Dungeon Antiqua – My Thoughts After Beating the Secret HARD Boss | IndieGame100 #3

This post is also available in: 日本語 (Japanese)

** Featured by the developer **

* This review has been featured by the developer. No compensation was provided, and it reflects an independent opinion. *

Whether you’re hunting for fresh ideas for your own creative projects or you just love discovering new games, this one’s for you.

I went all-in on this title: beat the secret HARD-mode boss on my own, and reached 89/91 item completion entirely through solo play. So let me share my honest impressions after thoroughly soaking in the game.

Don’t worry—no spoilers. I’ll keep things clean.

By the way, the game is said to be inspired by the Famicom-era Final Fantasy and Wizardry. For context, here’s where I stand with those series:

• Final Fantasy: I’ve only played the PS remake of FF1, which I finished. (For the later titles, I played 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10, but didn’t finish them.)
• Wizardry: I played the PS “Llylgamyn Saga” version of Wizardry 1 and cleared it, including collecting the “big three” treasures—Muramasa, the Holy Armor, and the Shuriken. (Somehow I ended up getting two Muramasas.)
  After that, I touched Wizardry 3 and tried a bit of Wizdaphne.
• Wizardry-inspired games:
  • Etrian Odyssey series (cleared everything on the highest difficulty; beat the superboss in 3 but didn’t finish the compendium; X superboss still undefeated)
  • Labyrinth of Refrain (cleared the post-game dungeon)
  • Elminage (beat 1’s main ending; beat 2’s superboss and fully completed the compendium; beat Gothic’s main game)
  • Bushin 0 alternative (played but gave up in the early game)
• D&D: Played 5e once at an actual table, and ran about six solo sessions where I controlled five characters and the DM all at once.

So yeah—despite the FF/Wiz inspiration, I’m actually more familiar with the Wizardry-likes side of the family. Keep that in mind as you read on.

Alright then—let’s dive in!!

Game Overview

Genre: RPG
Developer: Shiromofu Factory
Publisher: Shiromofu Factory
Country of Origin: Japan
Store Page: Steam

Dungeon Antiqua is a dungeon-crawling RPG inspired by 1980s–1990s Wizardry and Final Fantasy.

You create your own original party, power them up through steady leveling and item hunting, and push deeper and deeper into trap-filled, monster-packed dungeons.

The scenario structure, job-change system, party formation, class traits, trap mechanics, town layout, enemy sprites, and UI layout all pay homage to Wizardry.

Meanwhile, the music, blue-themed UI colors, player character graphics, 2D top-down maps, side-view battle layout, and spell-naming conventions clearly draw from early Final Fantasy.

The huge variety of items and the UI really feel like a deliberate blend of Wizardry and FF.

On top of that, the dungeon layout is randomized every time you start a new game, and treasure locations also change each time you enter a floor—meaning the replay value is pretty high.

For me, total playtime to the “main ending” was:

• Normal: 4 hours 36 minutes
• Hard: 5 hours 24 minutes

And for the full run including beating the final secret boss:

• Hard: 14 hours 43 minutes

Alright, with that out of the way, let’s get into the actual impressions.

Small Power Gaps Mean You Can Stick With the Party You Love

One thing I really want to highlight about Dungeon Antiqua is this:

In a lot of character-creation RPGs, certain jobs end up way too strong—or way too weak.
As a result, some characters get benched halfway through, some parties hit a wall because they don’t have the “right” class, and sometimes a job is just doomed to be bad from start to finish.

And when that happens, it almost feels like the game is denying the love you had for the characters you created.
I think many players have been burned by that before.

What’s great about Dungeon Antiqua is that it goes in the opposite direction:
instead of inflating power, it keeps the job differences tight and intentionally deflates the overall balance.
The result? No job gets left behind, and no one feels like a mistake.

As an example, let’s look at two cases: the starting class Thief, and the advanced class Samurai.

Thief

In most Wizardry-inspired games, the “thief-type” class is usually way too strong.

In classic Wizardry, the shop only sells beginner-tier gear.
So unless you have a thief to safely open chests, you basically can’t get mid-game equipment, and the game becomes unwinnable.

The difficulty swings so much depending on whether you have a thief that people used to joke:

“Wizardry lets you freely build a 5-member party. The thief is a fixed member though! HAHAHA!!”

And they’re not wrong.

This trend continues in Japanese Wizardry-like games such as Elminage and Etrian Odyssey.

In Elminage, thieves don’t just disarm traps—they can also steal equipment from enemies, and that loot ranges from decent stepping-stone gear all the way to endgame-tier stuff.
So again, having or not having one makes a massive difference.

In Etrian Odyssey, the thief-like roles are the old EO2 Ranger and Dark Hunter.

