User blog:Kiyoshiro/My thoughts about the game

Today, I felt like sharing my thoughts about Dego and why I made this wiki.

So, why would I create a wiki for an indie game that almost no one has even heard of? Let's rewind back to around 2009-2010. I somewhat recall being on the hunt for good free games to play and happened to stumble upon rpgmaker.net. I think that was also around the time the RPG Maker series was much more popular than it is now. RMN has a huge library of free games to play. I just had to find the hidden gems among them. Many amateur-made games later, I ran into Dego. Honestly, when you look at its RMN page, it's not all that impressive, is it? The nearly non-existent story, screenshots showing you the graphics are VX RTP...which I actually don't mind, by the way. I like a well-made game that can make good use of what limited resources its creator can use. Anyway, at least it looks like more effort was made to make the page nice, and I know I've seen much worse. But wait, it's not even made in RPG Maker, it's an Action RPG (which was a rare sight back then), and it's multiplayer? Sign me up! I've played a couple good action RPGs on RMN before Dego, so I downloaded the game hoping it'll be good.

And well...as you can see, I thought it was good enough to warrant its own fan-made wiki 2 years after its release. A big part of why this wiki exists is because you have to learn everything about the game. The game's "tutorial" is literally just two signposts inside the first two dungeons that you may not even run into on your first run. Everything else, you need to figure out on your own. It sounds like it has a lot of artificial mystery, but I'm okay with that. Experimenting is a big part of why I play games. I like figuring out how something works or doesn't work. Fun fact: I didn't figure out the Eternal Flame weapon has negative HP Regen until recently. Who knew the flavor text actually hinted about the extra stats it has?

The game is way more fun when you have a friend or three to play with. In my case, I played with my sister. Every now and then, we still play it in big bursts for a nice nostalgia trip, but also to gather data for the wiki. Even if you don't have a friend, you could try controlling two characters at once like I usually do, since the game only requires six buttons to control one character.

Of course, not everything I have to say about the game is all praises. The balance here is really wacky. Melee weapons are very difficult to learn since it requires you to know every monster's attack patterns, compared to range and magic weapons which shoot projectiles with infinite distance, making them way easier to use. And then there's the seven classes. Personally, I think Paladin is just god-tier in both support and offense. Their shields render most attacks ineffective and it only costs 1 bar of SP, and the skill that costs 3 bars of SP is one of the strongest offensive skills in the game. The other classes I liked which were also very strong are Mage and Thief. Mages are very good at clearing rooms and all they really need is, again, only 1 bar of SP. Thieves are better for bosses with their Level 2 and 4 skill, which increases attack speed and makes them invincible, respectively. As for the rest of the classes...well, they're not as impressive, but they do have their uses.

Dego also has a bug which can sometimes ruin your entire dungeon run. The collision mechanics in this game is bad enough to glitch monsters and sometimes players into unwalkable areas like inside walls and such. This bug can be worked around by having a Mage burn monsters to death, but obviously if they drop anything, you won't be able to reach it. If a player ends up getting glitched, hopefully you can find a way to kill them like with specials that decrease their HP per use or something.

Something that isn't either a pro or a con to me is the game's difficulty. It starts out as pretty difficult, and depending on how you play it, it either continues to be difficult or it becomes easy enough that you can clear any dungeon with minimal problems.

That's all I have to say about Dego. I realize over half of this post could easily go into a review on the game's RMN page, but I don't have an RMN account and I don't plan to make one, so I'll just have to go with posting this here.