[Ecchi]To Heart 2: Dungeon Travelers

Or the 15+ ages port of Final Dragon Chronicle: Guilty Requiem, except not really. More on that after the more.

Anyway, Dungeon Travelers is peak lewd gaming. Little else compares without being completely porn. Pervy monster girl enemies, every boss is a sexy cg, and the party is basically a bunch of fantasy cosplayers. It’s a 1st person dungeon crawler series, with this one using the characters from To Heart 2 X-Rated + its fandisc. The entire cast show their faces along with some new extras who end up dressing like they came from Utawarerumono.

To Heart 2’s path through 18+

To Heart 2 has had an interesting release history when it comes to porn. Currently it ends at this game, but going backwards it jumps kind of all over the place.

So, the original game had no porn. It would take a full year after its launch to add porn to the game, which came in the form of 1 scene for every route at the end. Then 3 years later Another Days would come out, which was a proper 18+ fandisc which added 3 or so new girls to the series and technically continues from the anime’s ending. The next year Manaka de Ikuno!! would release.

Manaka de Ikuno!! is a very short VN and a launcher for 4 other games, two being To Heart 2 related and all being 18+. Some odd 3D model thing with the class pres girl, and Final Dragon Chronicle: Guilty Requiem. The original version of this game. Kind of. Maybe…

FDC would then get converted into this game 2 years later when it was ported to the PSP. So, To Heart 2 went from being all ages to 18+ and then stayed that for around 5 years before being converted to the modern 15+ stuff the company converted to.

Now is this a censored released? Could Final Dragon Chronicle: Guilty Requiem come out in English now? Probably not. Now I’m not very in the know about FDC, but someone on Steam is certainly talking like they are, and according to them the games aren’t really alike at all. Paraphrasing the comment, this game and FDC are as alike as Dungeon Traveler 2 and 2-2. So same cast, completely different plot and remixed areas with some new ones There are definitely reused cgs with either cropping or edits to make them pervy instead of porn. The first really obvious case of this is when Konomi and Tama-Nee, the childhood friends, do a maid massage. It obviously was a threesome based on where the characters are positioned but got changed to the current thing. I think, I never looked at FDC’s cgs. Hell, it might be where all the bug porn for the series comes from.

So basically, instead of seeing this as a different version of FDC, I’d rather look at the series as having 4 games. FDC as entry 0, this game as 1, DT2 as the 2nd, and 2-2 as the 3rd. Glancing through the Japanese wiki, all the side areas are new to the 15+ version, so at the least the game got bigger when it lost the porn.

Story-4

Every character with art from To Heart 2 is huddled into the student council room as Ma-Ryan, the president, is unveiling that her last game she sold did amazingly well and so she made another. This president, being an existence of pure chaos (you fight her later, she’s not tagged human but instead none as her type) is expected by our protag, Takaaki, to be up to something very annoying. He turns out to be right as once everyone gets their VR headsets on, the main computer in the room explodes.

Before continuing, Takaaki is mostly the standard bland harem protag. His trait, if you can call it that, is that he is bad with women. Which a lot of Vn protags are then, since “bad with women” means shy, stammers, and freaks out when exposed to any level of skin beyond normal. So, he’s the same as most of the others, just he actually admits that he’s bad with them instead of freaking out for usually no reason at the first hint of nudity. Also, this game basically takes place after the anime, no knowledge of the Vn is really needed. It kind of pretends every possible route happened without referencing anything from them, but Takaaki backed off from romance at the last second for all the girls. They aren’t subtle about being in love with him either.

Our protag then wakes up in a field with his core childhood friends, Konomi and Tama-Nee, who are dressed as RPG characters. They find the male friend character, now named Townsperson A, who informs them that this isn’t the game they were supposed to be in but instead an actual isekai world. After fumbling around a bit learning if they can fight, you learn only women can really fight and Takaaki is relegated to being the leader who carries around the bestiary/picture book of hot girl monsters.

On floor 1 you come across a few friends who attack you then join the party after winning. That’s basically it for most of the game until floor 10, which is also the end of the core game. You just get 2 girls per dungeon floor until you reach the end, with somehow our lead being surprised he has to fight the girls each time. The girls are also lacking in existence once recruited. If the boss relates to them and they are in the party they’ll say a few words. Otherwise, most of the recruited party is just a big gaggle of girls behind the male lead, judging him for every harem nonsense thing that happens after fighting any of the other girls. Which always happens.

