"They healed for 0 and 1 so often that I started to wonder if they were trying to communicate with me in binary" Hoy shit my sides.

I liked everything about Darkest Dungeon except actually playing it.

See, your problem is that you haven't accepted that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.

Playing a game that you hate for 80 hours just to review it fully thats dedication man, definitely worth a like even though i like this game

Occultists communicating in binary was a clever joke, gotta admit.

It's so annoying to me that reviewers get away without finishing games before reviewing them. I give you merit for actually doing so even though you don't like it.

This Crituque is great as alway. There have been a few changes to the grind lately. 1. Characters now start to requie level 3 dungeons on level 5/6 2. The hero building can now be upgradet to provide Characters up to level 4 with all upgrades already. 3. you can now trade 1 kind of upgrade token for anoter (at a bad rate but you can) 4. There is a town event now, that randomly selects 3 of your fallen heroes and you get to decide wich one of them returns from the dead. Its not much, but in my opinion this few tweaks make the game much more enjoyable especialy the part with the heroes refusing to run dungeons from level 3 on was a bit to limiting.

In binary the occultist said, "A(space)"

That Cookie Clicker comment near the end. Jesus, that was savage.

So I watched this looking to get some more information about Darkest Dungeon, and initially this review really swayed me from buying this game. All the things you described looked absolutely dreadful and made me believe I’d have no fun with this game whatsoever. Yet it sat on the back of my mind, so I kept reading and watching gameplay footage, yadda yadda yadda. I ultimately ended up biting the bullet, buying it hoping I’d enjoy the game, and I love it. I’m having so much fun with it and it’s satisfying an itch for a specific genre I’ve had for a long time. That said, your video really made me realize what I was getting into when I decided that I was going to play it, and I feel had it not been for your analysis, it’s very possible I would not have the proper mindset to dive into Darkest Dungeon. So, thank you.

I also never finished this game because of the grind. However it seems that the free updates the game has gotten over the last year are mostly all focused around reducing this aspect. A new Radiant mode has been added that is designed around completing the game in fewer hours. Allowing higher level hero's to enter lower level dungeons and also a new upgrade line for the stagecoach that allows you to recruit higher level hero's from the stage coach. Also hero's being allowed to return to the darkest dungeon. Also hero's gain XP faster, treatments cost less and regions progress faster. Since I agree with many of your viewpoints I feel this is the way the game should have been in the beginning. But I am enjoying it much more now since I feel this game nails its atmosphere. Great video btw.

Just want to mention, the game has had quite a few changes since this review was made and the grind is a lot less tedious now. The new antiquarian class makes gold farming runs much more profitable(and therefore less necessary) and it's now possible to cycle one type of heirloom into another in case your one short for an upgrade or have a surplus.

Despite being a DD fanboy (I suppose I just like sushi) I can now understand why so many people are dissapointed with it. Great review, subbed.

Darkest Dungeon was the first time that a game in early access actually felt less fun when it finished. The launch version just had nine boss fights spread across three tiers, and then you were done. It was already in the ballpark of 20 hours long back then. Now you have 24 boss fights, not even counting any of the endgame, special events, or ambush fights you can find. By my estimation from what I've played so far it would appear that playing through the launch version will take at least three times as long. Why did it have to be this way? It wasn't enough for them to have permadeath, it wasn't enough for them to have all of this recycled content, repeated bosses, and grinding. They just had to go and divide your characters into three arbitrary power categories and limit their ability to interact. They just had to make it so that after one attempt your max level characters are banned forever from the endgame dungeons. They just had to make their already long game have a progression system that's unwieldy, nonsensical, and as artificially lengthened as possible. The more you play the more it feels like the infini-game. At least when I'm playing grinding in a JRPG I know that I'm gaining levels and gear. At least the progress is permanent. The progress is so abstracted in Darkest Dungeon that you can finish multiple consecutive dungeons and mostly feel like nothing has been accomplished. It doesn't feel like pushing a boulder uphill. It feels like a hamster wheel.

I like that you acknowledged the Eldritch Horror of cookie clicker.

personally, my biggest gripe with this game was the RNG. Even having a team of level 6 characters with powerful trinkets, I could do single digit damage one turn, then in the 30's the next turn on the exact same enemy with the same character. When the enemy can do the same thing and you can go from full health to death's door in 1-2 hits, it makes the leveling up aspect seem a bit meaningless to me, and makes things frustrating because no matter how much I understand the mechanics of the game, I'm always at the mercy of randomness, with severe consequences if things don't go in my favor. I beat everything in the game, but a hefty chunk of it was just dumb luck, which doesn't feel as satisfying as earning my victories.

