Buy Ray Gigant

The story is... okayish. Yet sadly it is the focus of this game, and it cost it everything else. The game is stupidly easy, has tons of insulting tutorials for things even a beginner to RPGs could figure out on their own, and takes too long to get started due to the focus on said story.

I can't recommend it. It has gorgeous aesthetics and music, but sadly is not fun to play at all. Refund requested.

Still need to beat this so can't comment completely on the story, will update this whenever I finish it.

For starters though, do NOT buy this if:
-You hate anime.
-You are looking for a straight dungeon crawler.
-You do not like Visual Novels.
-You are looking for a challenge.

This game is pretty easy. You heal after every fight. With a small amount of management you can keep the action points you need for combat topped off quite easily. If a character dies you just go back to base and they rez although this does respawn all the enemies as well. Enemies are pretty balanced and gradually introduce their types and strengths/weaknesses as you go through the story. I've never once lost a fight, and only have had 2 characters die while learning the ropes. The map is uncovered as you go and it has a nice auto run if you need to backtrack or revist sections with a save point toward the end of the dungeon. Powering up your characters happens at a good pace, although each arc has a different team that starts from 0.

And I say all that as a good thing. The story and gameplay are engaging enough to keep me interested and I am having fun playing this. It is fairly relaxing due to the forgiving mechanics and has a nice balance between visual novel story and dungeon crawling gameplay.

TLDR: If you are looking for a comfy dungeon crawler with a story straight out of an anime, this is the game for you. It is not amazingly mind blowing, but it is a solid offering.

I take everything back about this game.

I honestly had a hard time to rate this game, because the binary choice "recommend/do not recommend" can't quite make it, but I am inclined to not recommend it, for reasons that I will explain. The game is a visual novel with dungeon crawling, not a dungeon crawler with visual novel elements. The distinction is important.

Warning: There will be HUGE spoilers below, proceed at your own risk.


Okay, so I decided to give this game a chance, given that I consider myself easy to be pleased, and I had average expectations about it. Most of the reviews that you'll find on the internet (Steam included) will talk about how the story is generic shounen story, the dungeon crawling aspects are very basic. But I want to expand on many things that such summaries fail to capture.


First, the story. I've spent quite a bit of a time trying to like it. I consider myself to have an average taste in anime and I'm a big shounen fan, and I still think that the story got everything that is cheesy and bad about shounen and emphasized it to absurdity. Ichiya, the main character, shows zero character development in the first 20 hours of the game no matter how many things he experiences, ranging from deaths of friends, learning about his family being murdered when he was a kid, the girl he liked being a spy (and she's also spying the other group, so she's a spy of a spy who spies the spy ^$%^ me if I kept tracking at this point). Then we have Nil, the token waifu, who's equally dumb as the supposed MC, she ends up losing her "sister", who was in fact a clone, she cries a bit about it when she learns it and the next day off we go being a dumb bimbo again. The only saving character from a development standpoint is Kyle, because he changes his opinion and worldview during the game and really tries hard to become a different person. Now, I haven't finished the game, I dropped it at the part where they learn about Ray Gigant, so maybe things get better down the line? Honestly, I don't have the desire to keep on playing it, as half of the dialogue is a pointless clutter the kind that makes your mind drift off to anything other than the game as you mash the "next" key to proceed. Did I mentioned that there's no "Auto" or "Fast Skip" option in the visual novel parts?

So you can gather that even if you come expecting something completely average, the execution is also completely average. I'm fine with having a predictable average scenario that has a good execution, I really am. But this is mediocricy at its average. It's not horrible, it just lacks any sense of impact. There's no epic feeling into it, I never felt like I'm watching the epic journey of teenagers who have special powers, facing gigantic monsters, because after a while they become such a commodity that you just cannot feel any impact.


Now for the dungeon crawling aspects.

I'll start off by pointing out something that nobody thinks it's important but I do, apparently. And that's the blant and repetitive dungeon textures. Each character arc's dungeons consist of a single texture per character. So all 3-4 dungeons that you get for each arc might not share the same layout design (thank heavens) but they share the same environment. Literally, just copy-pasted the same set of textures over and over again per arc. Oh, someone was thoughtful enough to introduce a "dimension" dungeon before every big gigant fight, that has the same crystal walls over and over again. So within 20 hours of play I got 4 different dungeon textures (crystal, city, sea and one more that I cannot remember), add to that the usual palette switching enemies have and what would usually feel like "wow, let's explore a new dungeon" becomes "let's get this over with".