They do have scenes after their recruitment, but these fall under the sub scenes. A huge list of entirely optional scenes that trigger based on a bunch of different factors. This is what you use the Japanese only guide for if you want to 100% this game. This huge list of things has unlocks like take 200 steps with these two in the party, or be low health for x number of steps, or have this person poisoned, or have this character in this class reach this level, have this end tier item so a character can take it, and so on. The only issue I have with the sub scenes (other than them being kind of tedious to unlock) is that the game remembers exactly where they happened and what the girls were wearing when they take place, with no way to change those once they happen. I had to put them off until I could grind everyone to whatever outfit I wanted them to wear for most of these. Also the guide sucks with google translate, it combined character names on one of the entries which added two hours of problem solving to my clear.

Scoring this kind of thing is hard. The game doesn’t really have a point other than fanservice of both the sexual and character type. No one has an arc and the plot is a gag on harem stuff. Most of the actual text is hidden behind completely random requirements for scenes that are half tutorial and half character moments/references.

On the mention of tutorial, I remembered that this game had the reoccurring penguin and bear characters. In all three games they act as another tutorial (sub scenes do this, these guys are one, and each game has a devoted teacher in the hub for 3 total tutorials for mechanics. Often the same ones.), as their dysfunctional party goes around ahead of you and just decides to have skits on different game mechanics that are actually some of the funniest writing in the whole series.

Gameplay-6

I’m actually going to start with the most unique mechanical difference between this and 2/2-2. Honestly the three games are almost exactly the same, with the differences mostly coming from balance changes and cast differences, with 2-2 adding the most extra stuff on top. Oh, and the other two games added another class. All three even use mostly the same enemy roster.

So sealing monsters is a thing to do each in each. Doing so gives two bonuses. One is you get a piece of equipment, a book form of that enemy with some bonuses. The other bonus is it fills their stats in the bestiary which you can easily check in combat. There is only one other way to fill this, and it’s in that battle only so capturing can help you plan around how to fight enemies, a skill I never bothered with in the sequels but used constantly here. The thing is this game handles sealing differently than 2 or 2-2 which just require having defeated enough of that enemy type. In this game, we use the Pokemon style capturing.

The shop sells a few seals and there are a few better ones that are end game drops and in the random dungeon shop. Using these can seal monsters into their book forms and their success is based on enemy health. Better the seal, the more health they can still have and be captured. One character also has an increased range for using seals as her unique trait. This gives each new floor a Pokémon like feel where you spend a few minutes just capturing enemies and seeing what you are dealing with, testing them and seeing how much each of your units deal to each enemy to get an idea of how to lower them to 10 or 20% hp, which also tells you how to get them dead with as little wasted damage potential. This helped me mentally a lot in enjoying getting to a new floor. Instead of some dread that here was another gimmick, another 30 minutes to 2 hours of wandering through and filling in the map I instead was excited to get the new girls captured. It’s a change in mentality that helped a lot with me not checking out like I did with 2-2 last year. This game also didn’t launch with an audio bug that crashed it all the time, which I only found the fix the day before I dropped 2-2. There’s a decent number of reasons I dropped 2-2, the constant crashing was a big part of it.

One more change between this game and the rest that connects to sealed monsters is the lack of a gear slot just for them. In 2 and 2-2, you get a book slot and a ring slot. here you pick which of the two you want which generally ends up being bigger/more effects versus better defense. A lot of effects can be lifesaving or just make trekking through the dungeon easier, like immunity to silence on your healer or just TP(the game’s mp) regen each turn letting you just go. There is actually an entire base class, Maid, who’s whole gimmick is healing after each battle and letting you just go with free healing in battle or as battles end. This affects the overall difficulty of the game.