EO doesn’t have trapped chests, but Rangers have insane exploration power (zero encounters for almost two floors, guaranteed preemptive defense, etc.), making them an RTA favorite.

Dark Hunters, meanwhile, were hilariously overtuned:
All-Bind to shut down every action even on the superboss, conditional instant-kill (The End), and a monstrous counter skill (Trapping).
Yes, they were “situational specialists,” but those situations happened to be… everything.

(And just to be clear, I’m not trashing EO or Elminage—EO2 and Elminage 2 are games I literally beat superbosses in and completed the item compendium for. I love them.)

So, what about Dungeon Antiqua’s Thief?

In Dungeon Antiqua, the Thief is surprisingly restrained.

After the main game, once you pass level 30, they can reach 100% trap disarm.
But early on? You’re looking at like 38% success rate.

And even if trap disarm fails, you still get the item (albeit lower quality).
Traps themselves aren’t that deadly except in the earliest sections, and from experience, about 40% of chests aren’t trapped at all.
So even if you just brute-force every box, you’ll eventually collect what you need.

So does that make the Thief useless?

Not at all.
They absolutely help your progression by improving item gain efficiency.
And since consumables in this game are both strong and expensive, the more money you have, the more you can spam quality items to make the game easier.

Let’s summarize:

• Thief trap-disarm success starts low and rises slowly
• About half the chests aren’t trapped anyway, so you can manage without one
• Traps aren’t that painful to begin with
• But having a Thief definitely increases your odds of getting good loot

This balance is honestly beautifully done.
They’re not overpowered, but they’re not weak either.
And because of that, the game avoids becoming a “this class is mandatory” kind of experience.

Really, really well tuned.

Samurai

A frontliner who occasionally deals double damage and can also cast mage spells.

From testing on the job-analysis page, the “double damage” trait triggers at 14% around Lv13–14.

In other words, the job trait translates to a 1.14× damage expectation.
Not too strong, not too weak—just the sweet spot where it definitely matters without breaking the game.

Of course, how you feel about these numbers depends on what games you usually play, but for me, the rough scale looks like this:

• 1.1× damage — Nice as a bonus from a skill, but not a compelling reason to hire someone as a main attacker.
• 1.2× damage — Not impressive for mob-clearing, but as a boss killer, this multiplier often decides whether you can burst down the boss before your resources run dry.
• 1.3× damage — The realm of warlords. In gacha games, “must-have” attackers often sit around this mark compared to lower tiers.
• 1.4×+ damage — Looks strong on paper, but usually comes with heavy drawbacks, unique restrictions, or terrible synergy, making it hard to bring out full potential.

With that scale in mind, 1.14× is honestly perfect.
It’s enough to give Samurai a real identity, but not enough to turn them into a “meta-defining, mandatory” pick.

Thanks to this tuning, boss HP doesn’t need to be over-inflated to compensate, and players can genuinely finish the game using the party they want, not the one the game forces.

A really elegant piece of balance work.

A Classic Experience Anyone Can Enjoy

One of the things that really stood out while playing Dungeon Antiqua is how it balances deep respect for the classics with a surprisingly friendly, modern design.

Final Fantasy—even the originals—was never that punishing to begin with.
The real problem child is Wizardry.

The original Wiz (and the D&D systems it’s rooted in) is famously ruthless and absolutely unwelcoming to newcomers.
So much so that it has basically become “the embodiment of old-school brutality” in RPG history.

Dungeon Antiqua tackles that issue head-on.
It preserves the atmosphere and fundamentals of the classics, but trims away just enough cruelty to make the experience approachable without watering it down.

Let’s break down how it does that.

Party-Wide Item and Money Management Makes Life Easy

For those who haven’t played Wizardry, you might be thinking: “Wait, what?”

Here’s the background: Wizardry was designed to bring tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons to a personal computer.

Wizardry began as a simple dungeon crawl by Andrew C. Greenberg and Robert Woodhead. It was written when they were students at Cornell University and published by Sir-Tech. The game was influenced by earlier games from the PLATO system, most notably Oubliette.^[4] The earliest installments of Wizardry were very successful, as they were the first graphically-rich incarnations of Dungeons & Dragons-type gameplay for home computers. The release of the first version coincided with the first wave of Dungeons & Dragons’ popularity in North America.

(Source: Wikipedia – “Wizardry (video game series),Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizardry_(video_game_series)

Now, in traditional tabletop RPGs, items and money are usually managed individually per character.

There are a few reasons for this:

• To enable in-party roleplay, like lending/borrowing items.
• To let a playful, lazy character say “Put it on my tab!” at the tavern.
• To create formal negotiation hooks, like “Let’s split the loot evenly” when a party is newly formed.
• To give a specific “pack mule” role mechanical significance.

