Toss A Coin To See If You Enjoy This RPG
If I were to write a personal Tier List of RPGs, I’d have to include a ‘Fond Of’ tier. It would be for RPGs that are flawed to the point of almost sinking the whole experience, but I couldn’t help falling in love with them anyway. I wonder if it’s a tier that is unique to the RPG genre: it’s a breed of game that can be so overstuffed and complex that a few duff decisions might just get overruled by good ones.
Perhaps you have that category too? Mine would include Final Fantasy VIII, Blue Dragon, Alpha Protocol and Pokemon Shield/Sword, off the top of my head. In each case, if someone said they were awful and handed them a 2 out of 5 I’d have to sagely accept. They’d be well within their rights. But when they were gone, I would scrub out the 2 and replace it with a 3.5 or 4. I just have too much affection for them, or at least parts of them.
Vambrace: Dungeon Monarch absolutely fits that tier. It’s not the poster child for the tier like Final Fantasy VIII, but it sits proudly in the lower reaches. Because it is both critically flawed and – somehow – engrossing. It’s so flawed that a scathing review from another journo would be completely justified, yet I would still defend it from the rooftops.
Dungeon Keeper
Let’s take inspiration from Vambrace: Dungeon Monarch’s gameplay: before we defend, we attack.
Ugh, there’s so much wrong with Vambrace: Dungeon Monarch. The story, for example. I get what it’s trying to do: it’s been lumped with a minuscule budget and only five rooms to tell its story, yet it’s chosen a world-ending narrative. The narrative designers must have puffed out their cheeks and wondered how the heck to do it.
They take a big swing. The opening skips straight to the showdown against the big bad, Hellforn, and then rewinds cleverly to make it a vision that the main character experiences. It takes some chutzpah, and mostly comes off. The main character is also a complex chappie: he has infiltrated an enemy dungeon and installed himself as their leader. But now he has to kill good guys to justify his place at the top.
It’s a bold setup that gets nibbled by the lack of budget. The main character can’t actually leave the dungeon, outside of jaunts to an astral plane, so he has to get advisers to do the work. Which means they do the fun stuff. Plus, the writers are overly concerned about who is trustworthy or not. There’s so much double-crossing that it’s impossible to take any information at face value. The sheer number of times that someone pivots and does an “Aha, I was a bad/good guy all along!” gets tiresome. Plus there are WAY too many spelling mistakes and grammatical weirdnesses for a released title.
Oh boy, let’s not stop there. The flaws are rife in the game’s turn-based battles. Highlighting a unit is a mess of button-presses and awkward jabs of the analogue stick. Zooming into units and their stats, reading Lilliputian text, became so awkward that we eventually gave up and played with broad strokes. That vampire wizard is awesome; that werewolf isn’t worth bothering with. Remixing the troop layout for the next battle was so fiddly that we also neglected to bother, keeping what we had. Vambrace: Dungeon Monarch has got the ugly whiff of a PC game that’s been half-heartedly updated for console.
And then there’s the biggie: troop movement. You don’t actually control the units in Vambrace: Dungeon Monarch. They are automated, which makes perfect sense for combat (and is something we’re used to from any number of other strategy genres, like an RTS). But their movement is ALSO automated, and it’s here that we want to gnaw our arms off. Because enemies can bypass your defenses, spawning deep into the dungeon, but your units might not have the specific parameter that means they move to intercept them. You’re left helpless as the enemy carves chunks out of your portal, simply because no unit will listen to you. It’s possible to accommodate for this, but when you first start playing it’s egregious.
I have a notebook full of other foibles. I’m tempted to screengrab it and paste it in. Why can’t I buy units between battles? Why are tepid, useless structures (you can build on hexes within your dungeon, giving you perks) offered as rewards from a battle? Why am I forced to play the story twice, effectively, to get a ‘good’ ending? Gah, writing them all makes my blood boil. What a game this could have been.
Enter The Fungeon
Dysfunctional relationships, eh? My love for Vambrace: Dungeon Monarch remains.
I’m a complete sucker for deckbuilders, which likely helps. Each battle unlocks new cards to use, some exclusively for use by the ‘Monarch’ (the main character, who can be dropped into battle with – we imagine – a camp flourish) and others that are more freely available. These cards have different flavours, aligned with the troop factions – vampires, succubi, beasts, that sort of thing.
Any other game would have locked you into a faction or number of factions for picking these cards. But Vambrace: Dungeon Monarch says “sod it” and lets you have free reign. There’s something joyful in snagging the best cards from each set and then finding impossibly strong combos to exploit them (we loved drawing cards with the gemstone faction and then sacrificing them for overblown damage with ash raider cards).
There’s a macabre wit in how you can capture enemy units and immediately sacrifice them on a ritual altar, improving your affinity to a certain faction. Sorry, monk, I need to kill you so that my fanatics like me more. You can even break them, forcing them to fight for you in battle. Even bosses get this treatment, and we found ourselves gleefully running to our prison to find out what the last kickass boss can do.
There are so many touches like this which make min-maxing stupendous. We were able to neglect fiddly elements of the game like troop placement, simply because we were so overpowered. Our faction affinity was so high, our troops meticulously chosen, and our deck of cards full of synergies, that we stomped everyone – even in the second, New Game+ story. Most of the time our dungeon was impregnable, and we loved it.
What Do You Do With A Problem Like Vambrace: Dungeon Monarch?
Vambrace: Dungeon Monarch is, by almost all measures, slipshod, poorly thought out, buggy and awkward. Barely any concessions have been made for console, and we outright avoided using certain mechanics as a result. Those are the hallmarks of a 2 out of 5 scoring RPG, right?
Well, yes, we see where you’re coming from. But the thing is, we had a whale of a time with Vambrace: Dungeon Monarch. The combo of deckbuilder and hex-based strategy game was delicious, and the lack of any real balancing meant we became a god on the battlefield. Which felt quite nice, if we were being honest.
So nice, in fact, that the 2 out of 5 averages out to become a…
Important Links
Vambrace: Dungeon Monarch Claims The Xbox Series X|S Throne – https://www.thexboxhub.com/vambrace-dungeon-monarch-claims-the-xbox-series-xs-throne/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/vambrace-dungeon-monarch/9PHV1SBP7NJ1