Since the makers can expect you to enter each fight fully healed, which isn’t hard to do, each fight has to be life threatening potentially if you are on level with the enemies. Any group of 3+ enemies can drop one of yours, and once one part of your 5-person team drops the whole machine can fall apart. While not as bad as Etrian Odyssey, this is a hard series. Eventually floors get super enemies as well, the worst is on floor 7 when your party is average level 20 and suddenly a level 40 enemy can spawn and will one shot your entire party. You can save whenever, do it. Use at least two slots as well, you can potentially park yourself in the dungeon without any way to make it to the exit because of how bad off your team is and forgetting the escape item.

Now on to the actual game. It’s a pretty standard dungeon crawler at it’s core. One of those every item is unidentified, choose your parties class, wander the halls types. So the type I have the least fun with.

This game has 1 core dungeon that is 20 floors, though the story ends at floor 10. As you level the guild, a building with miscellaneous sidequests to do, you get 5 other dungeons that are far shorter. A forest, a battlefield, a pyramid, a pagoda, and a cathedral. To see the full ending you must seal every monster girl you can and defeat the true boss of the 20 floor dungeon to fight the boss of the cathedral.

As you progress through the initial 10 floors you amass your party for the game. Each To Heart 2 heroine comes with a preset core class, one of 4(fighter, mage, scout, maid). They also all come with a unique skill that makes them standout in their class. Like Sasara gets bonuses from shields or Ruri randomly gets an extra attack. At level 15 you can promote, and at 30 you can promote to the final class for that character. Each promotion has its own skill list, so each girl ends up with 3 of your choosing from their promotion tree. Mage has a total of 8 different lists, the other 3 have 6 options total. You get a skill point per level to buy skills from those lists, though around level 30, I think you start getting more per level. By the end of the game, I was getting 10+ per level, at the point when I didn’t need many more points for my builds, so this feels backwards.

Each skill can be leveled either 5 or 10 times, which usually increases it’s damage or effect/duration but also it’s cost. Some also decrease the speed taken when used making spamming the skill in combat easy. It is very possible for speed characters to get 3+ turns on a slow one. Weapon choice also influences this, with different weapons having different speeds. The game has one tutorial that points out your caster might not want a weapon at all as bare hands is faster than their other options.

Unlike 2 and 2-2, this is more the type of game to choose your core 5 and use that for the majority of the game. I would advise to swap party members out to see party combo bonuses, which rely on certain party member being together. I ran through the game with “B or less” active the entire time, which boosts the agility of my party because I was using 3 girls with a B cup or smaller. These bonus stats go up as you get achievements, or as the game calls them, awards. These, your girls unique skills, and class make up is how you should decide your party. There are also party skills which are in battle skills you get when certain combo’s and formations are in turn order with each other. These can help, though I mostly used the scan one for capturing monsters.

As for dungeon gimmicks, the ones in this are pretty simple. One way doors, trap tiles, hidden walls that you can see through if you have the light spell on, portals, unlock switches, one way walls, and that’s mostly it. One floor of the dungeon has switches that flip which doors are unlocked, and the pagoda has pitfalls and an elevator. Pyramid and cathedral stand out for their unique gimmick, party size and class limited doors which are the worst.

I want to end on the worst mechanic to me, crowning and with it level reset. I don’t know if the game mentions this, it might in the lectures you get in the first 3 hours and you don’t interact with this until hour 15 at least of the game. So to change character class you need to level reset, and this has set stop points. 15,30,50,90 are the places you can de-level to. Now for the most part this isn’t that bad, only 5 sub scenes have required classes and the point of the game is to use who you want. 2 and 2-2 make a much bigger focus on this with wanting you to adapt your classes to the fights, but this game only does that in it’s last dungeon and the pyramid with the damn class and party size only doors.

Anyway, crowning. If you get to level 51 and delevel to 1, you get a crowning point. Each character can get 50 of these. and you get 1 more per 10 levels above 51 you are when you reset. These points add multipliers to your character stats and some natural resists and are basically required to actually win the last few sets of boss fights. I hate this. The normal enemies? Semi difficult to win without this. Bosses on dungeon floor 20 and the Dark Cathedral (final extra area) are basically scaled to you having crowning done to some degree and are nigh impossible without. Which the game doesn’t bring up and adds another couple days of grinding to the game if you want to do it fairly. I cheated the last 10 or so bosses. Both because of crowning being a pain, and the Dark Cathedral controlling your party size and comp at boss fights that expect crowning. The whole Dark Cathedral is a cool dungeon with terrible boss fights. I don’t mind needing different classes, but boss fights with a random unit I’ve never used or losing 30 levels on my mains to switch? Both those options suck.

