And so, we return to my current “Big Game”: Idea Factory and Compile Heart’s excellent Mary Skelter 2, which I’ve been gradually ploughing through for quite some time now.
I really love dungeon crawlers. Something about the way they work just speaks to my brain. I think it’s the inherent satisfaction of gradually uncovering a map and discovering things.
In a good dungeon crawler, you’re always moving forwards and finding something new, and it’s satisfying to uncover a chunk of map even if all you discover is a complete dead-end.
As an aside, this is the exact same reason that I enjoy Rise of the Triad, since Rise of the Triad, like its spiritual predecessor Wolfenstein 3-D, is essentially a high-speed, real-time dungeon crawler in which RPG mechanics are swapped for arcade-style action. The block-based nature of the maps allows for a very similar maze-like feel to your typical dungeon crawler, while the speedy mechanics give it a markedly different overall feel.
In yesterday’s play session, I managed a good 6 hours of progress through Mary Skelter 2, which took me all the way through Chapter 9 out of 11 — the only thing I didn’t complete during the session was an ongoing sidequest to recover 10 of a rare drop from monsters throughout the dungeon that I was exploring over the course of the chapter. I got 6, though, so hopefully it won’t take too long to get the rest, particularly as I know exactly which monsters I need to concentrate on in order to acquire said drop.
As noted last time we looked at Mary Skelter 2, one of the nice things about the game is that things like these sidequests are completely optional. There aren’t any really significant parts of the game that are locked off behind them — the game’s true ending is simply dependent on answering some questions during the finale correctly, for example (yes, I looked it up) — and so if you find them annoying, you can skip them.
I won’t lie, I’ve been tempted to skip over at least a few of these sidequests when they demand that I defeat particularly rare monsters or acquire rare drops — but I’ve stuck with them. The reason for this is that these things are not, as they might first appear, entirely luck-based. I mean, yes, there is a heavy luck element involved — but there are also ways in which you can prepare yourself in order to improve your odds of success.
For example, towards the start of my play session this evening, I had a sidequest to defeat 10 of a rare monster from a previous dungeon. I could have just wandered around getting into random encounters in the hope that said monster would show up — and indeed, I did that for a similar quest earlier in the game. But instead, I discovered that the “predefined” encounters in the dungeon, of which there are several on each floor, appear to be significantly more likely to spawn these rare monsters. And thus, all I needed to do was hop into the dungeon, clear out these predefined encounters, run away from them and re-trigger them if the rare monster didn’t appear, and things were much easier.
The quests that involve rare drops are a little trickier, but again, there are things you can do to improve your odds. Besides making use of the characters Gretel and Snow White, both of whom are able to learn abilities that improve item drop rates and quantities, Mary Skelter 2 also includes a feature called “Jail Trial” in which you can tweak the difficulty of each dungeon in various ways, generally exchanging a drawback of some sort for a notable benefit.
There are a wide variety of these “Trials” to choose from, and you can have multiple active at the same time in order to stack their benefits. Not only that, there are multiple Trials that have the same benefit, allowing you to increase the likelihood of something good happening for you significantly. And, yes, you guessed it: item drop rates and quantities are some of those benefits you can acquire.
Thus, through a combination of using Gretel and Snow White in the active party plus triggering suitable Jail Trials in order to improve the item drop rates, I’m significantly more likely to get the drops I need, should I encounter the appropriate monsters. The only thing that I’m not able to manipulate in this scenario is the exact monsters that I encounter with each new battle in the dungeon, but that’s not the end of the world; each successful battle is a little more experience, making my girls even more powerful and more likely to survive the challenges ahead of them.
The dungeon I completed in this session, the City Streets, felt like a significant step up in difficulty from the previous one. This was a fun thing to see, because the City Streets are actually also the first location you visit in the game, so the first couple of floors are filled with very low-level enemies that, by the time you return to them, you can absolutely flatten very easily.
When you get past the areas you’ve been able to access since the outset, though, things get much harder. You encounter similar types of enemies to on the lower floors, but they’re much stronger. They have hard-hitting abilities — many of which can damage the whole party at once — and it becomes important to whittle their numbers down as quickly as possible by exploiting weaknesses. And, because their weaknesses are different to the monsters that inhabited the previous dungeon, in some cases I’ve had to review characters’ equipment to ensure that they’re in a good position to deal the most possible damage.
This is what I meant when I said last time that Mary Skelter 2, like many other modern dungeon crawlers, is all about proper preparation rather than each individual battle necessarily being a strategic challenge. Once your party is set up properly, you can pretty much make use of a “rotation” of abilities between your party members to reliably take down the foes that stand before you — although it is worth noting that the game’s significant “risk versus reward” elements mean that you really do need to keep on your toes a bit.
Probably the most significant of these is the “blood splatter” system, whereby as you damage and defeat enemies, your characters get blood on them, adding to a meter that runs alongside their HP and SP bars. When this meter fills, one of two things happens on their next turn: either they enter Massacre mode, whereby they become more powerful and gain access to some additional, very strong abilities; or they enter Blood Skelter mode, at which point they become even stronger but go berserk, as likely to attack allies as enemies.
The more “corruption” they have acquired, the more likely they are to enter Blood Skelter rather than Massacre. Corruption builds up over time in various ways, and is indicated by how dark their blood splatter meter is. Protagonist Otsuu is able to, with the assistance of Nightmare Jack, “Purge” one or two party members during her turn, though obviously this negates her damage output while she is doing so. On top of that, characters are able to “Lick” another character who has 3/5 blood splatters or more in their meter, which not only empties the meter, it also triggers a character-specific special ability that usually benefits the entire party in some way.
Part of the challenge I was finding with this dungeon was that because I had so many Jail Trials active to manipulate the item drop rate, I wasn’t able to add any that lowered the amount of blood that was being flung around in battle, making Massacre and Blood Skelter significantly more likely to occur. Thus, surviving this dungeon became as much about managing the various characters’ blood splatter meters as it was about defeating enemies quickly and simply surviving their attacks. It certainly kept me on my toes.
At the time of writing, as I say, I still have to finish that sidequest despite having technically “beaten” the dungeon in question now — and, of course, beating said dungeon also means that I’ve unlocked the next tier of sidequests, too, which will inevitably mean more skulking around looking for various things.
I’m having a great time, though. After more than 70 hours with this game, I’m very much attached to the characters, both in terms of their personalities and the role they play in the battle party. I’m looking forward to taking them through their most significant challenges yet in the last two chapters of the game — and I can already feel that beating this game as a whole is going to feel immensely satisfying.
That’s still a way off yet, though, so I guess I need to decide whether Sunday’s “free choice” gaming is going to be spent making more Mary Skelter 2 progress, or on something else…?
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