Another issue is the difficulty scaling. Because of the way the storytelling is structured, as soon as you feel that the difficulty of the game begins to go up, you have to start a new party from level 1 and go through roughly the same upgrades again. Here we go upgrading physical damage again, teaching the caster a healing spell again, and so on. Which of course impacts the way the difficulty scales, because it's like it's telling you "good to know you can handle gigants that require you to use your special move more than once and you enjoy being strong, now time to go back to the basics because plot". Were the developers unaware of games that handle party switching more elegantly?

Which brings me to another point: Treasure chests, or should I say loot. Everything that you can possibly loot are crystals that you can use to upgrade your character's "talent tree". So far, so good. Thing is, you also get your gear upgrades from the talent tree. So if you want to get a new belt, you invest a certain type of crystal to the "belt" upgrade, then you use another type of crystal to acquire it. So far this sounds like a great idea, you'd think, because you no longer are restrained by the lords of RNG in order to gear your character(s) up, plus it gives you the liberty of designing your gear, so that you can avoid making defensive items when you lack offense and so on. Yes, that is a good thing, but there's an BIG side effect. There is no such thing as exciting looting. That moment when you open a chest only to say "awww yeah, that's a huge upgrade"? Gone. In fact, I never felt compelled to actively chase chests around the dungeon, not only because of the watered down sense of discovery that lacked but because I never felt underpowered, since I could focus the glass cannon being a cannon, the tank being a tank and so on.

The combat system in this game is somewhat good but not really exciting. There's a lack of random encounters, which is good. But there's also a lack of motivation to actively go out of your way and engage in fights. The times I went out of my way to fight "that extra foe" was when I had no AP and wanted to recharge, which were 2 maybe 3 times during the whole game. The rest of the time, I was actually actively avoiding combat whenever possible. And since there were no random encounters, you'll see plenty of enemies standing in narrow corridors every now and then, just so you don't forget that there's also a combat system in place. The fact that it's simplistic also means that you will always have the same trinity (tank, ranger, caster) except of course for the moments when you don't have 3 members in the party. On the upside of things, your health gets restored after every fight, so there's no reason to get anxious about keeping your party's HP full.

The gorgeous idle character animation that you see in the videos is not accompanied by a "getting hit" animation, or an attack animation, or a use item. When attacks begin, the characters hide away. So the perceived third person over the shoulder viewpoint that makes things feel different than most of dungeon crawlers doesn't get the treatment it deserves, in my opinion.

Then we have the rhythmic game mechanic. To explain it, the attack is kind of like a limit break that builds up and you decide when tou unleash it (and later in the game with who to unleash it as more characters that use it become accessible). I wasn't expecting much, but for what it's worth each character has his own fixed music for his special move, and the timing is not always on the beat. You can decide whether the attack will be vs. element or vs. enemy type, assuming that you haven't deciced to equip it. The game goes out of the way to warn you about it "hey the next enemy is going to be an undead so use this and that, ok? Ok". I kid you not.

I really wish I could talk on how the whole weight system feels more like an afterthought than anything measurably good, but I'm reaching the character limit.

Here I am, right after final battle.
So... yeah.
Nice music, nice character desighn. And that's it.
Story is "meh" at start and "kill me please" later.
Battle and character progression mechanics is just worst. I mean it.
Also note there is bunch of people who can't even run game due to bugs.

Go get Strangers of the Sword City or Wizardry or M&M or whatever. This one is bad idea.

If you're a fan of JRPGs this is just what you're looking for!

If you're new to the Dungeon RPG genre, Ray Gigant is a great way to start!
- gorgeous art style
- lovely animation
- easy to play (it guides you through gameplay & is less confusing than most DRPG)
- nice soundtrack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGAFQ_rbuHo
Ray Gigant may not be a better game than Stranger of Sword City on an overall scale, but it's definitely much easier and less complicated.

Only played a wee bit but here's some thoughts:
- Love the art
- Cool battle system
- Visuals are neat in general
- Neat levelling system
- I like the character designs
- Love the simple shonen anime style story
- However the game is way too ♥♥♥♥ing easy, by the second type-1 Gigant I was only taking 1 damage from his attacks and this was without grinding. like seriously. ♥♥♥♥.