Quite recently with the new updates, redhook has been trying to slow the grind, like how if you fail to complete the Darkest dungeon, and or get a party wipe with high level heros, the game will give you 4 level 3 heros in the stagecoach, and since you failed the darkest dungeon, your party will get x2 resolve level exp in the next adventure, There is even little events that give 1 type of hero a resolve level, like a grave robber or highwayman, To be fair, at least redhook is trying to slow down the grind, its still pretty bad but at least its slightly easier now

While I respectfully disagree with some of your points of the game (I actually liked it), I must say that your Review/Critique is perfect, and is the way all Reviews should be done. You have your tastes & opinions, but you do it all in an objective way and describing everything meticulously. Fantastic Review, Thanks for the effort. :)

Really thought you were going to say "it's called life" at the end

I just watched a 30 minute video of a game I have no intention of ever playing. Great video.

I got screwed by the "90% of rooms" quest on a champion dungeon. There were 2 paths. One with a nothing room and one with a room battle connected to a nothing room. I thought I had to 2 rooms left to explore, so I went for a room battle. My leper has been targeted with every stress damage attack the entire dungeon, breaking and even having one heart attack. During the last room battle everyone jumps on him and gives him a 2nd heart attack despite using his stress heal ability. He dies, and I finish the room battle. "QUEST COMPLETE!" I cry. I only had that one party at level 5.

" IN THE END U DID NUTHIN BIG SURPRISE XDDDDDDD" I hate this so much.

HOW CAN U H8 SUSHI? 😂

Hahaha I thought you were building up to No Man's Sky at the end.

The early beta versions of the game was never this grindy. you can get through the content within 8-10 hours. starting over never felt tedious so I never understood why the devs changed the game for the worst

The biggest problem with the Darkest Dungeon is it manages to carry its theme far too well through its own gameplay. It's a game about darkness, despair and tedium. It makes for a good story if you're into that sort of Call of Cthulhu stuff, but it makes for a really dry experience. Once you figure out all the ways in which the game is cheap, all that's left is to go through the motions, with RNG occasionally setting you back several hours. The issue is there's very little depth to the actual gameplay. It has positioning and preparation, and that's about it. Focus on the most dangerous enemy, kill them first, go from there. Aside from a few hard-coded traps (such as knocking back the fat skeleton causing him to AoE you), it's a dirt-simple system which relies on randomness more than anything else. I like to bring up XCOM when talking about the Darkest Dungeon, since it has a similar gameplay loop. However, XCOM has a lot more complexity inherent in both its tactical and strategic layers. It plays out like a really intricate board game which - with random map generation in XCOM 2 - turns most encounters into de-facto problem-solving, at least up to a certain level of tech. The Darkest Dungeon's combat system is so simplistic that problem-solving happens only once until you figure out the specific enemy. The rest is a repeating preparation and rolling the dice. It may fit the theme, but it makes for a game that grows stale pretty quickly.

THANK YOU for helping me figure out WHY I love the aesthetics of this game so much yet can't bear myself to play more than a few hours of it

When you attack a stunned enemy and miss 🙃

Missed opportunity to insert some binary messages.

I recently completed this game and would describe it as a pearl of brilliance surrounded by 50 pounds of rotting clam. The atmosphere is top notch for a simple 2D turn-based game, the mechanics are pretty tight, and the artwork is lovingly drawn. But the grind...oh man the grind! Dungeons have four basic palette types, each with about 60% unique content (enemies, event items, etc.). These randomized dungeons aren't really that random, as the "uncommon" bits of content are very rare. So run 1 and run 20 of each dungeon type feels almost identical, with higher "level" content introducing a few new enemies and making the numbers less in your favor. Your characters have all their abilities more or less from 20 minutes onward, and most trinkets simply buff numbers instead of opening up new playstyles. Given the number of heroes you have to "max out" to conquer the final dungeon (minimum of 16, but likely 24+ with random deaths and bad rolls), you end up grinding a LOT of runs. Each hero needs to be leveled to max, have their skills upgraded, have their stats upgraded, and require the semi-random procurement of their best trinkets. If you wipe, you could be set back hours of play. This game would be a great title if each playthrough was cut by 80% and more randomized (maybe only certain character types available during each run, or characters having important stat/characteristic rolls that greatly affected how they play and combine with each other). You could even up the difficulty, as less would be on the line if your playthrough was an abject failure. But a game with 20+ hours required from intro fight to ending cutscene encourages safe plodding play from anyone but the most zealous enthusiast, especially when that play is 90% GRIND. And the capstone dungeons after that grind will never live up to your expectations. This game is also encumbered by its UI. There are some hotkeys, but many actions inexplicably require mouse input. I can select my skill with 1-4, but selecting the enemy or ally to use said attack on requires a click every. single. time. You cannot save equipment loadouts or provision lists, so every run requires a few extra minutes of bad-interface prep. A few extra hotkeys save slots would make play more enjoyable. To sum up, Darkest Dungeon is not a bad game but certainly not a good one. Playing to the end is anticlimatic, and you only need a few of the games 20+ hours of length to experience the vast majority of what it can throw at you. My recommendation i to buy this title with a heavy Steam discount, play until you get bored, and watch the ending fights on KZfaq.

