Games I Played in 2020: Snack World The Dungeon Crawl Gold

Snack World The Dungeon Crawl: Gold is a game developed by Level 5 (Professor Layton, Fantasy Life, Yo-kai Watch, etc), originally released as a 3DS game in Japan that never got localized, called Snack World: Trejurers. The Dungeon Crawl Gold is the localized version of Trejurer's enhanced Switch port. Aside from the game, it has a manga series, and a CGI anime available on Netflix but I have no particular interest in looking at those from my experiences with this game.

Let me say from the beginning that I wanted to like this game, I really did. From trailers, a lot of it looked like a fun, multi-player experience in a quirky RPG world, something that could echo the experiences of playing Fantasy Life with my friends who all got it for the same reason. Unfortunately it just falls flat on So. Many. Different Levels that I have a hard time figuring out how to list everything I found this game fails at. 

The gameplay is relatively pretty simple: you go through quests assigned by a character in the game, going to an overworld where monsters show up. To fight them, you use 'jaras', which are weapons, shields and tonics/perfume (healing items/buffing items) in the form of keychains that your character equips. It's a real-time battle system, with you having a regular attack, a charge attack, and a burst attack. The latter two has a charge time and cooldown, but are much more powerful skills. Every time you use your weapon, the jaras' durability goes down, but since you can equip 6 weapons at a time, you can switch between them. This is a necessity, as every weapon has different properties that make them work better against certain enemies, so you'd want to amass a good collection of weapons and change them up for every quest you go on.

In theory this is nice, as you won't end up relying on one weapon for the duration of the game, and force yourself to reconfigure strategies and the AoE of your various weapon's attacks constantly. However, the main way to get new weapons is through a random drop from the treasures you get at the end of a quest, and they also have random benefits like exp boosts, a plus to any stat, higher drop rates, etc, meaning getting ideal weapons is INCREDIBLY luck-based.

 Also the game automatically can pick these weapons for you if you so wish, and switch between them with one button during an in-battle prompt. Personally, I was thankful for this because I really didn't want to waste too much time on this game I thought the UI was kind of cluttered, making picking the right weapons by myself for EVERY mission an annoying task.

There's also armor/clothes you can forge from random drops you get in dungeons, and I think it's nice that they separated 'utility' clothes (as in, the ones that determine your stats/effects), and 'style' clothes (as in, the clothes that your avatar looks like it's wearing), but this separation doesn't really mean much when your clothing options are so limited anyway. There's only hat/headgear, the rest of your clothes, and accessories (which don't even show up on your character) as separate characteristics, so there isn't really much option in mixing and matching your outfit. And again, because the materials are all random drop items that the game doesn't even tell you where to get, you might not even be able to get the ones you want.

The gameplay gets incredibly repetitive as the quests are on boring overworlds and randomly generated 2 floor dungeons leading to a boss. And if you want to be ideally levelled/get the weapons, you might have to do this more than once. You can't even explore the world this game has because you're limited to quests only and some hub worlds you unlock as you progress the main story.  It's incredibly limiting, especially compared to Fantasy Life where the story only served as a short series of events that would unlock a new area with multiple new dungeons, enemies, ore, fish, wood, etc, which you can explore with your friends. You can't even do the story OR the character quests in multiplayer mode, and are limited to a boring set of sidequests, which you can unlock more of by...continuing the story. Alone. While I'm not one to complain about 'intrusive' stories for an rpg, in this case I felt it was incredibly so because the game itself advertised itself on the whole 'go dungeon crawling with your friends' thing but for the most part you'll be with the game's various and incredibly shallow cast of characters instead. Or some monsters you can befriend. 

Now the story, GOD, the story. You play as an amnesiac who woke up one day, gets audience with the King, and gets trained on how to be a warrior. The King gives you quests to get something his selfish daughter, Princess Melonia, wants, and once you get it, she becomes bored of it and asks for something else. You do this a few times, partnering up with some kid leading his own adventuring party (and who's also madly in love with the Princess), Chup. Eventually you realize that your old home is destroyed because of some tycoon named Sultan Vinegar, and you have to get the power of the Dragon Knights to fight him, or whatever, the point is it's all very cliched. 

Yes that sure is The Sultan, but we will unpack this game's ridiculously racist caricatures in a bit

 When it isn't being cliched, each chapter feels like a setup to a punchline that... isn't really funny. Chapter 2, for example, starts with Princess Melonia wanting a moisturizing cream that supposedly comes from a squid-like monster called the Krapen, and at the end of the dungeon you realize it's poop. Another has the goblin of Chup's party get 'murdered' but the end of the chapter twist was that it was actually some other random goblin. Almost none of the jokes land very well, either by being incredibly out of date, incredibly juvenile, or just plain offensive.

Seriously who even uses "First World Problems" unironically anymore

I can forgive the ridiculously tedious and boring gameplay, I can forgive a kind of out-there plot, but I can't really get over games that don't have any kind of... oomph to them. Either an interesting thematic thread that ties it all together, or some kind of passion/flash to them that makes them fun as a mindless experience. Snack World has neither, it is one of the shallowest games I have ever played. Nothing about the game feels genuine in any real way, every character is a walking punchline with absolutely nothing else to offer. Every wink and nod to cliche rpg tropes feels meaningless because it doesn't DO anything with it's cliches, it simply plays them straight and goes 'wow, isn't this absurd? whoops I'm breaking the 4th wall!'. Heroland was self-aware of it's rpg cliches too but it actually has an in-universe reason for doing so. Snack World just feels like it's trying too hard to be charming and quirky while failing to actually be either.

As a side note, the food puns for the areas, dungeons and for almost every character, as well as the moniker, Snack World, would make you think the game would have some kind of food theme going on in it's world, right? You'd be wrong, because for all intents and purposes, everything is just a generic rpg world (with slight modern tweaks), which have food-related names... for some reason. It might be a minor thing for me to be annoyed about but it feels like another aspect of the game not using it's theme/puns for anything besides the jokes of it all, which again, fall completely flat due to how there's no substance beneath it.

The characters are absolutely HORRIFIC. None, and I mean NONE of them grow in any significant way, and every single one of them can be reduced to one aspect of them that serves to be the joke at any situation. Chup is a kid who fantasizes childish things with Melonia. Mayona is angry, logical and greedy. The fat one (WHO I CAN'T EVEN REMEMBER THE NAME OF) likes food (wow, how original), and the goblin talks in AAVE and is a pervert. Melonia gets objectified and is selfish, Vinegar is evil, Pan, the Master of Wood is an otaku, etc etc etc. I can keep going on. If this isn't bad enough, some of these jokes just fall into straight up stereotypes, with the genies being a caricature of a gay man that feels as dated as it is painful, the hotel concierge being a sinophobic caricature named Dim Sum, and Sultan Vinegar, pictured earlier.

It's even worse with their voice lines

LIKE WHO ALLOWED THIS

 Snack World can't even do the bare minimum of having a game without incredibly offensive stereotypes, sexist jokes, AND transphobic jokes, while having repetitive and boring gameplay, a non-existent plot, and characters that don't matter at all. There is absolutely NOTHING this game can offer you that either Fantasy Life (if you want a multiplayer rpg) or heroland (if you want a quirky, self-aware rpg) doesn't do a thousand times better. Here's some more screenshots for good measure.

A major part of the early game is making a joke about how she wants to be called 'Ma'am'

Classic

Don't play this game.