Cladun X3 Review
All These Characters Make A Circle
Customization is a boon to an RPG, often giving a sense of a personalized playthrough. Nippon Ichi’s Cladun X3 harnesses this boon in its action dungeon crawler by making nearly every aspect of its game customizable. From endless optional dungeons and class layouts, to giving players the option to create their own music, there’s a bit of everything here. At some point, though, there has to be a sense of balance to all this customization or else things begin to feel more tedious than interesting. That balance is never found, as the randomness leaves everything too easy or too difficult, making for an average experience overall.
The protagonist has a nebulous backstory, as a created character summoned into an area for villains called Arcanus Cella. Upon awaking in a dungeon, a jellyfish humanoid named Jellia tells them they have been collecting villains for a death game. Jellia does not explain anything about this death game, and alludes to other participants, though only a few are focused on. Cladun X3‘s protagonist is customizable, with a lot of colour and sprite designs to choose from. This protagonist is a complete stand in, so much so that swapping to other created characters during the game doesn’t affect cutscenes beyond the other characters changing names in the dialogue box, despite spending what could be hours speaking with someone else. A few villagers and other contestants complete with hidden pasts, motivations, and memories that are unlocked around the protagonist, complete the premise, but events rarely directly affect them. Other than a few taunts from these other villains to fight them, there’s nothing that ties the player into the story happening around them. This passiveness is uninteresting beyond some moments of comedic dialogue. The story is definitely not the main focus here, and the moments of levity that this dialogue brings adds some amusement and makes it so the sudden focus on a more personal story towards the end does not come completely out of nowhere.
No matter the class that players choose, they all have a set of unique magic circles that can be learned and cycled between. With ten total classes, seven available at the start, and six different weapon types, not including inherent magical abilities, there’s a lot of choice to start off with. Magic circles allow a main character to equip sub characters, harnessing an attribute called mana to use for equipping artifacts, which can boost stats, item drop rates, and abilities. Figuring out the best magic circles with what equipment is available is a game in itself, as this aspect is easy to use, but hard to master — a good chunk of time can be spent tinkering here. Equipped sub characters take damage on behalf of the main character, though when they die, all equipped artifacts go with them, causing a slow degradation of the player’s strength. This can turn a damage-dealing machine into something as threatening as a wet noodle from these sub character deaths until either an exit is reached or everyone dies. Stats are so intricate and magnified that numbers on the screen include decimal points, with totals reaching absurd levels.
That name and appearance are random options from the game, showing the sense of humour off quickly.
Functionally, every class’s abilities boil down to weapon and magic skills. While anyone can equip every weapon, each class will only learn skills for set weapons, such as wizards with staves. There are six slots for these learned abilities, two of which are mapped to quick press buttons, while a third can be rotated around and highlighted on the user interface for quick usage with another button. This cycle still goes through the other two as well, making it cumbersome to try using on the fly and finds its worth when enemies have not noticed the player’s character yet. An exclamation mark appearing overhead signals the enemy will beeline to attack the player, with a few enemies homing in on players after that point for the rest of the dungeon floor. Most classes play similarly, with the main difference being in how weapons are handled. Ranges and speed will differ quite wildly, and figuring out how to optimize each weapon’s hit boxes can take some time to get used to.
There are moments where combat really shines in Cladun X3, but for the majority of the game, enemies are either too weak or too strong. The uncommon boss fights are well done, but the sudden shift in tactics comes out of nowhere, making it a shock for players to learn strategies that do not happen anywhere else in the game. The rest of the time running around collecting treasure and slicing through enemies is enjoyable enough, but far too often it turns into a frantic rush for survival to the exit. This rush is made more harrowing due to traps that are littered about, with their locations only revealed when players are nearby. There are a few traps that can provide health to the party, and are worth moving carefully to try and find, but most will find a way to injure anyone in its way.
Players have to decide how greedy they want to be, as exploration means more combat that can drain health, and death on a floor means losing all acquired treasure up to that point. In story dungeons, this is simple, as they are set on singular floors with the same layout each time, barring any rare red chests that have already been opened, which can be farmed for additional brown chests, or sped through for fame. Fame is a currency that opens a specialty store with the remaining classes, more songs, or random dungeons with post-game boss content. A few story maps also have an immortal beholder-like enemy, who tracks down players doing consistent damage and will easily defeat them on the spot.
Scary mask with an axe, do not worry – that’s the protagonist being picked on with that decimal amount of damage.
Cladun X3 has three types of dungeons that can be entered. Beyond story dungeons, which have good drop rates and treasure options, there are rangeons. A rangeon starts at level one, and players progress through a series of gates that typically make enemies stronger as a type of punishment, while frequently lowering item rarity and drop rate. This is extra painful because rangeons start with a single drop rate point, by comparison, story dungeons start at one-hundred, meaning there’s quite a few floors of diving just to get a consistent set of treasure dropped by enemies. There are some treasure chests that can be found, though much less frequently. This is offset with a special enemy type, the giant bird-headed flying Hiyokki that avoids players but will net them an automatic item if defeated. The lack of options on finding a good source of upgradable equipment leaves characters feeling slightly underleveled for much of the game, which often encourages running away from enemies rather than fighting them.
The final dungeon type is a mapgeon, the first of which is available early on and two more unlock as the player completes them, with the remaining ones being difficult boss fights to purchase from the specialty shop. The first two are just ten and twenty-four floor dungeons with set layouts, but randomized gates like a rangeon. The third mapgeon is fifty floors, starts at level twenty, and provides a few new gate types to encounter. In both rangeon and mapgeons, enemy level affects how strong traps are, so those added gates in the final mapgeon feels like a life-preserver sometimes to avoid painful jumps in difficulty. Gates have a percentile chance of appearing, so some floors will only have bad gates to choose from.
Cladun X3‘s deep customization extends to its presentation. Every created character has a wide assortment of face options and colours to choose from, and since the game doesn’t take itself seriously, some combinations are amusingly wacky. There’s also a generated quote, which can be replaced by one the player creates, for when those characters are idling in Arcanus Cella as sub characters. The soundtrack has plenty of premade tracks as well as an extremely complicated music creator that takes a long time to get working with any degree of success.
Not just any zombie girl can pull off looking stabby, so three cheers for Stabitha.
There’s a lot of music in Cladun X3, though the experience is negative overall. As just background noise, it can be tolerable, though when it slowly creeps into the foreground with chip tune trumpets and percussion instruments that are set one or two octaves too high, it begins to grate on the nerves sooner rather than later. These songs shift around frequently, so at least they don’t cause a repetitious headache, but there are not any that stand out in a positive way. Visually, there is a lot of variety in the sprites, as enemy designs are easily distinguishable and the use of colours means that their elemental and specialty versions are easy to spot. However, the details are presented with a few repeated animations and not in the design of the sprites themselves, making things telegraphed and robotic in a way that does little to connect the player with the NPCs and their own created characters.
Cladun X3 has so many customization options that it is easy to get lost and difficult to find ways to get the full extent of their capabilities. This creates a lack of balance between dungeons, as players are forced to either flee to survive or too overpowered to matter. There’s more strategy and balance in the exciting boss fights, but they are too infrequent to save the fluctuating difficulty. As it is, loot hounds will be happy with the constantly evolving magic circles and equipment, but the unbalanced progression and uneven presentation will not do this quirky dungeon crawler any favours in finding more than a niche audience.
Disclosure: This review is based on a free copy of the game provided by the publisher.
Plenty of customization options
Funny dialogue
Unbalanced presentation
Music is grating
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