It’s been years since I played a game that was a dungeon crawler. The new Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy was an excellent game to get back into the style.

The graphics are very well done in Operation Abyss. It’s very reminiscent of a dark anime. While the dungeons are dark and scary, the world around is quite the opposite. It’s light and full of color. The Xth organization that you are going to work for, along with the help of the police force, want to try and keep the knowledge of the scariness that is going on around them secret, so the real world is going on with its bright and happy world as if everything is normal.

Your characters are quite detailed and very well done. You can customize looks if you want, but personally, I just played with the default. If you decide to customize, there are a lot of choices. You can only be between the ages of 12 and 19, but that seems to be the only limitation. Considering the amount of choices available for mask, hair style, face, eye color, and many more, you can pretty much make a character who looks like anything you want. I loved the detail in the variants even more than the characters! You can tell what they are supposed to resemble from the human world by the way they look and sometimes by their actions. Their lines are highly amusing.

A lot of times in games, I tend to turn off the music and listen to whatever I want. Since the characters speak out loud and, for the most part, I really loved the voicework, I was listening to the background music too, with one exception. The music when you’re in the abysses is really creepy! I found that when I was home alone at night, I did not want to keep that music on. It definitely sets the mood for an abyss.

Operation Abyss: New Toyko Legacy opens with you right in the action. You wake up in an abandoned building with no clue where you are or any idea how you got there. A strange man tells you that you need to get out of there while he holds off the monsters. It turns out that he has to be saved by someone else, Alice Mifune. She can use something called Code-Rise, while the mystery man can’t. Apparently you also have the ability to use Code-Rise, which means that you will be joining the Xth with Alice as your captain. Your squad is called Abyss Company.

Alice takes you to a hidden area of Hinowa Academy, where you go to school. You learn that the monsters are called Variants. Kenichi Kanzaki is the dean of Hinowa Academy, and the director of the Xth. I guess it’s much easier to hide a secret organization from everyone when you’re the dean of the school. Alice explains that you have the ability to use Code-Rise by activating Blood Codes. You will need to learn to use your abilities well, as normal weapons don’t work on the Variants. Kaito Saeki is the vice-captain of the squad. He’s more of a thinker than a fighter. Kaito will be your lifeline for information and such. Your dungeons are called Abysses. Any time there is an abyss or variants attacking humans, it is a Hazard Case. Officially the Hazard Cases are handled by the XPD, which is a group from the police department. Unofficially, your group is in charge of the actual fighting that happens. You then report to the XPD. The structure of the game is essentially: take a mission, kill monsters, heal, rinse, repeat.

Inside the abysses, you will have to figure out where to go in true dungeon crawler style. Each step is a square on the map. Of course, there is no map until you take a step to reveal what comes next, so you have to do a lot of exploring. The enemies are randomly encountered. You cannot see them on the screen, so there is no way to really avoid them (without magic). This can get a bit annoying at times, when you’re continually running into monsters when you really don’t want to, but killing them is quite beneficial. They drop bits of code that you can pay to have revealed as materials for upgrading your equipment back in the development lab.

GP will help you greatly in Operation Abyss: New Toyko Legacy. You will earn GP after you return from each mission. You can then use these GP for pretty much anything you need to buy: healing, items, etc. Personally I found that I was always low on GP, but then I like to spend money! It’s interesting, but you will earn experience to level up your blood code after you rest to heal in the medical lab rather than after battles. This means that you are going to want to spend that GP to rest, but you’ve got to balance that with everything else. You even have to spend GP to identify the type of materials that the enemies dropped. You’ll have to spend more GP to use that material to build up your armor and weapons.

I love that now there is a large map you can use to see the full levels. Without it, trying to figure out where you’ve been and where you need to go is extremely difficult! Getting places still isn’t easy as you will have to warp up and down between floors after searching for hidden passages. You know one is near when one of your teammates senses something nearby.

As far as the enemies go, I didn’t really find them to be very challenging, at least at the beginning. The further I got into the abysses, I had to keep coming back out to heal. While you do have magic users that can heal you, they can only cast it a few times until they level up. Granted, you can buy healing items, but personally I found I’d rather spend my money on resting, so I leveled the Blood Code rather than taking healing items into battle. It takes a bit longer, but it maximized my GP.

Since Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy is a turn-based battle system, you really don’t have much to get used to by way of what button does what. Simply use (X) to select what you want to do. There are a few things you should know about searching. The Left Stick rotates you 90 degrees. Since every step is done in a grid pattern, this lets you face all directions. The Right Stick moves you whichever direction you want to go. (Square) will bring up the full map that I mentioned earlier. For those of us with no sense of direction, (Square) is a lifeline. You can even use it to go to a specific place on the map, if there is a way there. (O) can also be handy as it lets you write memos. You can also connect to the network and download memos that other people have left. When you get stuck, these can be handy. Of course, not all memos left out there are helpful, so be careful.

With the addition of the large area map, I have become quite enamored with Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy. It now feels like an extremely balanced game that is a whole lot of fun to play. If you’re looking for a really good dungeon crawler, check out Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy today!