Elrentaros Wanderings

Elrentaros Wanderings is a well-crafted, well-designed game that is cleverly paced and set in an adorable fantasy world with great animation and movement. The combat is simple and the missions not particularly challenging, but even the elements that could be more fully realized don’t take away from the overall enjoyment of the game.

I'm surprised by how much fun I had with Elrentaros Wanderings. Although it has limited gameplay, what's here is satisfying and its addictive blend of upgrading weapons with loot and completing challenges kept me coming back for more.

Elrentaros Wanderings had so much potential. After one inevitable wall and annoyance too many, the flaws will be too great to ignore any longer and will result in most just abandoning the adventure. From the utterly simplistic town, complete with non-moving NPCs, to various soft locks based on the general lack of a progression system, to simple design choices like the lack of save slots, this feels more like an alpha version or a tech demo, not something that its peers are just far better than.

Elrentaro's Wanderings doesn't really have any major problems other than it's a pretty simple adventure moulded in a template we've seen before. It mixes some relationship sims with dungeon crawlers and lots of dialogue sequences between fairly anonymous characters and it chugs along pleasantly without being directly fascinating.

I think if you are okay with a pure grind, Elrentaros Wanderings might not turn you off the way it did me. But if you have even the slightest allergy to excessive banality, then this game is likely to have you heading for the hills. Its few good ideas are squandered by watering down the broth too much, stretching far too little content far too far. Not without any merit, but thoroughly disappointing.

Underneath its unique plot device, Elrentaros Wanderings is a fairly standard JRPG, with interesting build mechanics but a severely lacking overworld and overarching story.

We didn't hate Elrentaros Wanderings' grindy dungeon-crawling gameplay. There are things to like, even if those moments are interspersed with long stretches of boring, repetitive enemy-bashing. There are hints of the trademark Rune Factory charm here and there, and the art is genuinely lovely, but this sparse action RPG feels like a new skin stretched far too thinly over the skeleton of a much better game.

Elrentaros Wanderings has the makings of a lovely relaxing game, but its repetitive nature and frustrating side objectives kill those cosy vibes.

Elrentaros Wanderings’ core tension comes from its depiction of parallel worlds and the uncertainty of which one is real. But time spent in both realms proves uninteresting, with monotonous combat in one and insubstantial exposition in the other. There’s a very real sense of dread when the game asks you to repeatedly descend into its insipid dungeons.

Overall Elrentaros Wanderings doesn’t have much to offer. There are a lot of different elements on display but none of them mesh together in a way that is satisfying and the game itself just comes across as an under-designed mess. Despite some cute character designs, the aesthetic of the game just isn’t pleasing to the eye and on the whole, it leaves a lot to be desired.