It's weird when you see a review that is so good that it makes you reconsider one of your favorite games. I've spent maybe 100 hours on DD and love it to death, but I don't disagree with anything you've said. Great review.

I strongly believe that the most egregious issue with this game is that it's TOO LONG, all of the other problems are downstream from there. A shorter game would mean less grinding, which would make RNG/Permadeath less devastating: and the overall experience would be less frustrating. Besides, I don't think anyone would complain that this $12 indie game only lasted 20 hours; instead of 100. There's a reason only about 5% of players actually completed this game: and it's not because it's "just that hard".

I like turn based combat and I didn't hate Darkest Dungeon. I did however find it lacking and you pretty much sum up the reasons. I guess the presentation and atmosphere is really seductive, hence the hype train. More form over content.

Good review- I was stoked with this game for the first 20 hours- GREAT stuff- but then the tedious grind kicks in and... I had a pretty strong party of lvl 6 Characters I took through the SHuffling Horror and sure enough I was randomly wiped out before I ever got to the Boss. And now... would take hours to get another good lvl 6 party together...

"Quirks don't really matter that much." That is just factually wrong.

For anyone watching this now, the devs changed things and added options to reduce the grind, and playing on PC there are many steam workshop mods that can tweak the experience to be an easy or hard as you would like

15:39 is the reason I stopped playing the game. I beat around 70% bosses, never lost a hero from the main roster but I got very close to dying and even died a few times with my b team because sometimes the game would decide to focus and often crit a hero from full to zero hp. I had almost all the trinkets as far as I knew and none of them could do anything against that. I like hard games as long as their fair, but this felt very unfair and I got disheartened to push on.

Absolutely hit the nail in the head for me. Darkest Dungeon is a game that is hard to hate at first sight because of how artistically stunning it is, but when you delve down, the grind and the randomness really detracts from the experience. The bit about being relieved about beating a boss not because it was a challenge, but because you don't want to grind anymore is exactly what I told so many people, but sadly due to the "hardcore" nature of the marketing for the game, it becomes pretty much immune to criticism. Anytime you have a terrible experience with it, it's intended.

From someone with 300 hours in DD, this is such a valid review

I love Darkest Dungeon and here's how: I keep most of the settings but change enemy crits to deal the max of their regular damage roll instead of double damage. I have a mod that lets high level heroes enter low level dungeons. But mainly - I don't try to complete the game. I just enjoy playing it and enjoy making slow progress a few hours at a time. Sometimes I'll go months without playing, and come back and start a fresh file. Grinding is boring gameplay you put up with for a future reward, if the gameplay is rewarding on its own, it's never a grind

A great critique as usual! Chadunda did a review of it recently which I also enjoyed, but he straight up acknowledges at the start that, despite always preferring to finish games before reviewing them, he couldn't bring himself to do it for Darkest Dungeon. I think he clocked in around 22 hours before reviewing it and his biggest criticism also seemed to be the grinding. Having now seen your review, from the perspective of someone who has beaten it, I cannot BELIEVE the amount of grinding involved! It's really just insane to me and it's completely turned me off of the game. As someone pointed out in the comments on Reddit, it seems kind of similar to FTL, except a failed run on that will cost you like an hour at most and it's nowhere near as punishing, unfair or random as DD seems to be, so I think I'll just stick to FTL haha

I personally had a pretty good time with the game overall, still gotta say that this is a fantastic review, though.

It's a sign of a good and thorough critic that you can make a 30 minute video insulting what is legitimately among my top 3 favorite games of all time, if not my number 1, and I don't lose any respect for you in the process. Shockingly few outlets take the time to make thorough work like this in any industry, much less video games.

Just stumbled across your channel recently and i'm really loving your work. Also thinking about reading your Wizard and the Dragon trilogy. Keep up the good work!

