Over the weekend, I made a second run through Sakura Dungeon to try to unlock a few achievements and screenshots I’d missed. This included increasing the difficulty level, but that didn’t make the fights more difficult, just more tedious, so I soon started using console cheats to buff my characters, and skipped through most fights (press “S”, then “A”) and all the dialog I’d seen in my first run (“S” again). I couldn’t bypass the puzzles, but most of them can be navigated quickly with maps; level 12/13 and level 15 are still really annoying, though.
Once the console is enabled, you can do all sorts of cheating, but the method that has the least risk of breaking the game is to use just two commands, repeated as necessary:
for i in party: i.xp=99
player.items.append(elixir)
Setting xp=99 means that everyone in your party will level-up during
the next fight (eliminating a lot of tedious grinding), and adding an
elixir to your inventory will revive and heal anyone who’s down after
a fight (allowing you to only return to the surface when you find a
teleporter, eliminating a lot of tedious navigation through cleared
floors).
Basically, even on normal mode you need to grind wandering monsters to get your level high enough to handle bosses (who will one-shot party members ~5 levels below them), so any enjoyment I got out of the simple combat system was gone well before I beat the main campaign, and I had no interest in grinding even more on “hard”, so I made sure my party was always a level or so ahead of the monsters.
I now have 34 of 37 achievements, and I’m not going to bother with the other three, because they are: grind more monsters, go through the main campaign on really-hard mode, and grind even more monsters.
The Steam global achievement page for the game says a lot about how much people liked the dungeon-crawling:
That is, they didn’t. Basically, half of the people who played at all stopped around 1/4 into the main campaign, and half of the remaining players dropped out by the 3/4 mark. Obviously this is skewed a bit by recent purchases, but the game’s over a year old, so it should be in the ballpark.
(note that the “Burning Soul” achievement is rare not because it’s difficult, but because it’s broken unless you’re playing the 1.05 “beta”, which has never been made the official version because of Winged Cloud’s breakup with their former publishers. If you play, play 1.05)
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