Mystery Chronicle: One Way Heroics review

Rogue-like and Retro RPG featuring alternate universes.

Game lets you play as Shiren the Wanderer from the Nintendo DS and Makoto Naegi which is an Ultimate Student from Dangan Ronpa, although those classes need to be unlocked first.
Similar to 2D Zelda games and a lot of other older RPGs, which is why I call it retro despite it being a relatively new game.

The main feature of this game is a destructive barrier that chases you as you try to finish your heroic adventure.

The adventure run defaults to a mission(given to you by your kin King Konrath which for some reason is translated as father instead of kin despite that you can play as a Queen or a Lord/Duke for example) to destroy a fallen angel named Alma, but you can select replacement missions from NPCs that you can place in your starting home. Yes, every adventure will see your starting home destroyed at the beginning.

You can choose any character you've unlocked for any world, although some characters will have advantages or disadvantages depending on various aspects of the world. For example, a Wrestler will eventually run out of holy salt attacks which is their best offense against undead enemies if they continue to fight them for experience or treasure.

The characters have mountain climbing and swimming power levels. This will affect how much time is used up travelling across such terrain. There are regular mountains and also high altitude mountains. Although there is only one water type to travel across. A character may surprisingly get better at travelling simply by leveling up from defeating monsters. Characters also gain experience just from entering new areas of the world, such as when you see a majority of the terrain changing types, and some classes will gain some experience from entering new dungeons or towns.

Worlds have hidden treasure chests which you can only access through a status you get from reading a treasure map scroll.

Inventory management is an important part of the game and will keep you thinking about what is really important. Sometimes you won't really know the answer, and that's okay. You can try using a save crystal and consuming some items to help you gauge their usefulness and then reload those save points.

Notetaking seems to help with adventure planning. Although there is still some randomness to each world, there are still some things that are fixed. You may always find a town with certain NPCs at a certain distance from the start location, but that won't necessarily mean you can always buy the same things from the merchants. Also, difficulty level selection will have effects on monster levels as well as item pools.

Allies that you can attempt to recruit will semi-randomly appear in worlds, although control over these allies is quite limited in general, so don't expect too much from them. Monsters will sometimes attack NPCs and that can include allies you have not yet encountered. Allies' inventory generally does not need to be managed, exceptions are of course that rabbit and owl which are intended to help you manipulate your own inventory. They might give you a reward for triggering all the story type conversations for that character, it's happened to me once so far.

There's a class that cannot access the dream vault, and another one that can recruit the charisma appraising soldier at your starting home. There's a lot of variety. Checking your character status can reveal not only their traits but also temporary effects(and their duration) from what's going on in the adventure, such as a recent monster curse or effects of a consumable item.

I have unlocked most of the classes by the time of writing this review, and I've completed King Victor's request. There are still a lot of things yet for me to discover in this game. I have fallen asleep on adventure runs which is relatively fine since it's a turn-based game.

Failure is part of the learning experience. There are many times where I died because I didn't use this item or that item because I was holding onto them for a future fight and didn't realize that fight already killed my character. The sudden power that random monsters have sometimes can be quite surprising, Somewhat like how equipment which isn't verified may be either weaker or stronger than you expect, depending on what modifications it has...well monsters have modifications from their base form too, and although it's difficult to examine what those modifications are, when a monster has a lot of them, much like with equipment...it usually means it's a lot more powerful than the base form.

As a single player game, it has a lot to offer, and there apparently is some sort of 2 player mode for it(a 1 vs 1 it seems) although I haven't been able to play it. I would assume the reason being due to there being very few players of the game but there might be something more to that. If they remade the game and added support for a second player in regular runs, perhaps one that controls the actions of the allies(since sometimes their AI is less than at a desirable level), that might be really great.

The game has potential to be quite the time sink, but it's totally not boring, at least from my perspective. If the game begins to feel like a bit of a grind, it may be a sign that you should increase the difficulty level, and that may increase the fun factor for you.

If you like classic style RPGs and you don't mind playing a lot of single player content, this game is definitely worth picking up. Unfortunately, you have to unlock content(including difficulty levels and classes) to start getting a lot out of it.