Elrentaros Wanderings Deep Look

There is nothing I hate more than my time being wasted, and Elrentaros Wanderings has now given me trust issues when it comes to trying games made by Hakama.

If there is one thing I despise, it is having my time wasted. Some games are meant to be time wasters, and some pose as engaging but are hollow. Hakama has made one of the most engaging Rune Factory games, but its recent offering of  Elrentaros Wanderings is a giant hollow step in the wrong direction. Nothing is enticing or rewarding in this game, which begs the question: why play it at all? It’s a simple answer really — you shouldn’t.

Elrentaros Wanderings‘ story has a lot wrong with it. The game begins with the protagonist (either a boy or a girl) waking up in the town of Elrentaros. They have no memory of getting there and the only clue to their past is a mirror with slots for gemstones to be placed in. While townspeople do not fully trust the main character, this amnesiac stranger is immediately tasked with saving a resident trapped in a nearby cave. After saving the resident, the player is then whisked away to another world with a more modern high school setting, and all the people they have met in Elrentaros are there, but they can’t quite remember which world is the one they came from.

Look at all those numbers!

The game’s story is a convoluted mess full of amnesia tropes and plays out like a bad isekai anime. Every character lacks personality and feels one note, which makes questioning them to raise their relationship feel like such a chore. Many of the characters in town are uninteresting, and it doesn’t help how dry the translation is. Some of the character dialogue is stilted, almost unnatural, when reading it aloud. It also struggles to land the core story beat of parallel worlds because these characters feel generic and don’t have an interesting narrative to tell. A story that features parallel worlds should be mysterious and the player should want to put the pieces together, but this game struggles with making the narrative kernels worth even picking up.

Worse off is the fact that this is a game all about repetition. The protagonist will go into a dungeon, and based on their build level — which is what level their gear is at — and go through each stage multiple times. Gear can be mixed and matched, though the math of how the game determines build level feels muddy. Equipment is mainly found in the dungeons and if completed, the player can keep whatever gear was discovered during the run. However, the issue arises that having to repeat the same dungeons over and over again, players will often end up with piles of useless junk that end up taking up space. While there is an unlimited inventory, wading through to find the perfect item is painful, to say the least.

Too much junk, not enough usefulness.

Why do players have to repeat dungeons over and over again? Well, that’s one of the game’s failings. It doesn’t have a good reason as to why players have to constantly repeat dungeons. The game reasons that the town residents will have quests for the protagonist to complete, but the player doesn’t find out what those are until the dungeon has been completed one time. Each of the game’s dungeons also has different difficulty levels, which require players to repeat a dungeon until they have gear close enough to the dungeon’s recommended level. While the dungeons are not long, they are dull wastes of time with very little to interact with, and many of the quests have dumb arbitrary factors, like “don’t get hit by an enemy that causes the darkness status effect”, while starting the run surrounded by enemies that cause darkness. How can one avoid that if the solution to doing the dungeon at a higher level is just to throw more enemies at the player? It’s poor design and the rewards are often so meaningless, that going through the dungeons over and over again has no real value other than to waste time.

The combat also struggles in the realm of repetition. For a basic attack, players only have to hold one button. Even worse while there are multiple weapon types, they all play the same. The combat feels like an afterthought, much like the entirety of the game’s design. While players can upgrade weapons to gain new skills or give gifts to the villagers which also provide mostly passive skills, it still requires constantly repeating the same uninspired content. Even the music and voice work is forgettable. It’s hard to find anything positive other than, “I guess the character art is kind of cute.”

I admit, I always like to go down with a sinking ship in my reviews. However, this game wasted too much of my time and I found the game genuinely offensive for its lack of respect for the effort I was putting in. This game is disguised as a “cozy isekai” but fails both areas spectacularly. Elrentaros Wanderings’s greatest sin is how boring everything about it is, and how unremarkable and bland the gameplay and story are. There is nothing I hate more than my time being wasted, and Elrentaros Wanderings has now given me trust issues when it comes to trying games made by Hakama.

Disclosure: This article is based on a build/copy of the game provided by the publisher.