Wayblazer Dämmerung

Wayblazer Dämmerung is an adult visual novel that incorporates turn-based dungeon crawler gameplay to keep their audience engaged with the game for long amounts of time. With four veteran artists working at the helm, it offers an impressive set of visual assets that help bring to life its fantasy setting. Although its story has incredible potential as a worldbuilding piece, its execution is a bit unsatisfying because of its flexible approach to story progression, leaving the sequence of events mostly up to the reader’s discretion. As a result, the cohesiveness of the story is compromised, with overall momentum greatly being butchered by the segmentation and non-linearity of the common route’s events. The lack of character for Mark further compromises this, with romantic segments largely feeling like self-inserts instead of budding relationships between members of the team. Despite these shortcomings, there’s still a lot to love with Wayblazer Dämmerung. For one thing, it establishes a pretty interesting setting that both old and new entries into the series can take advantage of. It does this through the partial resolution of some issues, where the relevant character’s arc finishes despite the persistence of the issue in the setting. Additionally, the healthy amount of equipment and items present in the game makes it actually plausible to build characters different from what you’d normally expect. Although there are stats that are glaringly more impactful than others, the numerous fallbacks present as quality-of-life functions in the game allow players to adjust the overall experience of the gameplay portion according to their own preferences. This extends to resources as well, where in-game references such as the glossary help with planning out your farming side trip. Except if you’re looking for a monster drop, which you’d have to sift the Unit List for because apparently they’re not included in the resource glossary as something that can be directly referred to. If you’re looking for a timesink with a decent story and a grindy gameplay loop, Wayblazer Dämmerung fits the bill nicely as Eushully’s present-day entry point to their expansive visual novel-slash-RPG series. Although a bit on the pricier side, chasing full completion of the game will surely get you back that bang for your buck, especially if you play with the external adult patch distributed by Shiravune. There’s also a DLC available, adding an additional dungeon and a new recruitable character.  Now the only question is, do you have enough time to do so?