Fantastic review, and I must commend you for beating the damn game. I spent 70 hours on this game and rage quit after getting sick of fighting The Collector over, and over, and over! Cool concept, but should've been a one off thing, not something you're guaranteed to fight at least once in every champion level dungeon. I beat the Swine God and the Hag Witch but still quit after two of my heroes died in one random encounter, bringing the total of dead heroes up to ten. I never even did the titular Darkest Dungeon segments. The worst part is people can't even criticize the game's difficulty without being told "git gud, fagit," by some try-hard meat-head with an obfuscating fanboy complex. This game is bullshit. I loved it, I really did, but then it started kicking me in the balls over and over, then I hated it. And that ending is a cheap copout, like most of this game's design choices.

You have perfectly summed up everything that I hated about this game. I had beaten first 16 bosses, leveling up my team and gear to soldier through the last rung of dungeons. I had 3 Vestals lvl 5 before starting the first long dungeon. Lost 1 due to crit/bleed unfairness. Then lost 2nd one a bit later after healing her with arbalest. He was wearing a trinket that had -33% heal. So I figured it would heal for 3 instead of 4. Wrong. I healed for -3 and it bypassed deaths door, resulting in another hero loss. At that point I ragequit. I am not a masochist. Fuck this game.

I struggled through Darkest Dungeon and quit on the final levels The thing that broke me was the mechanic of not being able to re-use characters in the Darkest Dungeon. The game tries to lampshade it, but it's just artificial difficulty/padding they use to force you to have to grind NINE more max level characters. I said fuck that and quit after beating the first floor.

i've rewatched all of your reviews so many times i lost count, upload more joseph :D

this was such a thorough proper review...thank you so much. Subbed.

Joseph Anderson played the last 70 hours for our sins. Thanks.

I agree. Love the game but after couple hours you have the standard dungeons figured out. Basicly there is one standard party for grinding. Healer, Plague Doctor for double stun and some 2 Atackers. And all dungeons you just destroy everyone with no stress. And Boss fights you have to hope for good RNG. Because most Bosses hit so hard that if they get a Crit at the start or you have a bad luck and miss 2 or 3 times it is all over.

Such grind is unsurprising. This loop predates even the earliest game designers.

"They healed for zero and one so often that I started to wonder if they were trying to communicate with me in binary" OH FUCK, that caught me off guard. That was good

HOW CAN U H8 SUSHI????

I was indeed very surprised that only 2.2% of the players have completed the game on the easiest difficulty, according to Steam achievements. Even La-Mulana has a higher score of 3.5%.

Finally someone who can articulate why I dislike this game without sounding like a contrarian.

I am really happy you actually do criticize games which most critics go lightly on because of their cult following and raving fan reviews. It seems like 90% of gamers these days judge a game based on some arbitrary checkmarks. DD has great graphics, sound, varity of loot, progression system, lots of heroes - it must be a good game! And if you dare to criticize mechanics, you are shunned as noob who should go play lol.

I just wanted you to know that I was playing an arena run in Hearthstone while watching this review and riiiiiight as you mentioned the extreme RNG in it I got hit with an Imp-losion for four that ended up losing me the game. Good analogy!

When you started talking about another game that fell into the "gather, craft, reset" cycle, I thought you were gonna call out No Man's Sky, but instead you're throwing shade at the Grandmas!

I love Darkest Dungeon, but I understand why some people doesn't like it. Very good video.

I love your voice and your tone of voice when giving critique. Subscribed

Thanks for taking the time to make this video Mr Anderson. There are some very valid critiques in your discussion. I hope the developers take some of your suggestions on board. I really enjoyed the critical analysis of games on your channel, normally this level of focus in reviews is reserved entirely for film and books. It's good to see more talented people such as yourself working to help the player base, and in turn the medium itself grow mature. Thank you for your time.

Joseph playing Darkest Dungeon: I’ll do my best to remain objective and analyze this game as neutrally as possible. Joseph playing Persona 5: mmmmm yes yusuke stan go brrrrrr

The problem with this game is no matter how strong your character is it all comes down to stupid fucking RNG always

The only thing that ruined this for me and uninstalled after 3 hours is that the game is ridiculously based on RNG and i wanna play a game where i have more control and this is basiaclly a dungeon crawling casino, im writing this before i watch the video :) P.S. that's why the Soulsborne series apealed so much too me..sure there are bullshit moments , but mostly you rely on your own skill and if you die its 99.50% your fault :P

i enjoyed it until i got bogged down at the end and then it was just torture to put up with it to finish. it wasnt the difficulty so much as it was the near endgame grinding. what a slog

I believe you're one of the best game reviewers I've ever come across. Subscribed and can't wait to view more of your reviews. Keep up the great work you're doing.

