Away: Shuffle Dungeon

"I’m amazed: it really does get better."

When I started it out, all I thought of Away: Shuffle Dungeon was that it was a simple dungeon-crawler with a flimsy story and a cheap gimmick. It's called "Shuffle Dungeon" because the dungeons in the top and bottom screens shuffle along every few minutes. If the player avatar is caught in the shuffle, he is forced to start that stage over again, with less HP. In effect you have to move up and down between the screens while solving puzzles, flipping switches and opening chests, so you can find the stairs located on each level and move lower into the dungeons. The dungeon design is extremely clever. Each half fits together neatly and seamlessly, and you can move effortlessly up and down and up and down again, no sweat. I was very much impressed with that.

Story
But why are you in the dungeons in the first place? Well, that's where there story comes in. At the beginning of the game, you are told about a strange phenomenon known as “Away.” This “Away” has been abducting one villager every year for the past 99 years. The story begins when another “Away” occurs and tries to snatch Sword, the main character. His maybe-girlfriend Anera pleads with the mysterious light to let Sword go. It agrees to do so, but in exchange it snatches up the entire Webb village and Anera as well. Now Sword has to go through a series of dungeons in an effort to rescue all the villagers (especially Anera, aha) and restore Webb village to its former state.

…That's how it starts, at any rate. Doesn't it sound boring and simplistic? Trust me, it is. It is very boring and repetitive and simplistic, rescuing one weird-looking, ungrateful villager after another. Even Sword acts extremely exasperated with some of the sillier ones.

But! Once you progress deeper and start probing the mystery of what Away is all about, the game picks up quite a bit. I haven't finished the story yet so my mind might change again, but I am very pleased that what started out as a search-and-rescue mission gradually gets deeper and weirder, and much more interesting along with it. Here is where I really wish I could spoil what I'm talking about, but to give away the twists would completely ruin the game for any prospective player. I was just sitting there thinking “Huh?” “You're from where?” “You think I did what!?” “What the hell is going on here?!” This all happened 15 hours in, just when I was about to give up on the game. Suddenly I found myself unable to tear myself away. I couldn't even sleep well at night, thinking “I'm doing to get to the bottom of this even if it kills me!”

And it frequently did. Several times a dungeon.

It's not that the game is hard, not really. It's just that I Suck at action RPGs. Suck with a capital S. In fact I tend to avoid them unless I can make up for my sucktitude with copious grinding. Fortunately your strength in Away is based just as much on your level as on your skill, meaning you can get away with sucking to a large extent. In this case, you can revisit any dungeon you've been to previously, even fighting the boss again if you wish. If a boss kills you, you can re-start from the boss fight as many times as you want. It's easy enough to buff up your level that even an ARPG doofus like myself has made it almost to the ending without only the occasional game-over (the last dungeons are brutalizing me, though). Non-suckers should find this game a total breeze.

Speaking of fighting, you get your choice of swords, spears, axes and daggers. Axes are slow and spears are hard to use, so I just stuck with swords all the way through. By the time I got the top upgrade, everything except bosses was falling down to a few quick slashes. Money isn't very plentiful in this game, and weapon and armour upgrades are expensive.

Fupongs
To make things even easier, each dungeon contains several weird, round little creatures called “Fupongs.” They join when you touch them, up to 6 of them at a go, more if you have a special item. Red fupongs spit fire, blue ones form a shield around you, yellow ones fire a lightning attack at an on-screen enemy and green ones heal you. Back in the village, you can fuse similar-colored fupongs to get stronger effects, up to level 4. A lvl4 red fupong blast hits the enemy for 400 dmg! A lvl4 green fupong heals you 20hp! There are only three things I have against the fupong system:

- You can't change their order when you're in a dungeon. If you want to cure it and your green fupong is at the end of the queue, you have to fire off all the other fupongs to get to it. They won't reset until you go down or up a flight of stairs.

- You can only fuse fupongs of the same color. It would have been more interesting if you could create different effects by mixing different colours. For exmple if you could get a barrier with a regen effect by combining a green and blue fupong or something.

- Fupongs are a pain to carry along in the dungeon. They kept getting caught on spikes or in traps, just when your time runs out and you have to change screens. Low level fupongs are expendable, but higher ones take a lot of work to raise. Gotta wait, wait, wait for that screen to shuffle around again so you can get it back

Shopping
There's a medicine store, a general store, a fupong farm, a restaurant, a blacksmiths, a weapon store and an armour store in Webb Village. That's one well-stocked village! Each store changes its pricing and other things depending on where it's located, feng shui and all that. Pointless, but anyway… Thing is, the stores start out with a very basic inventory. They only develop when you sell them special materials found mainly behind tricky traps in the dungeons. Orihalcon for the weapon store, charcoal for the blacksmith, etc. In the beginning you'll be hunting enthusiastically for these things, but eventually you'll realize that you can't even afford the new stuff they're selling. That, and the enemies are dying anyway, so why kill yourself? My advice is to wait till later in the game to give the earlier dungeons another going-over.

Final recommendation
In the end, the only real reason to play Away: Shuffle Dungeon is to see the story unfold. The shuffling dungeons are fun too, but I wouldn't play this game solely for that. Since the story depends so much on a few twists, once you've played through once, there's nothing left to do it for. There's a great game hiding in here if you can make it past the boring first 10 hours. If Mistwalker and Artoon could have sped up the earlier unnecessary bits and gotten to the real meat quicker, they would have had a modest hit on their hands. Oh, and if they could have made the graphics and character designs less off-putting, that would have helped too.

In any case, I've heard tales of people finding Away: Shuffle Dungeon at Gamestop for $9.99. For that price it's very much worth it. If you can find this game, give it a shot.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 02/26/09

Game Release: Away: Shuffle Dungeon (JP, 10/16/08)