If you like VNs and JRPGs you should grab it.

Ray Gigant has a story that is far more powerful and epic than that of most other dungeon crawler role playing games. In many other dungeon crawlers the plots tend to fall apart, are absent all together, or stop meaning anything half way through. The plot of fighting giant creatures is often over used but there were several instances in which I enjoyed such plots and Ray Gigant is among them. When I first played the title on the PlayStation Vita I was drawn in within the first five minutes by the dark and epic introduction, The music for the introduction and Ichiya’s opening cinematic contributed to it . The art also managed to instantly amaze me, I even took screenshots to keep as future wallpapers for my computer. It was unfortunate though that the art only kept a consistent quality in cut scenes. Although most of the art looked gorgeous some of it just didn’t blend especially between a few of the characters. the art of all of the dungeons was just like any other dungeon crawler but I had the same complaint for Mind Zero and Stranger of Sword City so maybe it’s just me. I enjoyed much of the soundtrack since I enjoy a mix of modern and ancient Japanese music but the elevator music in Ichiya’s living space was a bit odd, perhaps it was there for humor?

The battle system makes the game stand out the most from other dungeon crawlers thanks to the change of perspective during different stages of battle. I found it unique that it was in third person while entering commands but went to first person during the action phase. I also enjoyed the smooth character and enemy movements, they were much higher quality than what I had seen in dungeon crawlers such as Stranger of Sword City and Etrian Odyssey. The skill tree is somewhat similar to system s from games such as Child of Light but instead of points you use materials gained in battle or from crystals, one of the materials is called Materia. Each part of the tree requires different materials some of which are harder to gain. Unfortunately it didn't feel like there were enough options for the skills to learn but perhaps that is for the better.

One of the game’s more minor issues was the cliche personalities of many of the characters, Ichiya himself is the stereotypical reluctant hero who only thinks of food. I did see character growth but others might not notice any at all. The game is more story focused and even has visual novel elements that often overshadow other elements of the game. I enjoyed the game because I enjoy both role playing games and visual novels so I was able to appreciate more than just the RPG aspects. It was fun to be able to make some decisions on the character’s stance to influence conversations. Since the game can be seen as more of a visual novel at times it might not be as enjoyable if you don’t like visual novels.


Notes: I scrapped my old review to give a more thorough and detailed one since there was a bit of confusion. Keep in mind that this is my opinion of the game and be sure to research before buying. Also be sure that if you buy it your computer can run it well by checking the system requirements. My computer is above the minimum and runs it very well but other computers might not. I received the game for free but was not required to review it on the Steam page, I try to review games often to help others find games they might like. I also add other games I recommend to the bottom of most reviews.



overall I would give it an 8/10

Pros:
-Epic and immersive story
-Skill tree/ customization
-Beautiful and detailed art
-Smooth battle animations
-Unique battle system
-Occasional choices


Cons:
-Some characters are cliche
-Art doesn't always blend well
-Dungeons are too basic
-Enemies are too weak

Neutral:
-Soundtrack was mostly good w/ exceptions

Similar recommendations:
-Stranger of Sword City
- Mind Zero

I saw many people talking about this before it came out and decided it was worth a shot because I greatly enjoyed Experience's other outing on Steam, Stranger of Sword City. While this game is definitely not as hard, I find that the deeper story more than makes up for it. And as someone who ENJOYS Dungeon Crawlers that are difficult, it is a nice change of pace to have one where every single battle doesn't have me worried I'm going to misclick one thing and have everyone die. The art style is wonderful, and the fact that some new enemies/bosses speak to you is a welcome quirk. I don't speak fluent Japanese but as a fan of anime I know what a good VO sounds like, and this is one. You can HEAR the happiness/anger/frustration/evil/insert appropriate emotion here, and it actually fits with the subtitles. And the semi-4th wall breaking bits always give me a chuckle :-)

Tl;Dr
To anyone who enjoys anime rpgs with decent stories, or who enjoyed Stranger of Sword City,or to anyone who enjoys dungeon crawlers but has had the thought of "gee, it would be nice maybe ONCE to play more than the tutorial in one of these things without feeling like wanting to punch a wall cause of a cheap death", I heartily recommend this dungeon romp. Submit to fate! :-P