This is a Cladun X3 Review if the title didn’t give that away for some reason, and there’s a lot to talk about this new entry in the long running Cladun series. So first, lets start with some story behind it, Cladun was originally conceived in the PSP around the late years of the system, 2010, and the take on the Mystery Dungeon genre was quite unique for the time. Cladun is a series characterized for its high customization, first starting with art assets related to sprite work for both characters and objects. As new entries kept coming, these customization features kept expanding, and now we have reached a point where the focus is on sharing your creations.
Cladun X3 decides to up the ante and multiply it by three, as the aforementioned features present in the series make a grand return after 15 years with a 4th entry on the series, a new game. For those who know about this series, you might remember the disaster that was the PC release of the spinoff “Cladun Returns: This is Sengoku!”. I want to assure you that the bugs and crashes don’t seem to be here, aside from some minor inconveniences on Linux systems when closing the game. Cladun X3 really wants you to create your own things, as it introduces you to such features just as you are stepping into the first minutes of the game.
Let’s talk real quick about the gameplay however, to get that out of the way and discuss the wealth of features this game has. You are a villain in Arcanus Cella, you are trapped into that world with the pretext of establishing “true peace”, and you are forced to fight into various death matches and dungeons. The plot of course is told in a non serious way, while there can be some dark moments here and there its all in good fun and it isn’t the main focus of the game. Ironically enough, not even the gameplay, even with the interesting idea of the Magic Circle system, is able to capture me.
The Magic Circle system has to be one of the most innovative implementations of a skill tree in an RPG, as it forces you to create more characters and place them on slots similar to the Sphere Grid from Final Fantasy X. While they are on those slots, they are bound to you and act as your human meat shields, existing only to take damage for you and feed you their mana. You are a villain after all, so it is an excellent inclusion to have in a game where you are apparently evil, as this leads to some good potential for video game cruelty.
You grow stronger, and your “slaves” also grow stronger too provided they survive and don’t drop their HP to zero. If they die from being abused a bit too much, then you will get some big debuffs, so be careful on how you treat them. Cladun X3 is quite the particular experience to play, as the orthodox experience is thrown off the window when it comes to gameplay systems, despite the mystery dungeon crawling being fairly normal. There’s tons of mechanics that feel as if they have been done in such a way as to serve comedic purposes, such as setting yourself on fire to gain the fire element.
Cladun X3 does not really draw me in for the gameplay, despite it being quite innovative and honestly a fun time, no, what Cladun X3 provides is far greater and far more useful too. The customizable nature of the series is what makes it interesting, as it feels as if you were creating your own mystery dungeon game, you can edit your character in such a way that allows you to just make your own design from scratch, you can customize your home world and make it unique from scratch too, and the most important feature of all, a comprehensive MML Editor allows you to create any tune you want and it even comes with a tutorial to learn MML.
MML, also known as Music Macro Language, was one of the most important pieces of tech in the music world back in the old days of synthesized music, more specifically the 8-bit era of music, almost all retro composers used it. Cladun X3 not only lets you create stuff, but it lets you create stuff with competent, almost professional tools despite the general clunkyness of the controls, and it is truly an amazing thing to have. I will admit I have been forgetting about the game for a while after a I discovered the MML feature, but I had to do my job and play through all of it to give a fair review.
Cladun X3 also includes the ability to share your things with other players on various online world instances, however, it does not seem to be cross compatible with regions and even systems such as the Switch. This is pretty much the only major negative point of the release, as it locks you out from seeing what other people from Japan might have created, forcing not only to stay locked to PC only content too, but the overseas market only. This of course is a big issue, as the series is huge in Japan but niche over here, sure, you can still access 3 official servers from the developers, but that’s it for Cladun X3.
There is not a single notification of this issue on the Steam page for Cladun X3, you only realize once you have played for a bit and unlocked the feature, quite the disservice for people and reviewers who wish to know the state of the game. This is something niche, so I don’t expect many people will play it, or even care about interacting with the online functionality, which is really sad, because it could have been avoided by making it cross region and cross platform, and this is a big deal because this is the release where it matters the most.
There’s ways to contact NIS America to tell them about this issue, and it is important to let them know about Cladun X3’s current state, we need to tell them that we want to play alongside Japanese players and the rest of the world. We want to share things with them, and we also want them to be able to share things with us, cultural exchange should happen as it leads to people creating newer things. We are currently in some creative drought, and Cladun X3 is that game that comes to save the day, with no strings attached or shady deals.
Cladun X3 Review – Verdict
Cladun X3: Cladun X3 is a pretty good game on a very interesting series. There's something for everyone, both for players and creators alike, the tools provided are very good, especially the built-in MML editor. The gameplay is innovative by providing wild yet fun twists on the formula, typical of a NIS entry. However, the current state of the online components leave much to be desired, maybe they can fix those issues if we bring them forward. – Hiro
[Editor’s Note: Cladun X3 was reviewed on PC and a copy was provided to us for review purposes.]
