Crescent Tower

• Genre: RPG
• Spoiler Free Review: There isn't much to spoil, but I do talk about the mechanics of the final boss.
• Time Played: 24 Hours
• Too Short/Long: Too long, considering about half of it is grinding, especially at the end.
• Did I cry: No.
• Soundtrack: It's fine.
• Why I played: It had cute art and I know a friend enjoyed it. They always get me with that classic anime pixel art though.
• Jank: The menus are pretty clumsy. When trying to optimize my class changes I kept having to go back and forth and back and forth. There are tons of times where I opened the wrong menu because it didn't have the correct information. Made worse by all the real estate on screen where they could have had some of the stats. I think maybe they felt it would be silly to have the same information on multiple screens, but having to exit all the way back to another to compare your stats or abilities is not the way to clean things up.
• Difficulty: I'm not sure how much of it is difficulty that required me personally to grind, rather than difficulty of the actual strategy required of the game. I do think there are some interesting things touched on some rpgs ignore, but ultimate the difficulty lies in it being a grindfest.
• Pleased/Disappointed: Overall I enjoyed it, so I'm pleased enough. It just managed to push my patience a few times.
• Recommend to others: Not really. There are overall better little dungeon crawlers than this one, and even though it has a lot of cool stuff, the last section really prevents me from recommending it. Or if you wanna play it, I'd probably recommend doing so on the easier mode.
  

Crescent Tower isn't bringing anything new to the table necessarily, but it's a nostalgic jaunt that brings some interaction, puzzles, character art and class changes. It really drew me in at first, but then I needed a bit of a break when it just started feeling way too grindy in the middle of the game. Sometimes you get a random encounter 1 step after another. It's a little too much. I'd say on average it's like 5-10 steps, which is just too much for a game focuses a little more on an open exploration and figuring out the trick of the area as opposed to something with a linear path. It's not too complicated, but with all the other navigational quirks, it's possible you may just forget what you're doing exactly and get caught in a endless loop of random encounters because they're so frequent.

This wouldn't be so much of a problem if not for the way it soft-locks the level cap. It just gets to a point where the next level requires exponentially more experience than the last. This is exacerbated to the nth degree by the final area. I would say my last third of my play time is just spent in the last hallway before the final boss. The final boss has very high defense, immune to all status effects, resistant to all magic, and fully heals every round, so you can definitely be "too weak" to finish it, even with every buff on your own characters in the game. It's arguably not even about strategy at that point. Unless I missed some gimmick that was there and was just unnecessarily brute forcing the game. It's crazy that you can get to the point where it takes you dozens of battles to level up but still not be strong enough to beat the final boss. It can literally, based on the average experience the final enemies dish out, without using "special techniques" take 100+ battles to level up - not even close to a max level, just a level where you are still learning new spell levels.

It's just crazy how much the leveling up comes to a halt at that point despite the fact there are more levels that grant special skills. It's not a level 60-99 grind of your standard rpg where you learn your last skill at 60 or your skills are tied to something else so there is always new stuff to learn. This is like 14-15, 15-16. My highest level character was 16 and some classes learn abilities up til level 21 or so. I think this is where the "modern" mode differs from the classic and maybe it doesn't feel so restricting, and maybe I should have played in that. I started in it, but then I saw there was a little "modern" badge on my screen at all times. This signaled to me this is meant to be "little baby mode" and you are to be chastised for it because we'll put a reminder on screen at all times for it. So I restarted before I really even began to play in the classic mode, maybe that was a mistake, maybe those levels and skills would have been attainable in modern, but the game clearly didn't consider that the "intended experience".

So instead I grinded, class changed to get more abilities and increase stats, rinse, repeat, and eventually knocked it out. To be fair, it's kind of what I was in the mood for - I just thought I was gonna wrap up earlier in the day and move on to something else after, not keep playing for an additional 6-7 hours after I thought I was about done.