Elrentaros Wanderings review

There are plenty of games that require you to do the same task over and over again, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Whether you’re chilling out and farming veggies or running into a firefight to gather more resources from enemies, settling into a loop is sometimes just what the video game doctor ordered. There’s a danger of activities like this becoming dull and grindy if repeated without the right hooks though, and to say that’s a tough line to walk is somewhat of an understatement. Elrentaros Wanderings struggles with this somewhat, which is a shame as it’s got a whole lot of promise.

As either a male or female character, you rock up at a charming little village called Elrentaros. After setting up a tent outside the village and getting to know the locals you’re tasked with jumping into a dungeon to save someone lost inside. Sounds simple enough, and for the most part it is as long as you’re up for doing a whole lot of dodge rolling anyway.

Elrentaros Wanderings is a dungeon crawler at heart, where you’ll be sent down into holes full of baddies and expected to survive until the end and fight a boss. The combat is simple but enjoyable enough, mainly involving mashing the attack button and dodging whenever appropriate. There are abilities you’ll unlock or obtain as you go too, all on cooldowns you’ll need to keep an eye on. The first few trips into dungeons are pretty engaging, but that doesn’t quite last forever.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves though, because life in Elrentaros is only one part of this colourful adventure. You see when you go to bed at night you’ll sometimes wake up in a more normal modern world where you’re a school kid living a normal life. In this other world, the villagers of Elrentaros are all either your classmates or school faculty, and it’s all very intriguing. If the scenes from the other world happened more often they’d do a good job of encouraging you to keep playing, but with many many hours between each visit to the school setting I was just frustrated I didn’t get to see more of it.

Instead, the focus of Elrentaros Wanderings is more on befriending as many of the villagers as possible to move the story along and unlock stat buffs and abilities while doing so. As this is a game from the studio behind the Rune Factory this is hardly a surprising task to be given, but to accomplish it you’ll need to do a whole load of that dungeon crawling.

Making friends with villagers involves finding items they’re looking for, which are, you guessed it, in the dungeons. You won’t find them just lying around though, each area of a dungeon you dive into is complete with a list of side objectives to tick off with important rewards granted for doing so. These range from incredibly easy like finding a portal on a specific floor to incredibly annoying like not getting hit by a certain enemy or stabbed by a spike trap. Failing one of these can make a trip into the depths feel rather pointless, and when you just want that next interaction with a character you like it’s pretty frustrating.

As much as making friends is fun, upgrading your gear and leveling up is nothing to sniff at. You are constantly bombarded with new weapons to equip with higher stats and slightly varied attack styles, and grabbing better ones is the only way you’ll be prepared for trips with higher-level recommendations.

From all the different elements Elrentaros Wanderings has it should be a fun game, but the repetitive nature really lets the game down. Going down into the same caves and fighting the same enemies or slightly recoloured versions of them gets old fast, and with fairly basic combat and the quest irritations alongside it made me want to stop playing pretty quickly.

Elrentaros Wanderings may find an audience that enjoys its brand of dungeon crawling, but I was not a part of it. The simple combat and repetitive gameplay loop just don’t weren’t enough to hold my attention, and even the intriguing narrative of the second world is spread far too thinly. Those looking for the charm of those cosy Rune Factory adventures should wander elsewhere, because Elrentaros isn’t the place to find it.