Ray Gigant Review
By: Omar (@siegarettes)
- Ray Gigant
- Developer- Experience
- Publisher- acttil, llc
- PS VITA
Within the recent return of the dungeon crawler, Ray Gigant is working within frameworks that are at once traditional and forward facing. There’s the grid-based, first-person dungeon crawling that connects it Japan’s long love affair with Wizardy. At the same time it leads with an impression of a modern Phantasy Star IV, with fluidly animated characters and lavish, painted enemies populating its battles. Its pacing is thoroughly modern as well, seeking to take the archaeological exploration of the genre and transpose it to a portable format that can sneak into today’s hurried lifestyle.
To do that it shakes down several pillars of the genre. Gone are the random battles and roaming enemies of its peers. Instead, Ray Gigant’s dungeons have tiles that always instigate battles, clearly visible on the map, which repopulate in the same location each time you exit the dungeon. Vitality is also immediately restored upon completing a battle, with your main concern being conserving the Action Points that are used to perform during battle. With that it removes the tension of immediate survival, and the anxieties of dwindling resources. You’ll never wonder if you’ll make it to the next checkpoint, or if you’ll have enough resources to escape when you do. Every encounter is a known quantity.
Complementing that, each dungeon has a Marker, which when activated reveals the entire map as well as the locations of all enemies, traps and treasures. Reaching a Marker is performing the dungeon crawler equivalent of storming a bunker in a shooter, you fight your way into a secure position, then use that position to as a stronghold against incoming forces. With the entire map revealed, you’ll be able to easily find the most efficient paths to any area in the dungeon, including its bosses. In fact, Ray Gigant’s auto move feature will even plot it for you, and walk your party every step there automatically. You just take care of the battles.
Those battles are streamlined to the same degree of efficiency. Every set of commands (which are queued as a party, then executed according to the speed of each character) becomes its own macro. Hit Repeat instead of taking direct control and your last set of actions will be automatically played out. Your party only focuses on a single enemy at a time, moving onto the next one when it’s defeated, so even picking targets isn’t a concern. You can even fast forward through the battle animations to get to the results. Check the numbers, pick your moves, then check the results. The tension of watching the battle unfold crushed down to immediate outputs.
With such a truncated take on the moment to moment functions, most of Ray Gigant takes place in the long term. It’s fitting then, that it takes place on a grid. Its main loop is business-like, bordering on the aesthetics of a spreadsheet, or the perpetual fluctuations of a stock ticker. In that way, Ray Gigant turns an eye inward towards the genre. It acknowledges “the grind” as the core of the genre but removes everything that causes frustration. It’s a structure that strips away the ceremony to get to the raw mechanics of it. In the mental geography of the genre, Ray Gigant is Los Angeles, lean, modern, attractive at a glance, and without time for the languid lifestyle of its peers.
Beyond this compression of the genre format, Ray Gigant gestures at greater things. There’s a story with some throwaway philosophy that ultimately ends up in the thematic ballpark of something like Gods Eater, super moves that call up a rhythm game, a corruption system that eventually forces you to burn vitality to attack, and a leveling system that uses materials to grow your character rather than experience.There’s enough there to dig into for a while, but at its core Ray Gigant is a game for “fans of the genre”, not only in that it reaches that competent “7/10” territory that publications so love, but because it’s a game in which the way its genre subversions alter the structure of it are going to be most interesting to them. The game itself lacks gravity, both in narrative stakes and the consequence of combat, but the angles to approach it are genuinely interesting. It ultimately wasn’t something that I felt a compulsion to repeatedly return to, but the time I spent with it definitely gave me a lot to think through.