Dungeon Travelers: To Heart 2 in Another World is a weird game. It’s a spinoff of Aquaplus‘ acclaimed mid-2000s dating sim To Heart 2, with Dungeon Travelers transporting the To Heart 2 cast into an RPG fantasy setting. Dungeon Travelers was first released as Final Dragon Chronicle: Guilty Requiem, a game included on the 2009 compilation disk, Manaka de Ikuno!! Leaf Amusement Soft Vol. 5. It then got an updated stand-alone release on the PSP in 2011, where it was re-titled To Heart 2: Dungeon Travelers.
In 2013, Dungeon Travelers received a sequel titled Dungeon Travelers 2: The Royal Library & the Monster Seal featuring a completely new set of characters, albeit in the same world as the first game, just with connections to the To Heart universe filed off. The sequel released for both the PSP and the Playstation Vita in Japan, with the original Dungeon Travelers receiving a Vita port in 2015. 2015 was also the year Dungeon Travelers 2: The Royal Library & the Monster Seal was localized by Atlus for the west. Yes, you read that correctly, Atlus decided to localize a numbered sequel and keep it in the title, years before the first title was localized, which itself is a spinoff of a numbered sequel in an unlocalized dating sim series.
To make things even more of a mess, Dungeon Travelers 2 received a canonical sequel called Dungeon Travelers 2-2: The Fallen Maidens & the Book of Beginnings in 2017. Yes, they pulled a fucking Square Enix on us. Actually, this is stupider than what Square Enix did with Final Fantasy X-2, because that at least had a roman numeral. Aquaplus just used a Mario stage number as a game title and called it a day. The sequel didn’t get localized until 2023, where it and the first Dungeon Travelers 2 received PC ports by Shiravune… before getting banned from Steam. Anyway, Shiravune has now released the very first Dungeon Travelers, released as Dungeon Travelers: To Heart 2 in Another World, despite the fact that we still never got the visual novel series it’s based off of. This game, thankfully, hasn’t been banned from Steam, even though some of those lolis don’t seem to like clothes.
Just to get this out of the way, the story and characters did not make me interested in To Heart 2, and it very much feels like a halfhearted advertisement for its source material. I did not find these characters particularly compelling, and the plot just sort of meandered and didn’t go anywhere. The closest to compelling the story got was the final boss (of the main story, which makes up very little of the overall content) that’s essentially a meta commentary on the absurdity of frequent spinoffs and remakes taking away from the authenticity and goodwill of the original and going too far… or maybe it’s just a horny robot girl who is mad she’s not featured in enough merchandise.
Dungeon Traveler’s story is little more than an excuse to shoehorn as much fanservice and titillation as possible, and it doesn’t even do so in an interesting way. It’s literally just hours of “Oh no don’t look, I’m not a pervert! This is not what it looks like!,” girls being overly horny, and the MC getting freaked out. I’m not exaggerating, that’s literally 97% of the plot right there. If you play Dungeon Travelers, it will NOT be for the story.
Dungeon Travelers is purely a dungeon crawler, and the key appeal will be old fashioned combat and exploration. In fact, you may as well call this game Ecchian Odyssey. It goes without saying that if you don’t like challenging turn-based RPGs with several paths of long, winding corridors, random encounters, and the possibility of drastically overpowered enemies appearing to wreck your shit, then Dungeon Travelers is NOT the game for you! But if you are a fan of dungeon crawlers, then you should enjoy this game as long as you aren’t too creeped out by weird anime fetish slop.
The first thing to note about Dungeon Travelers, is that it is absolutely massive, and 100%ing this game will take you well over 100 hours. I must confess, I put 126 hours into this game and did not reach 100% completion. I actually had to stop, because the amount of content this game had completely wore me out. I would like to go back and complete this game one day, but that shit’s a lot harder when you’re playing it for review purposes and pushing yourself to see everything so that your review feels complete. Granted, that’s not the main reason it took this long for this review to get finished (saying I’m going through a lot right now is an understatement), but some games can absolutely overwhelm you.
While I enjoyed my time with Dungeon Travelers, the amount of artificial padding to lengthen play time left a bad taste in my mouth. It is one thing to have so much content that a game takes over a hundred hours to complete, but it’s another when it’s that long due to artificial limitations. Perhaps the biggest frustration with this game is the inventory limit. Unlike most RPGs, there are no shops or towns that sell weapons and armor, which forces the player to obtain them from dungeons. However, you can’t use weapons and armor upon collecting them, and need to have them appraised first. Until you have a party member that can cast a spell to do it (without guaranteed success), you need to backtrack to the shopkeeper and have him do it (for a price).
On top of this, you also have trash loot that you collect from enemies. These items are functionally useless, but you may need them for optional side quests, so you are incentivized to hold onto them. This means the optimal play style is to frequently leave the dungeon to return to town, store your items, and backtrack to your previous location in the dungeon, all while dealing with random encounters along the way. I frequently had to make four or five stops for each floor of the main dungeon, and I can only imagine how much time would have been saved without the constant inventory management.
Furthermore, some of the dungeons are designed just to waste your time. These include: one way doors that make you backtrack, labyrinthine dungeon designs that can be frustrating to navigate even with the mini map, hideously overpowered enemies that you’ll have no hope of defeating (that you can’t run from if you’re in front of a wall, meaning instant game over), and doors that require you to have a certain character class to enter when you’ve mostly used the same set of character through most of the game because there had been no reason to use anyone else.
To be clear, a lot of this is par for the course when it comes to these types of dungeon crawlers. Games like Dungeon Travelers are not intended to be friendly to casual gamers who have only played a few Final Fantasy games. It is instead designed in a way to make the player think and plan out their entire approach, down to what items they carry with them, and to make them pay attention to the map layout. The boss battles will require genuine planning in both equipment setups and battle strategy. It’s not a game that will appeal to casual gamers, but I personally enjoyed Dungeon Traveler’s gameplay, with the exception of the padding.
Dungeon Travelers is at its best when you are exploring dungeons and fighting powerful bosses that you often barely win by the skin of your teeth. The sense of discovery, and the thrill of combat are this game’s strongest points, and for some, that will be more than worth the price of admission. If you are not in this camp, however, there won’t be much else for you.
There is very little in terms of story or characters, and while the set pieces, music, and visuals are all very well done, Dungeon Travelers is still a game that lives or dies based on its dungeon crawler gameplay… and I guess it’s fanservice. Personally, I would like to finish it some time, but I also understand why it would not appeal to most. That being said, you can’t say it won’t give you a lot of playtime.
