Was DanMachi Infinite Combate Worth It?

Was It Worth It is a series here on Aggregator Reviews where we look at a given product and let you know whether you’re going to get your money’s worth from it. It can be hard to decide which items are worth your time, and most importantly, your hard earned cash. In Was It Worth It, we provide an overview, some tips and tricks (if applicable), and our personal brand of irreverent commentary. We finish off with an overall determination on whether the subject is actually worth it. With that said, let’s look at whether DanMachi Infinite Combate was worth it.

Fair warning, the full title of this game is “Is it Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon Familia Myth Infinite Combate”. I’m not going to type that out again.

Into the Dungeon

I like dungeon crawling games, both turn based and real time. I’ve been a fan since I was a lad watching .hack//SIGN on Toonami, and I thoroughly enjoy the premise.The formula is pretty simple: you go into a dungeon, kill somethings, and earn currency (be it items or experience) that make you better at killing things.

Dungeon crawlers are all over the map when it comes to how they reward the player in the gameplay loop. The Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series lets the player level up and evolve, and also uses held items for an additional edge. Snack World gates player progression behind leveling, gear drops, and item customization.

DanMachi Infinite Combate does something completely different. There is a barebones leveling system in which you gain skill points from defeated enemies and can spend them, but the “level” is mostly for show. The skill points have effects like “Increase attack by 5%”. However, your character’s base stats only increase at certain intervals in the story. Given that the protagonist’s shtick is that he grows fast, the stat increases are pretty drastic when they happen. However, it sucks that it’s totally out of the player’s hands, and this will come up again.

This obviously means that skills have a big impact endgame, but early on it feels like a waste. I actually used my first several thousand skill points taking the “additional skill points” options to reduce the grind later.

Gearing Up

So maybe the equipment system shines? No, not really. There are a few things that the game does well. Notably, if you sell enough enemy drops then new equipment will become available. You can also use the drops as currency to upgrade your items, or to add elemental damage.

Sadly, equipment is just stat sticks, and irrelevant ones at that. It doesn’t make a meaningful difference to buy and upgrade armor because your character stats will soon eclipse the armor values. When your armor contributes less than 10% of your overall defense then the equipment system isn’t working.

Then, we get to the literal plot armor. If you were grinding early on for the most expensive dagger for Bell, then stop! You’ll be interested to know that the game gives you a decent knife pretty early on. The game forces you to use said knife for a boss fight, even if your currently equipped weapon is better. Thanks, Infinite Combate. The same also applies to your armor. The game eventually gives you free armor that is much better than anything else for quite a while.

I understand the game is trying to follow the story beats, but there are better ways to implement this.

Story

The story is probably the best part of this title. I haven’t seen the anime or read the light novel, but the story sections did a good job of filling me in. They also really endeared Bell to me, and his earnest nature really made me feel for him since he’s stuck in such a crappy game. The game also does a good job of showing you what’s going on while Bell is up to shenanigans.

The story takes a visual novel tone, which makes sense, since Mages (formerly 5pb) is extremely familiar with this genre; these are the folks behind Steins;Gate. The voice acting is competently done and the music is passable but not enduring. What’s puzzling is that there is no way to skip the lengthy dialogue sections. It isn’t as though a skip feature isn’t coded in, since you can skip the part leading to boss fights in the story if you’re retrying them.

One issue I did have with the story is that it bounces back and forth between playable characters – Bell and Aiz. Their inventories and skill points, etc, aren’t shared. While I enjoyed Bell’s character arc and was really jiving with his motivation to get stronger, I was incredibly bored by Aiz’s story arc. To put it in perspective, it’s like transitioning back and forth between the perspectives of a novice Pokemon trainer and the Pokemon League champion.

Picking a Fight

Since this is obviously a dungeon-crawling action RPG, it stands to reason that you’re going to spend a lot of time in the actual dungeon. Truthfully, you’re going to want to avoid going into the dungeon as much as possible.

The combat in this game is absolutely terrible.

If you’re picking up DanMachi Infinite Combate just for the alleged infinite combat, then know that it is not worth it.

You wouldn’t be wrong in thinking that this was a mobile game, since it’s essentially a Vita port. The sprites don’t look bad necessarily, but the controls are a hot mess.

The brunt of your combat is going to be mashing the light attack button.

Make sure you don’t use the last hit of the light attack combo, or else Bell (or Aiz) will sit there thinking about their poor choices in life while waiting to recover.

The same goes for the heavy attack, which also has a long lag time. The characters don’t tend to have a lot of HP, and monsters like to swarm you. It’s easy to get hemmed in and whaled on by a bunch of trash mobs because you’re waiting to start your next combo.

You also can’t simply dash away. There are obstacles like trees and rocks, and the aforementioned monsters, who will take up space on the map even if they haven’t spawned yet.

The dungeon rooms generally trend towards small square areas and hallways and you can’t dash through the monsters. You also can’t dash cancel out or use your supporter magic to break out. Speaking of supporter magic, it’s a good panic button in theory. In practice I’ve seen it totally whiff and not actually damage enemies.

What’s even more egregious is that when you die and restart, you don’t keep your items. If you entered a fight with 5 potions and you used them all in that boss fight and you didn’t save beforehand, then too bad. The game offers you the chance to restart quests, but what does that say about your chances if you restart with less healing items? You would think that considering how janky the combat is, they’d at least let you restart the battle in the same state as when you entered it.

This is especially punishing in early quests with Bel before he gets his big boy stat boosts. I cringe at the thought of replaying the battle against the silverback or the ants. The ant quest gets special mention as those spicy boys are more agile than the player. They can damage you while charging unless you already have a combo in progress and can stagger them. There again, you run into the issue where it can be hard to maneuver in the small dungeon to attack safely.

I eventually stopped bringing healing items with me because it was a waste of money if I died.

Was Danmachi Infinite Combate Worth It?

So it’s pretty evident that this game leaves a lot to be desired. I’m not sure what the brand strength of DanMachi currently is, but titles like this are not going to strengthen the franchise. If Snack World is a solid 7-8, then Infinite Combate is a 3-4. I like the overall premise and I don’t dislike the characters, but the frustrating gameplay aspects really hold it back.

It’s pretty unforgivable that a game based around fighting monsters would have such awful combat. Furthermore, some of the design decisions in the game make me wonder whether anyone actually played this before release. HowLongToBeat literally doesn’t have any data on this game, which is pretty telling.

DanMachi Infinite Combate was not worth it.

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