Your player character also levels up by collecting and equipping newer, more powerful items and not by fighting enemies. While enemies do occasionally drop gear, it’s better to just gun it for the chests in each dungeon and get new weapons from there, avoiding combat entirely. There are a few rooms in dungeons where you will be locked in until all the enemies are defeated, but apart from that instance, there is little reason to stick around and fight as many as you can. Exploration is a moot point as well, as each dungeon is just a series of rooms that look incredibly similar with no variation, even though they usually have three to six variants.

If your character is not strong enough to tackle the first level of a new dungeon, that means going back to a dungeon you have already explored and doing it again but with slightly stronger enemies in it. I noticed very little difference between each level of a dungeon; they would be populated with different enemies and the final boss would be new but the actual layout of areas did not change. It made grinding the dungeons out feel incredibly repetitive and the amount of times I was forced to re-explore the first boring dungeon was laughable.

It’s a good idea in theory, but the problem is that when a townsperson gives you a quest like, ‘help me find my missing basket’, what that actually means is ‘clear the dungeon without being afflicted with blindness’. There is no connective tissue between the tasks you have been asked to do, and what you actually have to do in the dungeon to complete them and it feels very strange. The gifts you offer the townsfolk are odd too, there are shiny coins that you can collect either from clearing dungeons or by growing seeds that produce them. Either way, everyone seems very excited to receive the same gift of a shiny coin, and it feels like a very artificial way to claim you are growing to know and care about these people.

There isn’t much to latch onto when it comes to the story either. The protagonist of Elrentaros Wanderings has a magical mirror that gives them access to the dungeons in the game, and is missing several gems that appear each time a new dungeon is found. One of the members of the town Romero seems to know a bit about this mirror and encourages the protagonist to continue completing dungeons and finding gems. Other than that, the only shreds of a story to be found are through interactions with the townspeople, all of which move very slowly and often have little if any relevance to the plot as a whole. There is an incentive to increase the relationship between yourself and these characters but even though some of them do have pleasant enough visual designs, there was nothing about any of their personalities that I found interesting enough to pursue.

Nothing much interesting happens during these moments, and they are over quite quickly too. It’s a little interesting that the protagonist seems to also be suffering from amnesia in this world too, just as unfamiliar with the situation as she was back in Melvania. It does bring forth the question of which world is the real one, but I don’t think you spend anywhere near enough time in this alternate world for it to be a question worth posing. You can spend over a week delving into dungeons around the town of Elentaros and then endure three classes in high school before going straight back; an even split would have made this conundrum more significant. I also noticed some pretty glaring localisation issues throughout my time with the game, often with dialogue coming off as nonsensical, the gender select screen is especially butchered and sort of implies that only boys are allowed to say ‘heck’.

Visually, Elrentaros Wanderings doesn’t have much to offer either. While plenty of the character designs are fun, the actual art style is quite flat and boring. Character sprites also barely animate with only a few expressions that change very little, often nothing more than a shift in the eyebrows. Any originality in the characters is also completely lost once you end up in the high school setting instead because most of the identifying characteristics are in their outfits and not their faces. Rune Factory games usually have lots of fun designs and a poppy colour palette so I’m not sure where Elrentaros Wanderings went wrong, but it leaves the world pretty flat and lifeless.