Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon Because I DON'T KNOW!

Last year the furthest thing from my mind was that there would be a good game based off a television show. WayForward surprised me in the best way possible with Adventure Time: Hey Ice King Why'd You Steal Our Garbage?!, and certainly got me excited for the next game they would be doing. Well, they surprised me again, although this time, I'm surprised at how disappointed I am in Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon Because I Don't Know. I was rather harsh on the 3DS version, but thankfully the WiiU version is slightly better, but it's still going to take a die-hard fan to reach the end of this one-hundred floor slog.

When was the last time you wanted to do one hundred levels of anything? Never right? So I don't get why WayForward thought one hundred randomly generated dungeons would be a good time. This might be okay if there were some cool loot or a good reason to go down there right? Well there is a good reason if you're a fan of the series, but it's such a small carrot that I might as well just spoil it all right here. Actually nah, if you want those deets you're going to have to go look it up. Getting back to the main point, yes, one hundred levels, broken up every ten stages by boss battles that are actually rather fun and are some of the bright spots of this game. But between those ten floors, a lot of boring combat, and a lot of treasure to pick up, in order to power up your characters. You can bring three other friends with you for the trip down, but by the end of it you might wind up hating each other, especially if someone isn't the sharing type, but kudos to WayForward for allowing players to share their treasure while in the main hub area of Candy Kingdom.

Visually this game is mediocre at best, it gets downright ugly at times when textures collide and start flickering, it isn't nearly as common or bad as the 3DS version, but that it still happens is disappointing. The sprite-work is excellent which is not surprising considering that this is a WayForward title, but it does start to get a little disappointing when you start seeing enemies that are just color swaps of earlier enemies. The audio is a bit of a letdown as well. While the entire cast of the show is here, from Lady's Korean, to Choose Goose's rhyming sales pitch, all of the characters are perfectly represented. The fact that Lady's dialog box is also in Korean is utterly hilarious to me, and how Nintendo let that one through is beyond me. It's too bad that for all the good the vocal cast brings, the music is mostly forgettable which seems odd for a series that has such catchy tunes, instead here we have repetitive themes for each area of the dungeons that don't really do much to make you feel like you're experience something, instead it's just there filling a gap.

Exploring the dungeon itself is just a matter of finding the exit to the next stage, one part Diablo, one part Gauntlet, though minus the fun character growth with loot. I've got to applaud WayForward for getting so many characters in the game, and the playable roster is pretty good. You'll start out with access to Finn, Jake, Marceline, and Cinnamon Bun, there are others who will join the party as you progress through the dungeons, but I don't want to spoil the surprise, that would be... UNACCEPTABLE! Each character has their own specialty that makes them viable in the dungeon, Marceline and Jake can cross gaps, Cinnamon Bun is just a tank with a ton of hit points, and Finn is a great jack of all trades character that can also carry extra tokens in to the dungeon, allowing him to gain their perks. You'll find plenty of tokens on your trip too that can do things like speed up your movement (a must in this game, because it is agonizingly slow early on), increase your damage, or increase the drop rate of treasure, B-Mo will be on the bottom screen and can fill you in on pretty much every power-up in the game, which is helpful. Combat is a simple one button affair, with minimal combos for each character. You'll be getting a lot of mileage out of some of the special weapons that allow you to use projectile weapons, or freeze enemies in place. Out of all the characters, I like having Marceline as my main because of her ability to get some of those out-of-reach items and eat enemy projectiles to power up her special attack.

There are also quests that become unlocked as you get further down in to the dungeon. These quests are just simple things, like kill X number of Y, and find a specific item, nothing too taxing, but some of the rewards are great, as they can help max out a character who's got an upgrade that seems just a little out of reach. The upgrades available will increase your max hit points, your damage output, the power of your charged attacks, and the power of your special attack that can decimate the enemies in the area.

The loot system is utterly baffling in this game, there's plenty of treasure to pick up, and you'll want to make use of all of it to level up your character, but if you return to the hub after every fifth or tenth level you'll have to lose your unspent cash. Why? In what world do you want to punish the player like that? I get that it prevents the player from being able to level up too fast, and there are tokens that will allow you to keep your unspent treasure, but those tokens are incredibly rare, and by the time you find them it's too little too late, because you'll be pulling in enough cash to pay off those final upgrades, and the items in the shop will be equal to the ones you find in the dungeon.

So boring, middling, repetitive gameplay, a shoddy map system, and a few minor but annoying bugs is what you get with the latest Adventure Time game. It's a shame that a year removed from a pretty good Adventure Time game, we get this awful experience. I almost think that WayForward shouldn't have even bothered if this is how they were going to treat one of my favorite domestic cartoons in years. I'm utterly disappointed in Adventure Time: Explore The Dungeon Because I Don't Know, can someone tell me why this game was released in its current state? Because 'I don't know' seems like a recurring theme during this game's development, why is this game so busted? I don't know.