What do you get when you combine a Disgaea-esque sense of humour, retro-inspired pixel art, quick-fire dungeons that typically only take a minute or two per run, and a very unusual but inventive “party” system? You get Cladun, of course—an action RPG dungeon crawler that’s been kicking around for a good 15 years but has flown under the radar for most. With Cladun X3, the series finally makes its way to Switch, and it’s a perfect opportunity to jump in.
As is often the case with Nippon Ichi games, Cladun X3 casts you as a villain in a comical riff on the fantasy worlds of classic RPGs. This time around, you’re summoned into a pocket dimension called Arcanus Cella to take part in a death game with a bunch of other eccentric heroes, unreliable “heroes”, and various other misfits. The ostensible goal is to battle your way through a series of dungeons in an effort to be the last villain standing and take the crown of Ultimate Evil—but as you can probably guess, there’s more to this dimension and the people who live there than first meets the eye.
It’s not exactly a deep, complex, or thought provoking story, but as a vessel for what Cladun X3 does best—dungeon crawls and humorous exchanges between oddball characters—it works. The goofy personalities of everyone you meet, from a hero with a split personality who isn’t quite sure if he did or didn’t defeat the big bad in his own world, to a shopkeeper who is so obsessed with legendary weapons that she can’t help but, uhh, lick them … the cast and the banter between them is a near constant source of laughs. Much of that goes to the quality of the script, too—the gags just keep coming, and always manage to hit the mark.
Between these comedic moments, the meat of Cladun X3 is a good old-fashioned dungeon crawler. Each outing tasks you with finding your way to the end of a floor, fighting through monsters and navigating traps and locked doors along the way, collecting bags and bags full of loot to take back. The thing that stands out, though, is how intentionally short each dungeon trip is. You’ll tackle story dungeons one floor at a time, and we’re talking a couple of minutes per floor the first time, and under a minute on repeat visits—each floor has a speedrun target, and they’re measured in seconds, not minutes. That doesn’t mean that the game as a whole is short—quite the opposite, with plenty of dungeons to explore—but it gives the whole game a very snappy, satisfying sense of momentum.
If you want a lengthier dungeon crawl, there’s a randomly-generated “Ran-geon” that goes 100 floors deep and gets progressively harder—and more potentially lucrative, loot-wise—the deeper you go, and in this case, you’re not going back to town after each floor. “Map-geons” are similar, but they can vary in size and need to be generated from consumable items; these dungeons can also be shared with other players. In both cases, there’s the potential to get Disgaea-like levels of statistical absurdity for both your own squad and the monsters you’re fighting. And if even that’s not enough, there’s always the “Mega-geon” …
One of the most intriguing parts of Cladun X3 is its approach to party setup. Although you’ll only see and control one character at a time, this character is supported by a squad of helpers who provide various buffs and who act as meat shields—get hit, and one of your invisible party members takes damage instead of your main character, until the main one is the last one standing. This is all set up through Magic Circles, an elaborate mechanism through which you assign party members to nodes on a grid and use them to activate various buffs (and debuffs). It’s hard to explain without getting way too down in the weeds, but imagine a skill tree where you unlock things by assigning party members rather than by spending points of some sort, and you’re kind of on the right track.
It’s strange, it takes a bit to wrap your head around, but it’s a really nifty system once the pieces fall into place. There are lots and lots of Magic Circles to unlock, all with different layouts, nodes, benefits, and drawbacks. If you’re the kind of person who really likes to get down in the minutiae of optimising builds and exploring different party setups, Cladun X3 is heaven, just because of how limitless and inventive the possibilities are.
As for the characters themselves, they’re all player-created, with a huge degree of freedom in how you create them. Ten different jobs and six different weapon types, all that play very differently, provide plenty of variety in the moment-to-moment action, while a rich loot system and job progression offer plenty of scope to grow each individual character. A very open-ended customisation system lets you tailor the look of your characters to your heart’s content—right down to drawing your own pixel-art from scratch. (Thankfully, for the less creative among us, there are also several dozen ready-made designs to pick from.)
Much of this will be familiar to anyone who’s played earlier Cladun games. Cladun X3 doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, simply because it doesn’t need to. What it does instead is refine things a bit, making the game’s more obtuse system easier to come to grips with while opening up possibilities with new Magic Circles, and ramp up the humour in the narrative. That makes it an easy recommendation for both longtime fans and for newcomers—of which there’ll probably be a few, now that a Cladun game has finally come to the ever-popular Nintendo Switch.
Test version: Nintendo Switch, played on Switch 2
Review code provided by publisher
Cladun X3 brings this intriguing yet overlooked action RPG series to Switch, and new and old fans alike will enjoy its sense of humour and exciting dungeon crawling.
