Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy (PS Vita) Review

Operation Abyss appeals to a very narrow niche of gamers: hardcore dungeon crawl fans who are at home with first-person perspective of action and battle. In this regard, it stays fairly true to its roots and ends up being pretty fun and varied enough to be worth a look—however, nearly everything else about it seeks to take away or minimize the fun of the battles and crawling.

The premise of the story is interesting, but ends up being trite and minimal. The characters are dug straight out of tropes, and the menus the player is forced to navigate are incredibly Byzantine, so much so that a large portion of the playtime is simply fighting to find the right menu to perform an action.

Despite being simple at its roots, it gets overly complex. There are over 50 or more menus, submenus, and screens that lead to different menus, and it's vital to navigate them all to get anywhere in the environment or story. As an added insult, there is only a very sparse online instruction manual, and the actual game does a very poor job of explaining how to do anything. Downright stupefying is that the brief tutorial comes after the first dungeon is complete, meaning gamers had to have struggled through the endless menus to figure out how to even start the dungeon, only to later be told how it's done.

The exploration and dungeon crawling are actually pretty fun, but given the cover and promotional art, customers are likely setting themselves up for disappointment. The flashy anime girls? Not in the main party. A sci-fi plot? Barely. An epic story with a relatable hero? No, squads are quite literally just nameless mooks sent around to kill enemies—characters are not in the story in any meaningful way.

There are different classes that each of the six squad members can be. They go by weird names but essentially they're tanks, damage dealers, healers, mages, and so on. Members are set up with three characters in the front lines and three in the back lines. The back lines generally cannot do anything other than cast spells. This often makes the back line characters useless barring specific circumstances, though this isn't a complaint; this is actually an interesting mechanic and feels more immersive, as not every character can just spam attacks.

Dungeons are explored in first-person, and for the most part they're fairly unremarkable, but it works. The major problem is that early on there are things the player has no idea how to do and thus must resort to pure trial and error, such as having to leave, talk to people, then be told to press a switch that was inoperable the first time in, with no warning that there is ever a connection like this. There are a lot of weapons, but they don't really make much of a difference beyond "sword, sword +1, axe+2" etc., which is unfortunate.

Battles come in waves, so a typical encounter might be two enemies, backed up by two more waves of two each, and as they get plowed down, the next wave comes in. Generally the back waves can't do anything, and if they get sent in before their turn, they won't have an attack, which often allows the player to just steamroll all waves. Magic is extremely limited and, beyond an occasional heal, not that good, so the majority of battle is the front three squad members attacking and the back three guarding for the duration of their existence.

Even exploring and finding equipment gets bogged down in unnecessary minutiae. There's an endless string of "material a, material b" type things to find, and only through navigating appropriate menus will anyone learn what to do with them. The items that can be made are often more expensive and no better than standard weapon shop items.

Overall, it feels like the team that made the battles and classes had a good thing going on, then a different team came in with the goal of misrepresenting it all, and utterly ruined what could have easily been a pretty cool game. If the story was at all serious and integrated with the characters, and if the endless menus were cut in half and simplified, this would be a pretty good niche title. That being said, fans of this genre should approach with caution.