Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society

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Dungeon delving isn’t a particularly lucrative line of work in real life. Believe me, I’ve tried. I got my BD – Bachelor’s of Dungeoneering – from a local community college and got to exploring, but eight hours a day of killing slimes for vendor trash drops just doesn’t pay. Maybe I should’ve went to an Ivy League. While I consider my career mistakes, let’s also consider Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society, the latest puzzle box of a dungeon crawler from Nippon Ichi Software.

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We’ve all got to hustle to make a living, but some of us have cushier jobs than others. Case in point: Eureka, a young noblewoman who finds herself employed at a backwoods manor built over a sprawling underground labyrinth. This labyrinth is home to both terrifying monsters and mysterious Curios, magical items of unknown origin. Humans can’t effectively get in and out of the labyrinth, but via some magical contrivances courtesy of her witch mentor Madame Marta, Eureka’s able to utilize a magical lantern.

This allows her to command artificial adventurers that can make the journey, and by controlling these puppet soldiers and spelunking into the Labyrinth, she’ll seek the Curios d’Art, the most mysterious and powerful treasures of all. It’s a tough job, but hey – work’s work.

As with its predecessor Labyrinth of Refrain, Galleria is a combination of a visual novel and intense dungeon-crawler in the same vein as the Wizardry series. Between chunky cutscenes, you’ll find yourself delving into dungeons that are designed in the classical style. That means there’s traps, pits, false walls and such abound; the further you go, the more complex things get, and you’ll want to be prepared for some brain-teasers and mind-twisting exploration.

Every time you think you’ve figured out how dungeon-crawling works, Galleria adds on another mechanic to mix things up yet again. Gotten used to exploring in the dungeon, mapping things out and learning where everything’s laid out? Okay, now you can break walls, so all those bits of the dungeon you thought were inaccessible are now open for business. What about pits? Well, now you can jump over those. Deadly swamps? Got you, get to shlorping your way through them. There’s so much going on that it’s easy to get overwhelmed. You’ll want to be patient with this one, as it’s wholly possible to get stuck if you’re not exceedingly thorough.

Early on, combat takes something of a backseat to the ridiculous complexity of the dungeon, but it’s got plenty of depth all its own. The trick here, as in Refrain, is that your maximum party size is actually fairly massive, and while you’ll start with a fairly typical adventuring group you’ll end up with a team of twenty or more puppet soldiers at once. If that sounds intimidating…well, it kind of is, but as with exploration Galleria tries to go easy on you and introduce concepts gradually.

Getting too deep into the weeds would be out of the scope of this review, but rest assured that players who enjoy the kind of deep and complex character customization in titles like Disgaea will find plenty to love here as new quirks and mechanics continue to unlock.

As with Refrain, Galleria’s presentation straddles the line between cute and horrifying, sometimes wobbling back and forth over that line from moment to moment. Monster designs in particular are, well, something else. The anime-styled cutscenes aren’t too bad, given how long they tend to be, though this is very much a visual novel so you shouldn’t expect much in the way of animation there. There’s voice acting at least. You’ll want to keep it in Japanese, as while the English dub isn’t awful, it’s not great enough to merit keeping it around for the dozens of hours of cutscenes you’ll be watching as you proceed.

Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society is one of those interesting games where a review just isn’t the right medium to talk effectively about the sheer depth of content on offer. Don’t let the first few hours fool you. In fact, don’t let the first couple dozen hours fool you. There’s a lot going on here, more than the game even hints at early on, and players that stick with it are amply rewarded with devious dungeons, deep combat and a huge amount of interesting character and party-building mechanics. If that sounds like your kind of thing, it absolutely is, so dive in head first and watch the next fifty hours or so melt away.