Because of this tradition, in Wizardry and Wizardry-inspired games like the Elminage series, every character manages their own items and money.
Want to equip an item from one character on another? Use the “Item Exchange” command.
Sold loot at the shop? Use “Collect Money” to centralize funds to one character.

Reading this, you might think: “Wait… so I have to open the item menu and swap stuff every battle and shop visit? That’s tedious!”

And yes—it is tedious.
It’s great for immersion in a tabletop sense, making you feel like you’re living in that world, but as a solo digital RPG, it’s a system that’s more busywork than fun.

Dungeon Antiqua fixes this beautifully:
Items and money are managed at the party level, not individually.

It’s a system that clearly respects the classics while prioritizing player convenience.

This philosophy runs throughout the entire design of Dungeon Antiqua.

No Character Deaths, No “Stuck in Stone” Moments

When it comes to Wizardry, everyone immediately thinks character death. And when you say “character death,” you basically say Wizardry.

In the original Wizardry, if a character dies and you try to resurrect them, failure means the character turns to ash.
Fail a resurrection again? That character is gone forever, lost to the digital void.

It’s a hallmark of Wizardry’s ruthlessness. Later Wizardry-inspired games handled it in various ways: some kept it as a “feature,” others dropped it because it was just too cruel.

Dungeon Antiqua? No character death at all. Totally safe and worry-free design.

And another classic Wizardry nightmare, “stuck in stone!”—where a teleporter trap throws your character into a wall and they fuse with it, becoming immobile and effectively lost—doesn’t exist here either.

You can play without fearing random permanent losses. Peace of mind, guaranteed.

Even If You Wipe, You’re Safely Returned to the Castle

In Wizardry and Wizardry-inspired games like Elminage, if your party wipes out, their bodies just lie there in the dungeon.

To get them back, you usually have to train a rescue party and march them back to retrieve the fallen characters.

Dungeon Antiqua, on the other hand, does things differently.
Sure, you lose all the money you were carrying, but the entire party is automatically sent back to the castle, and the first character in your party is always revived.

Thanks to the no-character-death system we mentioned earlier, you can have the surviving lead character—usually a solo-capable warrior—earn some money or sell off consumables, making it completely possible to cover the revival costs for the rest of the party.

It’s a super player-friendly design that keeps the tension without punishing you endlessly.

Quick Recovery at the Castle Keeps Exploration Flowing

One nice thing about Dungeon Antiqua’s wipe-and-return system is that you don’t need to stay at an inn.

The entire party is fully healed for free just by returning to the castle.
You don’t have to stress over wiping out, and during normal exploration, you can casually level up, loot, take a short break, and dive back in.
It makes the whole dungeon-crawling loop feel smooth and stress-free.

Level-Ups Without Stat Drops or Aging

For those unfamiliar with Wizardry or classic TRPGs, this might sound strange—but in old-school games, leveling up could actually lower your stats.

Some extreme cases even had rules where hitting a negative stat on level-up could cause character death.

Wizardry also had an aging system: the more in-game days passed, the more your characters aged, increasing the chance of stat loss on level-up.

Dungeon Antiqua removes all of that.
No stat drops, no aging, no headaches—your characters always improve steadily as you level up.

Always-Visible Maps Let You Focus on Exploration

You can hold the cancel button to instantly view the map.
Unexplored rooms—potential treasure spots—are immediately highlighted, letting you zip through dungeons without losing track of where to go.

“BIRD EYE” Spell from the Start

The early-game spell BIRD EYE, learned by the mage right from the start, lets your party automatically walk to previously visited locations.
No more wandering aimlessly through already-explored areas—you can move forward smoothly and keep the pace of exploration up.

Five-Character Parties Hit the Sweet Spot for Tension and Difficulty

In Dungeon Antiqua, your party size is five—not six like Wizardry, nor four like the original Final Fantasy.

And this number is perfectly chosen.

Let’s do a super simple calculation.

• In a 6-character party, if one member falls, the loss of combat power is 1/6 = 0.1666…
• In a 4-character party, one falling means 1/4 = 0.25

That’s roughly 1.5× higher.

Put simply: in a 4-person party, losing one character feels about 1.5 times worse than in a 6-person party.

What does this mean for game design?
In smaller parties, it’s harder to create situations like:

“Oh no! Someone got knocked out by a one-hit KO or a massive single-target attack!”

Such “someone down” moments are great for tension, but if the difficulty spikes 1.5× every time, the game can quickly feel punishing.
So, in smaller parties, designers often reduce these moments, which unfortunately cuts back on some of the most dramatic tension.

Big parties, on the other hand, have their own problems.

• The threat of area attacks increases.
• The value of single-target heals drops.

