To put salt in the wound, they don't even really get Falin back, and instead the gang decide the only way to truly free her from captivity is to defeat the dungeon master.

As they go deeper, they add Izutsumi to the party, a half-human, half-cat girl. She's pretty funny, though she sort of has the same issues Chilchuck had early on where she only really exists when story moments require her. Incidentally, Chilchuck has developed a bit more since last week, as has Senshi. Senshi's backstory after the Gryphon was very nice to read, and I liked how Laios was suspicious of the accounting of events, but he followed the truth to the bitter end, helping Senshi resolve past trauma without falsely condemning Senshi's old friends.
To be honest I was considering ending my journey with Dungeon Meshi at volume 7 since that's how many volumes I owned, but the introduction of the elves to the island, and the gang accidentally walking into the changeling ring right at the end of the 7th volume were enough to sell me on reading more, so I bought the next three volumes.

DUNGEON ENCOUNTERS

So I got to the credits in this game... twice. Dungeon Encounters is so weird, but it's also so orthodox. I figure I might as well comment on my experience for the last week of gameplay.

At the start of the week I had about 9 hours of play time in this game. At the end of the week I have close to 35 hours. The first 39 floors were relatively boring. Of course everyone gets hit by the curiosity about the FC encounter, the rat who proceeds to put you in debt, but beyond that the combat and gameplay is basically just "make notes about good shortcuts and keep exploring".
The game really breaks open when you unlock the Elevator skills. Elevator Down and Elevator Up flip how you think about the dungeon and accelerate progress in a way that probably gives each player a slightly different experience. When I first dug down, I ended up going from the 39th to the 69th floor. I was lucky enough to also find the Town Portal on that floor to make it into a convenient pivot point for further exploration. From there I navigated around enemies to chart deep floors, unlock movement abilities that nullified all kinds of hazards, and eventually I got the "double damage when at full HP" and the "strike flying foes with any attack" battle abilities and combat became a mindless game of 4x sword/lance users. Don't get me wrong, this is still part of the game that I enjoyed, and I was enjoying my progress through combat at this point a lot more than the incremental grind and party management I was doing up to that point. Now all I had to pay attention to was which enemy dropped the next best sword and the next best lance.
I reached the bottom floor relatively quickly. I'm sure most players probably do. The real tricky parts is all the floors between 90 and 99. Each seem to have some navigation gimmick and I still need to overcome. As of reporting my only unfinished tasks are mapping the mid-90s, defeating a handful of EX and FX enemies (I've already defeated FA, FB, FC, FE, and FF... FD pending...). One last bit of praise for the game is that I think the aesthetics and music are very pleasant for the task at hand. As a classical music enjoyer I liked hearing remixes of some great songs. It reminded me of The End is Nigh, a platformer which also used royalty-free music and does a great job with it.

I want to be annoying. I got this game because it receives endless praise from every other person who plays it, and I feel like for as interesting a game as it is, it's actually not that creative or good. The combat is basically boring, and enemy attack damage has so much variance half the time it felt like armour was an afterthought. Nine out of ten of the status effects in the game are just "death" with another coat of paint. Eating, blowing away, petrifying, even becoming a guinea pig, is just a form of "taking a party member out of the game" for shorter or longer periods of time. And since you mostly get battle abilities to ignore status effects around when you need them, I only had to deal with a petrified party member once (and it was cool I had to leave her body where it petrified because it was too heavy, don't get me wrong). I never got poisoned, I never got eaten. Becoming a guinea pig was a huge waste of my time because I found the cure before fighting the enemy that does it, though I like how the status effect becomes a buff once you have a particular weapon.
The 60-69 floors have a great gimmick that I enjoyed overcoming, and the reward for overcoming it (the ability to see invisible floors) was great, but when I finally went back and did floors 50-59 I was disappointed by how unfun that gimmick was. 70-79 was basically nothing, and 80-89 was extremely nothing, just a lot of running around. I do like how each stratum has an identity and they were able to craft that identity using nothing but a background png and tile placement, but there are hundreds of movement gimmicks in RPG dungeons they could have pulled that would have made it more engaging and worth backtracking in the way the 60-69 floors were. What if 50-59 had conveyor belts and once you get the ability to ignore them you can walk backwards along one into a secret shop or something? No? Just take chump change off my character? Ok I guess... And that's the funniest thing in the game, maybe. When the FC takes your money and puts you into debt you think "how will I ever recover this precious gold" and then when your party becomes a walking slaughterhouse you're suddenly earning tens-of-thousands of gold effortlessly. I also can't stand the math puzzles. Noticing Pythagoras' constant was one thing, but some of them are just impenetrable in an unfun way. At least I can still look forward to mapping out the 90s... and gathering up my missing party members when I get a single digit of my teleport address wrong.

I think Dungeon Encounters is an "it gets good after 10 hours" game. I don't understand the recommendations it receives, but I did have a lot of fun after the 40-floor tutorial ended, and I look forward to clearing out the last few encounters and mapping the last few hundred tiles.