Elrentaros Wanderings Review (Switch)

Elrentaros Wanderings is a brand-new game from Rune Factory creator Yoshifumi Hashimoto and his studio, Hakama, which takes place across two parallel worlds: one in a present-day Japanese school, and one in a fantasy land where a small village is plagued by monsters that live in nearby dungeons.

Your character — male or female — must be the one to clear out these dungeons, making friends with the locals and upgrading weapons to take on progressively harder dungeons. But sometimes, when you go to sleep at night, you wake up in that parallel universe... and all the characters seem like the ones you just got to know in the village. How strange!

Sounds cool, doesn't it? It's an isekai! Those are always fun. Plus, Elrentaros Wanderings has many of the minds behind Rune Factory working on it. That's a recipe for success! And yes, the title is terrible, but... isekai Rune Factory!!!

Unfortunately, Elrentaros Wanderings has very little in common with its Rune Factory siblings. It's a repetitive grindfest with very little motivation to keep grinding, and even though you can date the characters that live in the village of Elrentaros, you'll find little reason to do so. And that fun parallel-universe-in-a-Japanese-school business? It came up, like, four times over our many, many hours of playing, and never really went anywhere. Plus, we couldn't figure out how to trigger those scenes, anyway. We never thought we'd be so keen to go back to school.

Every single day, your character wakes up in a tent outside Elrentaros, and heads towards one of the dungeons you've found. Each dungeon has multiple difficulties, which you unlock as you go, with several "missions" to complete while you're in there, like "Avoid taking damage from spike traps" and "Beat the boss without passing out." These missions are relatively easy — unless you're taking on a dungeon well above your current level, which you usually have to do to progress. Each mission has a chance of giving you an item which advances your relationship with a character from the village, special coins that allow you to buy gifts to advance your relationship with a character from the village, or a new weapon or armour.

Once you're in the dungeon, you'll battle hordes of enemies with those weapons, plus magic spells and buffs that you've unlocked by making friends (by giving them items). Each weapon has its own style and upgrades to unlock, including some sick rare moves that can take out multiple enemies at once, which provide most of the variety in each dungeon run. The level of the weapons and armour you have equipped also determines your character level, which in turn determines how well you'll do in each dungeon. But honestly? It makes little difference.

The dungeons are so samey and empty that you're really just doing the ol' hold-down-attack-button-to-make-numbers-go-up thing that grindy games love so much. Seriously — we were playing on easy mode, doing 20k damage a pop to some of these monsters, and it still took 30+ hits to take some of them down. That's not fun! There's no tactical intrigue to 'hit guy until numbers go up TO DEATH!' We can't even imagine how boring it gets on hard difficulty. Plus, you have to swap out your weapons really frequently to keep up with the enemy scaling, so even if you find a weapon you enjoy using, you'll be forced to change it eventually.

It's not all bad in the dungeons, though. The enemies themselves have really charming and varied designs that reminded us of Studio Ghibli — there's a big red panda that summons more monsters, a pig-guy that throws poison at you, a rabbit that fires arrows, a fox that buffs other monsters, and giant glowing golems, among many more, each with unique and detailed animations. Honestly, they're probably our favourite part of the game's design.

Except... every single dungeon has the same monsters, just recoloured. What begins as an impressive cast of critters to kill soon devolves into "Ugh, these guys again?" The bosses at the end of each dungeon are usually bigger, tougher versions of these smaller monsters, too. On top of that, there's this one tiny blue fairy that we learned to loathe, because it does nothing but summon walls in front of you. It makes it really hard to get around the dungeon, and that's the whole point of dungeon crawls. The crawling!

When you're done with all that grinding, you'll head back into the village to give out your hard-won prizes to the villagers, who will reward you by presenting you with stiff, weirdly-localised dialogue that seems like a quite literal translation of the original text with little thought to individual characters' personality or charm, plus a ton of grammar errors. Also, it's often weirdly sexual in a way that made us feel quite uncomfortable. Some of the scenes were strange, goofy, and even funny in a way we really liked, but overall, the writing feels too stilted to get invested in a particular character. It's a shame, because we were pretty into the character art. It's gorgeous!

Not that it really matters, though — to woo someone, you have to complete specific missions to find the item they're looking for, and some of those missions are hard. We just ended up befriending/wooing people based on the missions we were able to complete, which made the whole wooing system seem quite pointless, and made us feel powerless to boot.

Oh, and there is farming, too, technically. You find sparkles in the overworld and plant them in a tiny plot of land. They grow into rainbow cabbage things over the course of two days without any input, and then they turn into more of those special friendship coins. That's it.

But, hey! Maybe you love grindy action RPGs. If that's the case, then Elrentaros Wanderings is... that, for sure. But honestly, you'd have a better time with a Rune Factory, Silent Hope, or one of the many other good games that actually feel like they bring something new to the genre. If Hashimoto wanted to move away from Rune Factory, we totally get it — but Elrentaros Wanderings makes us feel like he got lost along the way.