Rabbit hasn't been effortposting this year, but Rabbit's effortposts got praised (thanks!) so here's a celebratory effortpost.
I've been intending to do these with games I've finished for the better part of this year and just wound up...not, but since I'd been so overwhelmingly positive about it on Discord while playing it and real time chat isn't the best place to write lengthy dissertations about game mechanics (though I try to brute force it all the time) this seems like as good a time as ever to start.
Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk
Coven received pretty glowing praise when it released in Japan a couple years ago so I was rather anticipating it, but I really wasn't expecting it to be the complete package that it wound up being. While it's not without some relatively significant design issues that would severely hamper replays and render different players' experiences relatively samey, NIS has laid out a framework with Coven that, if pursued and refined as Disgaea has been, could lead to an incredibly successful line of DRPGs going forward. Please note in advance that the actual play experience of this game is stellar, and I'm going to go diving through the muck of actual systems design that doesn't necessarily have significant perceptible impact on the experience itself--just places where things could be more elegant or lead to more refined design or varied play experiences. Coven's The Good Shit and a joy to play, but nitpicky mechanics critique is just how I do.
Before I get into that, let's clarify that Coven is one of those rare (and wonderful) The Last Remnant situations, where you lead several groups of characters into combat totaling a maximum of 15 active combatants. These groups are called Covens, and each Coven Pact is a loot item that allows one instance of that Coven per copy of the item. Covens allow for a fixed number of both active (up to 3) and support (up to 5) units, with slots often having positive or negative effects. They're also what determine the active skills the characters in the coven can use, with some skills requiring certain slots not be left empty (and with these slots often having negative effects as a tradeoff for more powerful skills). This means that some covens are more geared toward Donum (magic) use, some are for tanks, attackers, supporting, buffing and debuffing, or what have you.
Individual characters are an amalgamation of your usual stats as well as up to 12 passive skills. They can be reincarnated through multiple classes to restart from level 1 while carrying over skills, allowing for effective multiclassing. Characters themselves have no active abilities, only passives, but each class can use the majority of weapon types even if their class doesn't have any passives that especially support that weapon's use, so you can get a little creative with things. They can also be customized with one of two different optional stances intended for tanks (drastic boost to HP and defensive stats, and an inherent taunt effect) or damage dealers (massively reduced HP and luck but a bonus to weapon mastery ranks and offensive power), and several different stat growth patterns ranging from "every stat rises equally" to "extreme specialization in class-favored stats and F-rank growths in everything else" or anywhere inbetween.
Finally, each character is given equipment, which runs on a blizzard-like loot prefix and rarity system to determine the ultimate stats on the gear. Equipment falls like rain, has wildly varied stats depending on the prefix and rarity, and you can toss your garbage (which you'll have a lot of) into other items via item synthesis to offload it.
Covens are generally given a single command that applies to all units in the coven. Spells are cast collaboratively, averaging out relevant stats, and the attack command makes each unit attack in turn. From a systems design perspective this means you're actually better off looking at your five chosen covens as your "Characters," your characters as the "Equipment" that determines stats and what the unit does, and equipment as "Gems" slotted into the "Equipment" to tweak it. Once you're thinking from this angle, you begin to hone in on a couple of Coven's bigger design problems--namely, as with almost every equipment gemming system in the history of RPGs, the gems are way more complicated than their actual practical effect on combat would lead you to desire. Since you're dealing with over a dozen gear slots for every individual coven, and five covens, this means you're probably gonna be falling back on auto equip a hell of a lot because really, who has time for that crap? The randomized loot and synthesis systems have next to no practical effect on actual play of the game unless you get a notably broken legendary item with really good modifiers, everything else is just a haze of fillery cruft.
Perhaps more importantly, while Covens do come with quite varied effects and many of them are kind of interesting, the game gives you a number of Obviously, Overwhelmingly Optimal covens such as a pair you can obtain in mid-late game that'll inevitably be used through postgame that confer no negative effects and grant the highest tier of offensive spell for every element, a 70% HP heal for all active units, and an offensive self buff. Coven grants you a lot of options, and a lot of possibilities for extremely intricate customization, but in the end most players aren't going to make use of it. There's an incredible amount of potential for future games if the equipment system is streamlined (say, a single item per character with drastically more significant effects, rather than the haze that is managing several dozen pieces of gear across your team) and covens themselves are either made more customizable in their active skillsets or simply more balanced with less of the whole "blatantly obvious optimal choices in a sea of heavily penalized gimmicks" thing.
Now, in practice none of this really impacts the moment to moment play experience--Coven's a hell of a lot of fun--and the only real issue with the gameplay as you're playing it is that normal encounters are on the easy side, which means none of the resource management you'd expect from a DRPG. Luckily, since you're representing a bunch of necromantic mannequin soldiers being controlled by a witch, you're awfully concerned with her remaining Reinforcement Magic, used to summon the puppets at the start of the dungeon crawl, bolster the puppets in combat as desired, use various traversal skills, and teleport yourself out of the dungeons or set checkpoints. Additionally, your dolls can be very easily dismembered by crits (so can enemies, for the record, which is great). This sends their limbs flying and disables equipment slots while reducing max HP drastically. A crushed head will even render a doll's max HP 0 for the rest of the run, resulting in not so permanent permadeath. You can rebuild their bodies for a cost when you return to the witch's caravan at the end of a crawl. These mechanics mean that even if you're not managing your magic juice or HP very carefully, you've still got the requisite resource management necessary to keep DRPGs ticking.
Coven has some of the best dungeon design I've seen in a DRPG in some time, and the aforementioned traversal skills are a big part of it. Among them is the ability to knock down walls--in some dungeons this means basically all of them, in others just specific ones, but it's used a bit differently in each location and it's fantastic. Sometimes there may as well be an entire second dungeon hidden inside the walls of the dungeon you access normally. There's even an instance where you find yourself traversing through frequent mazelike unmappable areas where nearly every wall is breakable and you can Dogi your way through the entire maze...if you have the Reinforcement to spare, which makes for a hell of an engaging crawl.
All of this, I mean, sure, it's a solid DRPG. We get an Etrian Odyssey game almost yearly, we're familiar with those. Where Coven really surprises is the narrative. Which I'm going to heavily praise and then barely talk about, because the way it rolls out is actually pretty great. Your primary protagonist is a misanthropic, miserable, world-hating, remarkably petty late-20s-to-30-something-ish witch with a prosthetic leg and cane. Her co-protagonist is her boundlessly happy and frequently mistreated child apprentice. She's not the world's best surrogate parent, but by god not only does she wind up sympathetic somehow (Coven is largely a character study and it's a VERY personal story) but their relationship--both the way it develops and how its existing layers are peeled back over the course of the narrative--is actually incredibly memorable and affecting by the end. It is... a ride, I'll say that much.
Coven probably won't be my Game of the Year this year, because what the hell even is 2018--or even September 2018 alone--but it might have been in a lesser year, and that came as quite a shock. Good on NIS for this one. Bring back toi8 for the next one. Soul Nomad's art would've been more fitting for the game's feel, I think. Also give the dolls ball joints next time. Thanks.
TL;DR:
Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk is really good.
*Please note that Coven is subject to trigger warnings for less than delightful subject matter, most extremely multiple instances of heavily implied but never explicitly shown sexual violence, which is framed in an extremely non-titillating manner thankfully.
