This morning I am going to talk a bit about Snack World a game that I have been playing on the switch. It showed up in January on the North American store front, but has actually been available in Japan since April of 2017. Not entirely certain why the extremely lag between the two other than maybe because of the recent ARPG renaissance someone decided a localization was financially viable? I am not terribly far into the game but I do feel like I have a general feel for the flow of things. Snack World The Dungeon Crawl Gold is a nonsense title, but honestly at least on some level this is a nonsense game.
It comes from Level-5 which may not be a name you recognize but I am almost certain that you recognize some of the games they have created. They are behind the Yo-Kai Watch series, LBX, Fantasy Life, and the Professor Layton series among others. So the pedigree of the game was solid going into it, and the end product feels like this weird amalgam of Dragon Quest, Gauntlet, and Pokemon or more truthfully Yo-Kai Watch. The game is set in the Kingdom of Tutti-Frutti where almost everything is some sort of a food or animal based pun. Instead of Cinderella you have Ciderella who is apparently the leader of an elite strike force of commandos in this universe.
The kingdom is also apparently addicted to mobile technology and everyone has a Pix-e Pod which serves as the mechanical means of accessing all of the things you collect. Your gear is in theory materialized from your device as are the various summons that you can collect and a lot of the early missions revolve around unlocking specific features. The last thing I unlocked was the Pix-e Tunes app which allows me to play specific tracks from the game that you collect while roaming around. The Pix-e Pedia serves as a sort of PokeDex for the game and as you encounter new things you can then go back and view information about them and see what your familiarity rating is with that creature which influences how likely they are to drop a summon card for you.
The core gameplay loop involves setting forth on missions which come in a bunch of forms, but as of yet largely seem to be more open over world zones or multi floor dungeons. You ultimately stay in a mission until one of two conditions are met, either you fulfill the objectives and reach a warp point allowing you to teleport out or your party is wiped. The good thing is even in the case of a wipe and ultimately a quest failure you are allowed to keep everything you have looted up to that point. This mechanic becomes super important when you realize that you are not going to make it through every mission on the first attempt.
The game has a certain measure of mindless grinding needed to move forward, or at least I need it to be able to succeed. Very quickly into the game you are presented a quest to defeat Medusa in Gorgonzola Ruins. When you get the quest you are likely going to be character level 2 or 3 and the quest itself is ranked as level 7. You probably could in theory be able to progress through the zone and defeat it if you are terribly good at the game. I however am not and am having to grind other content in the attempt to level my character up enough to make it all the way through the multi-tiered dungeon successfully.
In theory you could just take it slow and easy and work your way through the dungeon. However the game has a measure in place to keep you from doing this. Remember me comparing it to Gauntlet? I did so because in gauntlet there was a creature type called Death that would rush towards the player and drain their life and was seemingly invulnerable to attacks. You could in theory use a bomb potion if you had one available, but ultimately it became a race to keep mobs between you and it and to find your way out of the level. Something similar happens here when a grim reaper named Popsicle that shows up if you are taking too long to exit a dungeon floor and will begin tracking its way to your location and effectively one or two shot you. There are supposedly ways to defeat this creature but I have not yet encountered them and as a result this is something constantly making me try and go faster.
If you manage to clear an objective you are showered in loot… or at least given some items. There are a number of situational chests that can be gained for various objectives. You get a chest for your first time doing something, another for not allowing any party members to be KO’d, and even one for not taking a sip of health potion. In a good run you can walk away with four or five chests, but the vast majority of these are probably just going to be crafting materials and not anything terribly exciting. I mean unless you are one item away from crafting a new piece of gear, then I guess they would be fairly exciting.
So when I say I am not terribly far into the game, I have yet to beat the first dungeon. I am in a pattern of running around and grinding the early missions trying to level up and gain crafting materials to get better gear. This is a bit of an old screenshot but as of last night I am level 5 and have crafted a full set of Greenhorn gear. One of the videos I watched on taking down Medusa showed the player at level 12, so I probably have a lot more grinding in front of me which gets into the only negative. Right now I have 2 over world missions, 1 slime specific hunt and then the dungeon itself to grind on. It feels like the lack of content diversity may be a problem because I feel like at this early stage in the game I should not be grinding the same thing over and over. That said maybe that is representative of what the game is like as a whole and it might be good that it is at least showing you that early on.
It is a fun little game filled with charming moments, but I can’t help feeling like maybe this started its life as something targeting Android or iOS and then morphed into a Switch title. Level-5 has released mobile games and it feels like maybe it is itemized in a way to push players to buy a little currency. The items sold in the game are using a currency called Gravies, and to buy any upgrade weapons you need somewhere in the vicinity of 50 to 100 Gravies. Having spent NONE so far… I am only sitting at 22, and the “Gashapon” game requires 100 Gravies per attempt at getting the chase weapon. You do occasionally get free draw tickets so I am guessing the way it is itemized they expect no one will actually pay that 100 Gravies cost.
The interaction of running dungeons is enjoyable but I am not sure yet if I am going to gain enough traction to really feel like I am fully engaged with the game yet. However since I have been playing it off and on the last few nights I thought I would at least talk about it this morning. I’m still however on the fence about if I would ultimately suggest it to someone. If you were like me and were looking for an ARPG other than Diablo to play on the Switch, it might be something worth checking out. I think we are all sorta in a holding pattern until the release of Animal Crossing New Horizon.