'Quirks don't matter that much' *Laughs in Fated Leper*

"There's another game that's just like this. There's this repetitive task you have to do, there's a loop of gameplay of saving up resources in order to unlock the next tier of repetitive tasks..." FORESHADOWING

"they were trying to communicate with me in binary" This was exactly the moment I lost it. I must say your content really is amazing.

As one of the ~1% of people who too finished the game on hardmode without any breaks and took 80 hours for it, I can relate. When you were saying the game has 4 problems and listed them, however I disagreed. The real 4 problems are, in order - The grind - More Grind - Grinding - Repetitive Grind For me, Darkest Dungeon is a 20, maybe 30 hours game tops, stretched to an atrociously unpleasant 80 hours.

Brother, you are NOT alone in your feelings for this game. To this day Darkest Dungeon is the only game I have ever rage-quit. Besides the tedium and the RNG, I'll also say that anyone who gets attached to their characters should stay the hell away from this game. I'm looking at you Fire Emblem fans! And I think you hit the nail on the head with one of your comments. After defeating a boss I wasn't relieved that I won, I was relieved that I could avoid having to grind a new set of heroes up to scratch. As you said, the game's ambiance, music, and art are all on point. But the gameplay just pissed me off. Lastly, at certain points in your review, I could just HEAR your rage bubbling beneath the surface. Props to you for actually finishing this thing.

Thanks for this video. I was already kind of on the fence on continuing playing at level 3 due to grind (lol)...now I know not to waste my time with it anymore.

Your content is some of the best I've seen. Your Witcher 3 video popped up on my feed and I've been watching most of your content since! I am sad to hear you didn't have the same feeling for Darkest Dungeon, seeing as it is a game I absolutely love. Then again, I am a bit nutty because I enjoy the grind :p Also, mods! Lots and lots of mods. So many fantastic mods for this game

I’ve watched developer talks and really this game was created in their perfect vision. Through early beta they would find exploits that’s people would do and adjected. They wanted a turn base statagy game where team composition was important and the joy came from grinding up the home base. They have even mentioned that the reason it seems like the dungeons and combat is so styled is because they found that part the most boring of the game and grinding up the base and characters the most enjoyable. When people just started building high first row dps builds, since everyone would move forward, they added corpses so that people would have to build back line dps (a change that was crazy controversial and even had articles written on them how the game was ruined but they stayed with it cause that was there vision). When people didn’t care about stress they added heart attacks, which was also controversial cause before it only gave afflictions so would would just run the same team over and over instead of resting or have stress healers. The reasons quirks don’t really have any connection is because they didn’t want people to just have the “quirk” they they use to touch and grab everything. But they did give the ability for many of these things to be checked off and they even added the lower difficulty and districts which help making the game easier on longer runs.

15:57 he just sits there on that screen, im just imagining behind the screen he's like "FUCK FUCK I JUST- FUCK"

Man, you basically nailed it with the "Single Player Hearthstone" comment, that's what I said to a friend when he asked to describe it. That was the reason I stopped playing this game - too much stupid RNG for me. I love turn based and grinding games and I really liked the style of the game, but Hearthston-ish RNG killed the mood, I hate it with all the passion and stopped playing the game just like HS because of it. It made me lose my calm and rage for no reason and you feel helpless in those moments.

This is a tremendous review/critique, and really helps to articulate the issues I have with this game. I absolutely loved the first 20ish hours I spent with DD, but now that I see what the road to the Darkest Dungeon will require, I don't think I have it in me to grind it out. Kudos for being so thoughtful and straightforward in your analysis of the game. Here's hoping the devs make some changes to make the whole experience a little more palatable.

I was there from the beginning. The promise this game showed in the beginning was immense. But then the patches came. They ignored the original players' comments, continued to ignore their problematic stat mechanic system, shoved a load of temporary fixes in like PROT and tried to make DoTs work. They added corpses, the dumbest mechanic in the world, and it just got worse from there. The grind became ridiculous and all sense of fun, risk and adventure was lost. To this day they're still bitter about it. The head dev moans all the time at conferences about the big bad trolls that told him Red Hook was ruining the game. It just boils my piss that a whole bunch of people came along at its release day and gave what was an inferior version of the game a big thumbs up. I hope one day someone takes it upon themselves to mod the game back to the pre-Houndmaster patch, fixes the terrible stat mechanics, and makes an incredible experience of what used to be my favourite dungeon crawler.

Great review. I loved darkest dungeon but u literally pointed out all the bad things so beautifully it made me question myself if I really liked it that much. Cheers !