Lewdness-9

Each To Heart 2 girl gets 1 cg to themselves. Usually of their clothes being ripped off in some way. After that you get 1 cg of almost every monster girl variant in similar levels of losing clothes or some sexy pose. In both cases, the enemy usually offers to sleep with the lead in some way, his gaggle of girls get mad, and he runs to avoid their wrath. It does get old.

So lots of monster girls, convenient cover ups(sometimes it’s just the image getting cut off by the screen size), different body sizes and such. The party itself is basically cosplaying and I wish some of those outfits got cgs. Tamaki’s samurai especially. Part of me wishes they had just done the To Heart 2 party with cgs, making each class a cg based on different sub scene requirements, instead of most of the game’s gallery being composed of random boss enemies.

To me, Dungeon Travelers as a series is peak lewd gaming due to content amount and variety. It’s lacking a bit in impact(no massage minigame, the actual playable cast doesn’t get that many lewd outfits, the scenario isn’t really that sexual though like half the cgs have the girl offering themselves, Takaaki is annoying) but makes up for it in amount compared to most other cg reliant games. It does lose in total to Peach Beach Splash but still stands as a big contender as a good game filled with lots of pervy content.

Final Thoughts

This is the kind of game to point to when people say ecchi is only added as a crutch. This is a solid dungeon crawler with some character fanservice but plenty of good ecchi that doesn’t detract from the core foundation of a good gamer. Everything is solid, up to the endgame where I admit things fall apart for me with the boss scaling. For the 5% or less of people who make it that far, good luck. Happy grinding.

Why did I drop 2-2, or more like what’s my issue with this type of dungeon crawler? This is a question I’ve been stewing on for my entire time playing this. I enjoyed most of my time with Dungeon Travelers 1. Ignoring the bullshit end bosses and a few gimmicks here and their (floor 19 and the pyramid and Dark Cathedral all suck), I enjoyed mapping out places and fighting and getting the lewds as I went through. On the other hand, 2-2 was a drag and I never really want to touch Mary Skelter again. I think I’ve gotten a few things nailed down.

1. I don’t care for the random loot. I really only like the named gear, the overfilled junk pile of random stuff isn’t satisfying to get and it’s most of this genre of dungeon crawler drops.
2. 2-2 released with an audio bug that crashed the game and I didn’t find the solution until a day or two before I dropped it. This crashed a lot of my enjoyment that I was having at the start.
3. The method of skill development and how you have the full character progression stuff unlocked at level 30 means you have your full build at basically that point. Leveling from then on is just numbers, and that is kind of boring.
4. If using magic all hits, every fight went exactly the same way. Wait to cast, win. I enjoyed DT1 more because I went heavy into physical, meaning I had to focus fire on enemies and learn who was dangerous.
5. I ran way more in this game then I did in DT2-2. I think fighting every battle was exhausting. The method didn’t help.
6. I think the new Trails was coming out or something else I wanted to play, so once I sidelined 2-2 it was hard to go back. On the other hand, Maid of the Dead was a nice break in the middle of DT1 that took little time. Honestly, 2024 has started pretty open for me. A decent amount has come out but nothing has felt like a must play other than qureate’s stuff for personal support of them.

So yeah, those were the reasons I came up with. I’ll try to get DT2 next year at some point. I do want the whole series done eventually. It is in my mind, peak lewd gaming after all.

Save for To Heart 2: Dungeon Travelers

All cgs, all replays, all sub scenes unlocked. The in-game save has every achievement other than level 99 with everyone and crowning someone to max. The second save is before I did sub scene grinding in case you want to change what they wear for whatever reason.

Gameplay: 6/10 Eroticness: 9/10 Story: 4/10

Completion:

Beat game for 98% of cgs, run through a checklist for all sub scenes, find the 4 hidden random encounter bosses, get the guild to level 15 and that was enough for me. Crowning is a huge waste of time, same for getting everyone to 99 for in game achievements that by the time you earn, you don’t need.