Back in March of last year, I started playing Dungeon Fighter Online on a whim since it was free. It has since become one of my favorite games, period.
Fighting Dungeons Online
I’ve mentioned DFO on here before, but that was mainly in passing while talking about my enjoyment of the DNF Duel open beta on PS4 near the end of last year. Since then, I’ve started going a bit harder on the game and felt like gushing about it properly.
Near the end of March 2021, I downloaded DFO on a whim after properly seeing how cool some of the characters looked and remembering that it was completely free. I made my first class, a Shadow Dancer, and the rest is history. I got my controller set up and started having fun.
The game has honestly been a lot of fun and it’s been in my rotation since I started. I take my breaks from the game, but it’s staying installed, and is getting played whenever I have that itch, which is more often these days.
Dungeon Fighter Online website
The Characters & Gameplay
The characters make DFO for me. DFO is the first game besides Guilty Gear where I look at damn near every available playable character and think, “That’s fucking sick.” Every class looks amazing in all their advancements, my personal favorites at the moment being Ghostblade, Shadow Dancer, and Sword Master.
What’s even better is that all the classes I’ve tried(currently sitting at 9 out of like 60+) all feel different when I play them. Characters have different effective ranges, mob clear ability. damage, preferred gear, etc. Every class has its own gimmick that has effects on the general gameplay experience. Shadow Dancer has amazing damage and mobility, but you have to score back attacks to bring out her best. The Sword Master’s skills change depending on which style of Sword she has equipped. Ghostblade has insane range and damage output thanks to the fact the you use both him and his ghostman to attack. It makes switching between characters over the course of a session really fun and keeps the game fresh. I’m still killing mobs and bosses, but the change up in playstyle is really fun.
DFO plays like a beat ’em up merged with an RPG. You run around dungeons juggling mobs and pulling off sick combos, but you also do a lot of quests, and have a lot of farming, gearing, and crafting to do to make your battles in the dungeons a lot easier. Your character steadily levels up as you do all this, giving you new skills to go to town on your enemies with. It’s pretty easy to start stringing together combos, and if you lab a bit, you can find some really sick juggles to use on mobs and even other players if you ever check out the pvp mode. Damage optimization can get pretty important in the endgame content, where you’ll want to have some skill rotations down to take advantage of boss groggy phases. I can’t stress how addictive DFO gameplay can be if you love beat ’em ups. it can get even better if you get enough abilities on you to do stuff like increase movement speed or reduce skill cooldowns. Also, the game makes use of a system called FP, which basically serves as a hard cap on how much you can play as one character. It takes at most an hour and a half to use all of it up. This is where making a bunch of playable characters comes in. Not only does having alternate characters extend the time you can play the game for the day, but it also helps with your progression. While not perfect, there are systems in the game that can let you transfer things between your characters, so stuff like gold/material farming can go a lot faster if you’re making use of your other characters. You also get bonuses to your account for having multiple characters, especially if they’re leveled up.
I will admit that DFO’s story is much better than I would’ve expected. It took me a while to pay attention to it if I’m being completely honest, but once I made a fresh character and decided to actually look at the events, I liked the story a lot. Of course, this a sprite-based, dungeon-crawling beat ’em up with no voice acting in cutscenes, so the fanciest it’ll ever get is the occasional anime cutscenes, but that’s honestly fine with me. While I do wish we could get more attached to some characters and do more, the story beats and moments are well done for the limits of the game. I’m actually engaged with the story, even if it can feel a bit rushed sometimes. The NPCs are very lovable, and I have some heavy favorites from the story.
DFO lore gets pretty in depth, honestly. There’s even an entire website dedicated to the lore and characters.
DFO’s ost is an absolute gem. While I eventually turn to my own collection of beats(shout-out to Knxwledge!), I have no problem jamming to whatever song is bumping in the dungeon. Every single track is a banger.
Dungeon Time
Probably my favorite aspect of DFO is the flexibility. You can put in however much time you want and have fun. Only have time to play for 2 hours once a week? It’s the perfect game for that. Have a lot of free time on your hands and need a hobby to no life for a while? It’s the perfect game for that. At the time of writing, I’ve been playing on-and-off for mostly a year and have had so much fun just making characters, following the story, running dungeons with a buddy, and just material farming. I have barely touched the real endgame content, and yet I’ve had so much fun and sunk so many hours in already. And what’s more, there’s some convenience with the endgame content. There are solo and challenge versions of a good chunk of the end game raids/events that let you go at it yourself in the event that you 1). Don’t have a lot of friends that play the game, 2). Don’t feel like waiting a long time for a party, or 3). aren’t comfortable asking for party in a discord/forum/group chat. I sit firmly in all 3 of those categories, so the fact that I’ll get to try my hand at the content whenever I get around to it is comforting.
DFO is very grindy. Once you hit the level cap, and even a bit before then, you’re gonna have a lot of farming to do. You’ve gotta get your enchants, get your buff swap set, get your unique/legendary/epic gear, reinforce/refine that gear, run dungeons for mythics, farm for gold/materials, etc. Again, this process can go a lot smoother if you make use of your other characters. If you’re at the level where you’re farming these dungeons, then a clear of them doesn’t really take that long. You’ll burn through one character pretty quick, and that’s when you can switch to an alt and farm on that one. In my case, I’m mainly funneling gold since things can get expensive(and I wanna buy avatars from the action hall). Still, this is all something I take in stride. I like having a lot to go through and do, and again, I put in however much time I want. I’m having fun just fine playing my character.
The game itself regularly has events that help newer players or people starting new characters, but is also kind of lackluster on directing you/telling you what you need outside of guiding you through the story scenarios outside of those events. The community, however, has been great for this. I need to take the time to specifically shout-out Raven/DressupFighterOnline. Their blog is a priceless resource for the game. They update it with all the latest news and has tons of guides for leveling, gear progression, raids, the whole 9 yards.
My only real beef with the game is that I can’t play it on my preferred operating system. I use Manjaro Linux as my desktop OS. DFO’s launcher still uses Internet Explorer, which has problems running via wine. Also, going off my searches throughout reddit and discord, trying to play the game via a virtual machine risks getting my account banned, and I’m not about to run that risk after dumping idk how many hours at this point and over 20 bucks into this game. So for the time being, I just play the game on the laptop I used for programming in undergrad. I hate Windows with a passion, but I may have to reinstall it if my laptop kicks the bucket and I can’t get another one.
I’ve said it before, but it is a really good time to be a DFO fan. A patch adding the new Male Gunner class and removing the Synergy class in the Korean version, which will show up in the global version in about 5 or so months. DNF Duel is coming out this summer, and we still have Projects BBQ and Overkill to learn more about. I’m really loving this game and look forward to playing it even more.