I honestly think this is a great case study in how Kickstarter can create bias. The massive amount of rave reviews basically come from people who were in love with the concept before playing it. They also had input into the game. It's sort of like asking the developer to review their own game. It's hard to imagine someone who paid money for the game up front, was super excited about it, and then got to see suggestions they made actually implemented leaving a bad review. It's just impossible to remove yourself to see this game for what it is.

I tried to love this game but I think their devs enjoy too much the idea of having a frustrating game.

You sir, have gladly received my subscription from the ending of this review. And the deepness of your video of this game and others as well of course.

8:35 That FFIV joke made me chuckle. We could never succeed without characters throwing themselves at collapsing walls or jumping from unbelievable heights into certain death.

summary: play cookie clicker

This game is the answer to the question "What if XCom, but with less tactics and strategy, but more grinding and RNG bullshit?" The other answer is "No".

Nice video, I just wanted to point out an inconsistency: You say that the learning curve caps early and it took you about 10 hours to fully grasp. It is possible to then demonstrate that this is not true. Some examples: 1- Most trinkets are useless / unsatisfying due to heavy drawbacks. Talking about ancestral trinkets, they usually come with a +10% stress attached but give some nice pros. It is completely possible to manage stress during dungeons, to the point that the +25% stress for a Plague Doctor trinket is a favorite of mine and often my doc returns with less than 20 stress in town. 2- It is a grind to copy with character loss. We knew from the beginning that characters death is present and permanent. It is part of the learning process to find a way not to lose 4 hours every time somebody dies. Death could also be prevented. Initially one could just boost HP or deathblow resist and later learn to stack speed correctly within party members and manage debuffs / enemy stuns / periodic damage. Knowing your enemy also helps. 3- RNG. "Darkest Dungeon is too hard" by Don't panic is a good example with memes on the side. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/iNChqreart7bnZs.html Generally being unaware of a game mechanic doesn't mean that the game is unfair. Imagine that my goal is to beat the game without taking too much damage. Since I can't see myself taking damage too often I'm inclined not to bring healers. This will make taking damage randomly so much more punishing than it actually is. Eventually I can either change strategy or complain about it till the end. Now we can apply this concept to any mechanic, such as random misses, deathblows or whatever really. Planning for enemy crits is important and one could mitigate the enemy focusing fire on one target by stunning or other means. I'm sure that what happened to you was very unlikely. I love how Darkest Dungeon is a game about the worst (and unlikely) situations and how to prepare for them. Peace

So when is your in-depth review on cookie clicker coming out?

Well done this, was fun to watch. You gave me something to think about when it comes to grind/difficulty. Also cookie clicker, nice.

I really like DD but I also like this review, a lot! You did an outstanding work going so much into detail with the game's mechanics. Hope to see more reviews from you :D

Revisiting this 3 years later, and just after revisiting and finishing the game for a second time. The game hasn't changed much in that time. I think alot of your dislikes with the game are understandable, and some of them I feel too. For example, in my recent completion of the game I turned off enemy crits, since the randomness was really bugging me. However, I do think there is some sushi-ness going on. I cringed at the idea of playing a game like this with turn timers/reward timers, final fantasy style. I enjoy the slow pace and the lack of pressure that comes with that. Anyway, I appreciate this video. Keep up the good work!

When you said "I got 0s and 1s so often I was starting to wonder if they were trying to communicate with me through binary" and then followed with a montage I got either "A" (Including the 2 that appeared in the backround while you said the quote above) or a sqaure symbol (not including those 2).

I was playing this game since last week, I enjoyed it, had fun but something started feeling disgustingly wrong, when I was able to beat the first 8 bosses, I had to beat them again, okey, but the few level 3 or 4 heroes I had weren't reliable enough or got past level 4 after beating a few of the veteran bosses, so I started grinding to level up several level 0's, suddenly all of my runs became runs just to level up heroes. I can't fucking fanthom how horrible it is for someone that gets wiped on the darkest dungeon and has to bring up 4 more level 6's really nice video, it would have been nice to have another emphasis at the end of how people are playing, rating and dropping this game before doing champion dungeons, or some that don't even reach the veteran ones.

I have 82 hours of the game without changing difficulty. Everything you said was completely right. The grind really made me not like the game as much.

