Excave (Nintendo 3DS) Review

Excave feels like a prototype. It barely has a story (not even simple text crawls with illustrations); the two playable characters don't even have names and are designated to just "male" and "female" hero. The two generic ciphers are supposed to be plumbing the nondescript dungeon for treasure and that is about it. Nothing wrong with a simple treasure hunt story, but when it is presented so flatly and sterile with no character or personality, from the very start it will be very difficult to get invested. Especially since Excave seems like it was designed for children or young gamers, as illustrated by its cartoony/anime aesthetics.

Other than "go hunt for treasure", there is very little context for anything in this game. While the character models look decent enough and have okay animations, the environments have a very cookie-cutter feel to them. Nothing is ever distinct and the dungeons themselves are very bright and lit in an even and unnatural way. Dungeons are surprisingly not randomly generated, and in a game like Excave one would expect it, considering how the assets that make the dungeons look like they are all interchangeable.

Outside of the looting and excavating of the dungeon, Excave has very little else to do. There is a dedicated escape button that will take players to the town screen, which really has just a few options on a static piece of art of the town. Users can switch between heroes, with the only distinctive difference between them being that the girl can use rapiers, bows and knives, while the boy can use katanas, axes or great swords. Splitting the weapons this way causes a lot of annoyance since it is completely random to what players will find from enemy drops, and since weapons break with no indicator to show degradation, players end up stock piling weapons they can't use that takes up precious inventory space. There is only one entry into the dungeon and the game was designed so players had to continue going deeper to open up short cuts or warp points, thus making progress a tug of war of the player constantly having to return to town to unload on loot, or simply just dumping items in the dungeon.

Regardless of what the player does, it is a very tedious and frequent conundrum that occurs in the Excave. It becomes very hard to care at all about the progress, and players will end up lazily shuffling themselves through the dungeon, not even bothering to kill any of the generic enemies (slimes, bees, wolves, etc.) since there is no level up system. Characters do not grow in Excave - the minimal stats are determined by the few weapons and a couple of accessories that don't really feel like the make an impact. No special moves to learn; instead all magic are just one-time use spell books. There is the option to equip and use shields, but they are so ineffective and take up an item slot, it's better to just walk around or evade enemy attacks, or take the pot shots and stab the enemy to death.

Excave is the heavy weight champion of brain dead combat. There really is nothing to it. It is just mash the attack button until the enemy dies. Since character movement is extremely slow, even with the accessory that is supposed to make movement faster, there is little point in evading attacks or blocking. It's really just a matter of wail on the enemy and then heal up after everything is dead. With so few spell books and how rare they are, relying on magic is never a viable strategy, either, and is just best used for bosses, which also are just mindless wailings with whatever weapon is on hand. It all just feels so futile and makes players feel like they are slipping into comas. There is no map screen, either, so Excave expects players to make a mental map, which wouldn't be so bad if the environments had distinctive landmarks, or if the game was not designed for babies.

There is a trilogy of Excave games in Japan and this particular entry is the first. Apparently the developer Mechanic Arms made attempts to make the later games more engaging and even rectified many of the criticisms that highlight Excave's flaws. It is good to know that Mechanic Arms learned from its mistakes and made efforts to improve on its formula; it is just too bad that the first game to get localised was Excave. Excave is just such a boring game it is very hard to recommend. It might be okay for a very small child who is just learning to hold a 3DS (or 2DS), but there are better titles out there that are better deserving of the purchase. Excave is about six to eight hours, but each hour spent playing it feels like 10 hours due to the boring-game-time-dilation-effect.