SOURCE: https://www.vg247.com/dungeon-encounters-impressions-deep-impressive-brilliant
Some good praise for the game in here
Perhaps most importantly, he was director of two of the best games in the Final Fantasy series - 9 and 12, two wildly different games that are both incredible in their own right. Games are made by teams and we as an industry have a bad habit of crediting too much to those individual big names - but there is no denying that Hiroyuki Ito is a towering influence and one of the most important and clever game designers in Japan. If we set aside things like art and story, he is surely the most notable employee Square Enix now has. He is to FF's game design as Nobuo Uematsu is to its music; the grandmaster. Even the unstoppable force that is Tetsuya Nomura says he regards Ito as one of only four people he considers his "senior".
Looking at it, I'm acutely aware that this totally could've been a physical board game - such is the visual simplicity of it. I wonder if it was prototyped that way. Battles have minor flashes of animations to indicate spells and the like, but really it's all about looking at stats and meters, planning your next move to try to get ahead of the enemy and keep your party alive. A quote attributed to Leonado da Vinci posits that "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication", and Dungeon Encounters feels like a rare expression of that idea in a video game. Everything is stripped back to the bare minimum - but by doing that, the focus is shifted onto the very heart of the game.
Like much of Ito's design, Dungeon Encounters is deceptively simple at first, but the more that you play the more its depth is exposed to you. What hides beneath a simple game that'll just have you hammering the standard attack button for the first few floors suddenly becomes dynamic and thrilling. The design is delicately balanced in a way that's difficult to adequately describe - but it's constantly encouraging you to push outside of your comfort zone, to floors and zones where you're under-leveled but where the rewards are too good to resist. By the time you're about twenty floors into the dungeon, you're spinning several plates and doing some serious strategizing.
Some good praise for the game in here