"Quirks don't matter that much" is straight up false, and Radiant mode alleviates a lot of the repetitive aspects you mentioned, including the Never Again mechanic (although I can totally see how many players wouldn't know this, nor feel the need to alleviate the grind before it was too late to make the decision). The ending cycling back to the beginning being a bad thing also seems like a case of "I hate sushi". As others have mentioned, the inevitability of your demise and ultimate powerlessness before evil is a common theme in Lovecraft's literature, which heavily inspired this game. A happy ending where you ride into the sunset after slaying Eldritch Grandpa wouldn't sit well in a game like this either. Other than that this review was spot on. While I did enjoy the game, I have to agree with most of what you said, especially the unforgiving grind in normal difficulty and the bullshit deaths leading not only to extreme frustration but also to more of the aforementioned, unforgiving grind. The DLCs fix some of these issues but also bring a whole bag of new ones, so they hardly matter when reviewing the game and these aspects in particular.

The party building and combat in this game is incredibly fun, and so is the resource management in dungeons. But actually trying to finish it is just painful. Killing the last bosses of each tier sucks, since most of your roster won't take the lower level missions anymore. It means that you have to either give up on them or build a shitty party with whatever heroes you have left at that level. Grinding 4 separate parties to level 6 is a pain. God help you if you fail any of the final missions or get wiped. Don't ever get me started on Crimson Court.

While I respect and understand your criticism with the game, the gameplay loop was made with an overall progression in mind. Money and trinkets that you earn even heroes are killed or you choose to escape absolutely make a difference in the effectiveness of future forays. For a game based on dice-rolls and chance, there are mechanics that ultimately increase your chances of success despite the difficulty. I do think that the developers could have devised a mechanic similar to the stress system but for enemies to give combat an even greater level of intricacy. As to the variety, this is why I think this title's home is perfect on the Vita system. It is best experienced in shorter bursts unlike a traditional RPG. The excitement comes from the fact that unless you have leveled up and bought all upgrades available and found all trinkets, it is entirely possible that a random dungeon crawl will result in defeat. I don't think many games are able to execute this idea well, if at all. For example, in DD I can couple a hero with an area scouting ability with scouting abilities at an early camp to find the best way to a particularly difficult boss while avoiding unnecessary battles. This makes me more likely to face off with the boss in the best condition possible, putting potential success in my favor. This way of being able to approach the game is refreshing and very tangible in my opinion.

