Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society

I have a spreadsheet for tracking Etrian Odyssey party compositions, so when a dungeon crawler shows up promising a puppet army of up to 40 fighters across eight distinct Facet classes, I pay attention. Labyrinth of Galleria: The Moon Society is the follow-up to NIS's 2018 cult hit Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk, and it doubles down on everything that made the predecessor mechanically dense. You play as Fantie, a wandering spirit housed inside a magic lamp, guiding protagonist Eureka and witch employer Madame Marta's puppet soldiers through a grid-based labyrinth beneath Galleria Manor. The premise sounds simple. The systems underneath are anything but. The Facet class system is where the build-order thinking really lives. You have eight classes to mix across your coven: the all-round Wonder Corsair, the tanky aggro-drawing Peer Fortress, the ranged Rapid Venator, the passive-healing bell-wielding Theatrical Star, the heavy magic damage of the Magia Maid, the physical burst of the Shinomashira, and others. Each puppet can have its stat growth style tuned (flat, sharp, or normal curves), skills inherited through the Pact system, equipment strengthened via Alchemy synthesis, and even bonded to another puppet through a ring exchange mechanic that unlocks cooperation benefits in combat. The Donum ability layer adds elemental attacks, provoke chains, and healer-buffer combos on top of baseline turn-based combat that starts simple and compounds fast. For players who think in comp synergies, this is a very good time. The dungeon crawling itself has a split reputation, and honestly that split is fair. The first half of the game covers two large, hand-crafted floor sets where wall-smashing with Reinforce points, gap-jumping, mana harvesting, and pitfall management give exploration genuine texture. Finding a shortcut by punching through a wall at the right moment hits exactly as satisfying as it should. The problem is the second half, which shifts toward procedurally generated floors that lack the visual and structural variety of what came before. The final dungeon in particular runs extremely long. Veterans of the genre will recognise this as a familiar genre-wide failure mode, but it is worth knowing going in. Dungeon aesthetics are a weak point here relative to something like the Etrian Odyssey series. Where The Moon Society punches well above its weight is the story, and that is not a sentence I expected to write about a grid-based DRPG. What begins as light window dressing around the dungeoneering quietly accumulates mystery across the first act, then pivots hard. The visual novel cutscenes, some running close to half an hour, are the reward for each gruelling floor-clearing session. The relationship between Eureka and Nachiroux, a character introduced later, is specifically praised by the community as the emotional core. More surprisingly, clearing the main campaign does not end the game. A second narrative arc unlocks with new characters, reworked mechanics, and additional customisation layers including class rebirths that carry over stat investments. The total runtime comfortably exceeds 100 hours for completionists. The Metacritic consensus sits at 83 with 92 percent of critics recommending it, which is about right. The PC port is clean. English and Japanese voice options are both present, audio mixing is reportedly improved over previous NIS PC releases, and controller support is solid. The tutorial system is heavy, occasionally overwhelming, but it does pace mechanics out rather than dumping them all at once. A newcomer to the DRPG genre who commits to reading the tooltips and accepting a slow first ten hours will find the systems open up into something genuinely rewarding. The ceiling here is high. The floor requires patience. That is the honest summary.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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