Review: Elrentaros Wanderings Is a Waste of a Good Idea

I loved the idea of Elrentaros Wanderings when I first heard the premise behind Rear Sekai. There being both an ordinary world and isekai fantasy one existing somehow at the same time, and you needing to play to find out what’s going on? Action-RPG battles paired with relationship building? It sounded like so much potential was there. Unfortunately, Hakama wastes any possible goodwill by somehow making every element of the game boring and tedious.

Elrentaros Wanderings begins with your protagonist happening upon the out Elrentaros. You’re a wanderer who doesn’t know much about who you are or what you were up to. You’re welcomed into the community, and end up getting a chance to restore mitamas to magical mirror by heading into dungeons that reveal themselves around the town. However, in so doing, you also begin waking up in a more ordinary high school setting after every major boss encounter resulting in a gem acquisition. When you do, you find all the people you met in Elrentaros also exist in this other world, albeit in different roles and without any memory of you.

So the first disappointment tied to Elrentaros Wanderings is the fact that the localization isn’t great! Sentences read very awkwardly here. Sometimes, it seems like the translators couldn’t decide what to go with as an official name or phrase. For example, early on it feels like the townsfolk can’t decide if the first dungeon is “Cave Pick” or “Cave Peak.” I do wonder if part of that is due to the nature of the original script though. While there are 10 people who could be your “partners,” there’s no real depth to them. Some personality traits will come through, of course, but this isn’t like a Rune Factory game where your potential love interests feel as though they are well-realized individuals.

The second is that Elrentaros Wanderings doesn’t handle the idea of dual worlds very well! The more fleshed out side is of course Elrentaros, since that’s where you can walk around a town, shop, talk to NPCs, and explore dungeons. The school life portion does eventually get more screen-time, but prior to that it is limited to extremely short, visual novel segments that don’t do much to make that element of the game feel well-realized or inviting. Spend enough time dungeon-crawling for equipment or NPC quest items, and you might even forget there is that element.

Said dungeon-crawling is disappointment number three, but you won’t realize that initially. See, Elrentaros Wanderings is a loot-based action-RPG at its heart. Your avatar’s level is tied to the weapon and armor they found and equipped when heading into one of the locations you’ll find on the map. Each dungeon will have different floors, with new minimum-level-advisories and challenges. To get the items from NPCs that you need to fulfill their requests to bolster relationships, advance the story, and unlock new dungeons, you need to complete run and complete those tasks. 

As an example, an initial one might say you need to find the hidden areas (done by clearing out all enemies in a space), not take damage from a certain type of enemy or hazard, not fall in battle, not be hit by a certain type of boss attack, or defeat a boss. Each tier of a dungeon will have five of these challenges, which will reward you with the sidequest item, a weapon, or a currency you can put toward “buying” a partner gift so you can earn an alliance battle passive by equipping them as a designated partner. This means that you typically need to run through each “level” of a dungeon at least twice, since all objectives won’t be revealed until you’ve cleared it once.

The problem here is that these dungeons are incredibly tedious and, after a certain point, feel like they don’t pay out with the gear at appropriate levels to handle the “asks” by the time you unlock the third and fourth ones. To avoid spoilers, I’ll use Cave Pick as an example. The dungeon layout at all tiers will remain the same. The enemies are all mostly identical, and you’ll also see those same foes repeated in every other dungeon. (The only difference is, their colors will change and they’ll be slightly stronger.) Attack patterns aren’t altered. After you get to about build level 25-28, you may even find that you’ll be able to handle dungeon challenges that would normally require a minimum of up to 40 if you equipped the right special skills from Legendary-tier drops. Viability of equipment comes down to if it has a special skill attached, and you’ll have more money than you ever need since that’s only used to unlock skills for your weapon and armor. Even the bosses eventually start to repeat, once you get past the recommended-level-30 tier. 

This all leads into the fourth most disappointing part of Elrentaros Wanderings, which is that I didn’t find the gameplay loop in any way fun or satisfying. This isn’t like Diablo. The gear you get won’t eventually hit a point where you’ll keep it around for at least a half hour or so. By the point I hit the fourth dungeon, I only cleared out floors of enemies when the game would bar my progress through an area. I could be in and out of an area in about 15 minutes. Maybe less if it was one of the more predictable bosses at the end. Odds are, I’d at least switch out the armor at that point. Though by the time I got my Legendary Ugallu axe, I did hold on to that for about two hours because it was still better at level 27 than anything else I owned or found. I never replayed any of these repetitive dungeons because I wanted to. It was only because I had to.

Which is also how I ended up feeling as the story and relationships seemed to reach the endgame as well. Nothing about Elrentaros Wanderings felt satisfying to me. I didn’t want to really “romance” anyone, by which I mean toss a type of currency at them to get their Alliance Buff perks, even though some of the character art looked good. The nature of the story meant that some of the “reveals” were buried so deep and had so little substance surrounding them that I didn’t really care when a Big Bad suddenly appeared or I started to get answers. 

I didn’t like Elrentaros Wanderings, and the things wrong with it are such that patches to fix the localization or adjust other elements wouldn’t salvage it. It’s a tedious game that doesn’t offer the sort of substance to make it feel in any way satisfying. There are better isekai adventures. There are better loot-based dungeon-crawlers. There are better titles where you can connect with people in the nearby village and perhaps even fall in love with them.  

Elrentaros Wanderings is available on the Nintendo Switch on August 16, 2024, and it will appear on the PC via Steam on August 22, 2024.