The more characters there are, the bigger the potential damage from area attacks, which makes mass healing far more important, while single-target healing becomes less meaningful.

Also, in large parties, if a single character falls, it doesn’t feel nearly as bad, so the most reliable way to create challenge is often spam powerful area attacks.
This can make close fights feel like mindless healing loops—exciting tension turns into repetitive work.

The answer? A 5-character party.

It’s the perfect middle ground:

• You can still have the “Someone’s down! Oh no!” moments without them being deadly.
• Area attacks feel threatening, but single-target heals can handle them.

As I noted in the guide, enemies that frequently use CURSE 3 (drop HP to 1) → weak attack combos or the lack of any full-party heal makes sense in this design context.
It’s all a natural result of careful balancing around a five-person party.

HARD Mode and the Item Compendium Keep Hardcore Players Happy

In Dungeon Antiqua, you can choose your difficulty at the start.

There’s Normal for beginners and HARD for seasoned players. HARD mode changes a few things:

• Enemies hit harder
• You gain more experience
• Escape attempts can fail (in Normal, I never failed once, but in Hard I failed quite a few times)
• Loot quality tends to be better? (Maybe just because your thief levels up faster, indirectly improving drops)

Honestly, I found Normal a bit too easy.
I thought, “This is fun, but I want a little more edge during dungeon crawling…”
So I started a second save on Hard just for testing… and got completely hooked. I even pushed through to defeat the secret boss, ignoring article writing along the way.

I never wiped in Normal, but in Hard I went down at least three times before clearing the main dungeon.

Each wipe forced me to rethink my strategy, gear up, train my party, and try again.

• Which debuffs work best to neutralize enemies?
• What gear do I need for resistances?
• Should I grind my characters enough to brute-force bad luck in gear drops?
• Where can I safely level up?
• Or is it more efficient to push forward and snag strong items early?

It was peak dungeon-crawling bliss.

If you’re ready for a real challenge, HARD mode is highly recommended.
Dungeon Antiqua rewards your effort with meaningful, satisfying difficulty.

Plus, after clearing the main dungeon, the Item Compendium unlocks.
This makes chasing a full item collection perfectly feasible. I managed 89/91 items on my own, but I highly encourage you to aim for 100%.

The Trade-Off of Simplicity: Customization Is a Bit Limited

Now, let’s touch on a minor downside.

Honestly, it really boils down to one main point, and given the game’s overall concept, it seems like this design choice was intentional…

Even though you can create your own characters, the amount of customization feels limited by modern standards.

A quick list of what’s missing compared to modern RPGs:

• Synergy between classes and races (Dungeon Antiqua doesn’t even have races, unlike Wizardry or other inspired games)
• Customizing gear with stat boosts or special effects
• Skill acquisition and training, plus building combos or tactical patterns
• Positioning in the party to trigger side effects
• Unexpected party setups for unconventional strategies

Regarding “class and race,” the game partially substitutes gender for race, as mentioned in the class breakdown article, but it’s still fairly limited.

That said, Dungeon Antiqua is clearly optimized to offer an approachable, classic RPG experience for anyone. Adding all of these modern complexity layers would probably dilute the game’s charm and go against its design philosophy.

Still… as someone used to modern games that emphasize tactical depth and character-building complexity, I do feel the lack of customization. That’s my honest impression after clearing all the way to the secret boss.

In Summary: Casual Classic Fun Meets Hardcore Challenge

So, here’s the overall take on Dungeon Antiqua.

Thanks to its thoughtful design and thorough homages:

• If you’ve heard of early Final Fantasy or Wizardry but always felt the barrier to entry was too high…
• Or if you want to relive those adrenaline-filled, “death-is-around-the-corner” youth RPG days…

…this game is perfect for you.

It also supports HARD mode clears and item completion runs, so hardcore players chasing those challenges will find plenty to sink their teeth into.

The only downside? The lack of deep customization for a character-creation game might feel noticeable compared to modern RPG standards. But considering the game’s concept is to pay homage to the simplicity of classic RPGs, it’s hard to even call it a real flaw.

So that’s a wrap on Dungeon Antiqua!

A big thanks again to frenchbread, the creator, for providing super helpful comments.

• Dungeon Antiqua on Steam

For the next IndieGame100 installment, I’ll be checking out “The Use of Life” by
Daraneko Games.

I’ll be posting my playthrough progress on X using the hashtag #IndieGame100!

Enjoy your gaming life!

Thanks so much for reading till the end!!!

Previous IndieGame100: STRANGER SAGA -Stranger Bach and Iskiyeld’s Ambition-

The developer has graciously taken the time to read this review and share a kind message.
I’m sincerely honored if this article has, even in a small way, reflected the vision behind the game