Listen, I'm a fan of Joseph Anderson, and I've seen almost all of his videos at least three times over, but most of his criticisms in this video were either true at the time and was later fixed, or was just flat out wrong. Fixed: The "grind", you no longer have to train people from level 0 to level 5, now you can upgrade the stagecoach to allow recruitment of up to level 3 heroes. Successfully beat 5 long dungeons, and the person is basically ready to go to the final dungeon. "Since you can change what abilities you can use in the middle of a dungeon run, it doesn't really matter which ones you invest in while you're in town"(10:32 in his video) Fixed. He stated that the quirks you receive from a dungeon run are random, but they aren't. The less stress a hero has, the better the chance of a positive quirk. To be fair, the game doesn't really state this in any way, shape, or form, but doesn't make him correct. "The experience gain from small, medium and large, aren't that different, you're better off rushing through smaller dungeons" You now get double XP from long dungeons when compared to short, as long as they are the same rank. Example: Short Champion Dungeon is 8 xp, long is 16. You probably weren't that much better off rushing through dungeons back then either, since longer dungeons means more money to get good trinkets and quirks. "Additionally it takes a hefty amount of gold to continually upgrade your weapons, armor, and skills of your characters. So you're constantly grinding out more money and more levels, never really fully able to commit to focusing on one set at a time. Resources are spread thinly between multiple groups of characters, instead of between a handful you can level in a short time." Antiquarians, the aforementioned stagecoach upgrades, longer dungeon benefits, and a couple of the "outright wrongs" I mentioned fix these issues. "Once you use up all these heirlooms(on buildings in town), which is very likely to happen before you beat the game, you have nothing to do with the hundreds of heirlooms you'll find after that." I was tempted to put this in outright wrong, because this could've been a playstyle thing rather than a game issue, but I'll give Joe the benefit of the doubt. This has been fixed with the introduction of blueprints, and new building you can make in your village. This also may address his "optional bosses don't give enough" issue. "Worst Random Culprits" I can agree that dungeon layouts can still be lackluster, but I still disregard the comment that all quests play basically the same(see in Outright wrong section). The Tavern itself hasn't been "fixed", but the church has the ability for characters you send there to lose gold/items too now(I think). "The Finger ability" itself hasn't been changed, but you can now use Holy water to decrease chance of bleed for a couple turns(pretty sure you could have a quirk to do that too...and maybe an item...). "Screen recap" You can now press the next button and it immediately shows all the stuff you got in the dungeon. "The ending sucked" They didn't fix this...but perhaps in Darkest Dungeon 2(announced just yesterday, February 19th 2019)? Outright wrong: "Quirks don't really matter that much" Even back then, they still kind of did. Quirks that increase scouting, damage, accuracy, effectiveness of effects on enemies, etc. are pretty good to have. Bad quirks can be really important to get rid of, especially if it affects the role the hero plays(Example: A heavy hitter has a perk that makes it so it can't hit as easily, or can't hit as hard.) (Extra note: He says later in the video that certain quirks force a character to do certain actions, and that he should maybe have the option to use items when this occurs. If he took negative quirks more seriously, this wouldn't be an issue) "The game is too easy, the death punishment is too hard! I would've tried more things if death wasn't so permanent!" Unless you're in the actual Darkest Dungeon, you can literally run from almost every fight in the game. The game is as punishing as the player is greedy/confident, you have to know your limits and know when to hold your cards and when to fold your cards. "You can't use the same party consecutively, your party has to rest in the tavern or church to heal stress." If you're really going through a bunch of smaller dungeons, the amount of stress your entire party suffers should be negligible, and you should be able to go a couple weeks without resting in either of those places. In the video, he places Dismas, who has only around 40 stress, in the church. The hero could easily have been taken with a "newbie" group. "My Hellion shouldn't have died, and there was nothing I could do about it!" Hellions, although great damage dealers as a front liner, cannot take hits worth shit. The Hellion in question was almost at half health, in the front line, and had around 30 dodge. Now I can't testify to what happened in that dungeon before he got to that point, however Joe had plenty of food to heal the Hellion to a more manageable health situation. Joe, after playing for so many hours, should have known the enemy move set, especially since he's fighting in a champion level dungeon. With or without crit, the bandits probably could've killed the Hellion in one turn regardless. Additionally, it appears that Joe surpised them to start out with. This means that Joe could've killed the weaker bandit first, and his Hellion probably wouldn't have died. There absolutely was "something he could do about it". "There are 4 different types(of quests); Explore 90% of rooms, Beat 100% of room battles, collect/use three items scattered throughout dungeon, or fight a boss. These are all functionally identical, and have you moving through the same rooms, killing the same monsters. They all end up requiring roughly the same amount of exploration through a dungeon before completing it, the only main exception are boss fights." Unless they radically changed the way spawning things worked, most of this is just plain wrong. The monsters are identical, however the quests can radically change how you approach a dungeon(or how you SHOULD approach a dungeon). When you explore 90%, the best way to get through it is to have a process. Unless the dungeon is exclusively a straight line, there has to be a method to the madness, otherwise you're going to have to backtrack, which increases odds of an unnecessary monster attack, which can lead to loss. There are times where effectively skipping a monster room or two has saved lives, or at least prevented failure. 100% of room battles is similar to 90% of rooms, however the time it takes to complete this task can be much shorter. You're going to need a more robust/aggressive party, but the payoff is that you'll probably only need to explore around half the rooms, and you'll receive around the same rewards as you would a 90% exploration. The three item quest is perhaps the most varied quest of all, more often then not the quest will result in some sort of temporary(but pretty good) buff to either the town or next expedition. You're highly incentivized to NOT fail these quests, since the potential benefits are so high(Free healthcare for a whole week? 45k gold worth of quirks enforced/forgotten? Sign me up) These quests are the most varied, the amount of exploration necessary could be 3 rooms worth, or the entire dungeon. Regardless, it's just plain wrong to say that it consistently requires the same amount of work as either of the other two quests. "(Trinkets) are downright awful. Most of them suck and come with heavy drawbacks." Extremely debatable, but either way, the ones he highlights when he says this in the video are all pretty good. There was literally no drawbacks to the Abomination item, the Dark Tambourine item is pretty good even back then, and the Blasphemous Vial gives you more accuracy, blight chance, and stun chance for a mere 15% increase in stress damage.(I will admit that his idea of randomized item reward pool at end of dungeon would be good though.) "What happened most often was one hero was decided to be the game punching bag...either by damage or by stress(I paraphrased here) everything is riddled with these extreme takes on dice rolls." I can't speak for all enemies, but some definitely had a consistent strategy that wasn't dice rolls at all. Spiders are fast and usually focus on a few(or a single) characters, this is effective against players trying to get through a dungeon with all party members being extremely slow, the solution is to either surprise them or not have all your characters in the party move like snails. The cultist mage also focuses almost exclusively on the most stressed members, this teaches players to focus on the cultist first, which is decently hard to do since it's usually in the very back.

I hate it when turned based games use timing. I prefer one or the other. It's kinda like... "MAKE YOUR DECISION STRATEGICALLY ... BUT HURRY THE FUCK UP"

I respect your articulation and detail. Subbed.