Ray Gigant is a dungeon crawler JRPG for the PlayStation Vita and PC. The battle system is unique in that your actions cost AP but your party of three characters shares the same pool of AP. Each character can take up to five actions in one turn or skip their turn in order to regenerate some AP. It is a turn based system and thus you can have your strongest characters attacking five times while you dedicate the weaker characters to regenerate AP to repeat the cycle.
The types of actions that characters can perform during battle are attack, spells, wait (to regenerate AP by skipping their turn), use items, healing, guarding and evading. Each character belongs to a vague class such that they could be a great attacker while another would be great at healing. In traditional RPG fashion, each character has a skill tree which dictates their stats, moves and passive effects. There is a Parasitism Mode where characters use their HP instead of AP to perform actions. This mode is initially involuntary as a gauge builds up automatically and once full, the characters are forced into this mode.
Finally the main characters have a super attack while utilizes the Slash Beat Mode. This changes it into a rhythm minigame where you need to time your button presses to the rhythm and onscreen prompts for bigger damage. Initially, this is a really awkward minigame since the rhythm mechanics does not feel as tight as dedicated rhythm games but after a few rounds, you'll be hitting all the prompts in no time. The battle system definitely takes some getting used to but you will end up relying on the Slash Beat Mode super attacks to deal massive damage to quickly defeat bosses, while trying to just survive out of it in order to build the meter to do another special attack.
The dungeon crawling aspect is in first person. There are no random battles since you can see the enemies in plain sight, and also on the map. The enemies do not respawn unless you decide to manually respawn them at a checkpoint. You can exit most dungeons at any time by returning to the entrance and there is usually a checkpoint right before a boss where you can save. This is because if you die, you have to reload your last save, which is annoying during boss battles if you wanted to retry the boss immediately.
Once a character depletes their HP, they do not automatically revive. The only way to get them back is to exit the dungeon or go to a checkpoint. However, HP is automatically replenished to full health after every battle if they haven't died. Ray Gigant does not have a conventional level system. You gain materials/points after every battle and there are treasure scattered on the map. You then use these items to unlock more power or boosting certain stat parameters.
Throwing some spanners into the works during the dungeon crawling aspect is the fact that enemies can be "Light" or "heavy", which means that actions during those battles will use less or more AP respectively. It makes the game a little bit tougher in the beginning since AP doesn't replenish after battle. Perhaps more annoying is the tendency for the dungeons to get larger and larger with multiple levels, heaps of enemies and various other gimmicks. There will be traps which deplete your AP, false dead ends, warps, one way paths, hidden rooms and levers.
The traps and size of the dungeons gets annoying to the point where you cannot save for an hour unless you respawn every enemies along the way. Note that in each dungeon, you uncover the map square by square. The final dungeon ends up having so many levels that just makes the game drag on and on and on with its repetitiveness since enemies are no challenge and you're just going through the motions. Then it takes the cake when it removes the mini map which serves no purpose except to confuse you and waste your time by pulling up the full map every so often, it's inconvenient and doesn't add much to the game.
Ray Gigant has a heavy focus on the story, which is told in a visual novel style. It holds promise but ends up being fairly boring, it's such a shame that it makes you want to skip the story scenes. There is a lot of redundant dialogue and repetition. However, the two dimensional art for the characters and enemies look fantastic. Interestingly, there are sudden changes partway through the game which forces the player to end up effectively starting from scratch, which is odd. On the first run, the game is not a challenge. You will end up utilizing the same strategies no matter which characters you are using or what bosses you are facing, making it more of a chore to finish. The game doesn't give you any reason to play the battle system to your advantage other than that one strategy.
The final two chapters are so repetitive and boring where you are doing the same thing again and again with the dungeons repeating the same annoying gimmicks, it feels sickening and ruins any goodwill from the earlier parts of the game. What should have been a modest 15-20 hour game is instead dragged to 20-30 hours when it didn't need to. Once you beat the disappointingly easy final boss and get the ending, you can use the save data to start a new game which is on a higher difficulty. You can choose to carry over your stats or not and also activate God Mode which causes enemies to do no damage allowing you to focus on enjoying the story if you so wish.
Overall, Ray Gigant is an average game. It starts off strong, introducing neat aspects of the battle system and the dungeon crawling aspect being rewarding. Unfortunately, by the time a third of the game has passed, you realize that you have seen every mechanic that the game had to offer and end up cruising along the rest of it with no challenge and a lot of repetition. The story is flat but the design aesthetics are fantastic. Ray Gigant is worthwhile to play if you want to start off with an easier, more forgiving dungeon crawler.
----------------------------------------------------
For other game reviews, have a look at this page.
