Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy

Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy - a dungeon crawler where you make high school students fight a horde of evil monsters - is not a game for the impatient.

Nor is it a game for those with little time on their hands. This game will demand a lot from you.

But is it even worth dedicating all those hours, to play something so monotonous?

The game follows a simple, and predictable formula: you take missions, head to the location, dispatch into the dungeon, wander around corridors, fight monsters, return to base, and repeat.

The randomised battles are tough, and can be between anywhere from one to a dozen enemies at once. Plus, monsters can call for help and bring their friends into the fray.

And because you can't use experience to level up your character's abilities until they’ve returned to the home base to rest, you won't be able to better yourself within the labyrinthine corridors of a dungeon.

One of the strangest aspects of New Tokyo Legacy is that you can create your own characters. You're given a set of six starter characters, but if you don’t like how one of them is turning out you can create a new one from scratch and add them to your team with a few button presses.

There are multiple classes that characters can take, each one adding specific strengths and weaknesses to form a perfect balance on a team. And there are spellcasters, warriors, assassins, and many more types of fighter.

But it means that characters feel like indistinguishable cogs in the machine, rather than relatable, well-defined characters. Especially when the entire squad is addressed as one entity.

It makes me wonder why the characters even have names or faces in the first place, because they sure don’t need them.

That lack of emotional connection with the characters adds to my biggest issue with the game: its sheer monotony.

The formula from earlier explains the entire experience, with little to no variation whatsoever.

Sometimes you'll find a dead body laying on the ground or a spirit that wants to tell you something, but for the most part these dungeons are nothing but long, boring corridors with a few instances of multiple paths.

When I complete a mission it never feels exciting or rewarding because I’m about to go do the same thing over again in a different in-game location, only my objective might be to fight a boss instead of find a certain something.

Piled on top of that is the grinding for experience. It’s as if the game is actively trying to waste as much of the player’s time as it can, while giving very little reward during the trek.

I went into the game knowing that dungeon crawlers are significant time investments, but I at least expected to feel rewarded or connected to the game at some level.

Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy has no intention of establishing any type of relationship with the player characters, using them only as a group of mercenaries sent from dungeon to dungeon to kill enemies ad nausem.

A game like this, especially a grind-heavy dungeon exploration game, needs to give the player something back, any little thing at all, but New Tokyo Legacy does nothing of the sort.