In Grim of Abyss you defeat enemies in a series of dungeons. Each of the nine dungeons gets consecutively more difficult and then there is also a separate boss rush dungeon. Before you enter your first dungeon, you will need to equip a grimoire. The grimoires will each have a rank, starting with the lowest (Rank E). The rank determines both the prospective stat increases you can attain, and it also determines the maximum rank of skills that you can equip on the book. The stats will raise when you gain levels with your grimoire, and you can gain levels by either having the book equipped in battle or by using items to enhance the book. You receive enhancement items and can possibly extract the skills in a book by using Extract Skills. This is a good thing to do if you are building up a stock of worthless grimoires, or you have maxed out your current grimoire and want to equip a new one. You can also sell grimoires that you have no need of for P$ points (the in-game currency), but since you receive those enhancement items and (rarely) skills, I’ve never had the desire to sell them. One other thing you can do with your grimoire is to use PP Allocation, which allows you to invest the bonus stat boosting points that you earn by leveling up your character to boost your current grimoire. When you equip a new grimoire, those points will reset to their maximum level, so when you level up you are always increasing your maximum capacity to change whatever book you will equip.
Each of the dungeons you enter has 100 potential levels, or depths. I say that it has that potential, because you will usually skip depths based on your performance in a round. So you will start at Depth 1, but by the time you finish that level you will usually skip to Depth 5-10. You can see your depth counter rise during the middle of combat, which is a nice feature. It can be important to keep track of where you are at on your depth because every 20 levels you will meet up with a boss character. You cannot gain additional depth during that match, and that character will not only have a red glow around their character model, but they will be far stronger than the characters before them. For a normal enemy you will typically gain a skill as a reward for the kill. For a boss you will usually gain a new grimoire. Keeping track of your current depth is so important because those boss characters invade you as a new challenger. They do not wait until the next round, so it’s important to keep your health high and make sure you are ready for a difficult fight when you start approaching the next factor of 20.
Once you reach Depth 100 you will fight a final boss of that dungeon, and they will be gold colored instead of having that red outline. Needless to say, they are much more powerful than any of the characters previous to them or any of the sub-bosses. In my experience they seemed to have a lot of story relation to the character I was currently using, but that may have been just luck. You will typically get a much better grimoire as a reward for defeating the final boss of a dungeon as well. Once you’ve received all the loot from that dungeon, you can go back to your Grimoire Shop and equip your new book, whichever one was the best, and extract from the rest of your loot. I typically only gained about five character levels for the first easy dungeons, but the later dungeons definitely boosted my levels a lot more. Of course a large reason for this was that I skipped so many depths on the three easy dungeons that I typically only had to fight around 15 battles at most for the 100 depths. Overall this entire mode ended up being great fun, and I can see myself going back to it repeatedly over the next months or years. Given its structure, it will take even longer than seeing everything else in the game in order to max out 41 different characters in this mode. There is an almost absurd amount of depth with game mechanics to be found here.
The Item Shop in the game is one place you can spend that P$ point in-game currency. It’s a fairly simple list of additional colors and an extra costume for Noel. There is also the standard Sound Shop for Arc System Works fighting games. But it should be noted here, while I’m talking about sound, that the music in this game combines all the best hits of the previous titles in the series and adds even more beautiful songs. It’s hard to compare to the heavy metal of the Guilty Gear series (I’m a huge metal head), but this game still has one of the best soundtracks that you are ever going to find in a game. One issue that some people may have with the sound design of this game is that it’s only available in Japanese with English subtitles. There is no English track. This decision was already made even before the current voice actors guild strike, so it has nothing to do with that. If I had to guess it’s mostly because of how massive the visual novel story is within the game, and that would cost a lot more to produce a new English track. Personally I do not mind that, as I prefer the Japanese voices (even though the English cast was good in the past), but it’s important to point that out in a review.
The Visual Gallery in the game is a bit more robust than the Sound Gallery. There are quite a few unlockable portraits and concept art for the game. In addition they have many inspirational art designs, as I have come to expect for Arc System Works fighting games. There are so many of them that I did not have enough P$ cash to purchase them all before review, but if you are looking for sexy waifu designs, you will certainly not be disappointed with this gallery. Yes, the game engine is starting to show its age, but their designs are still quite good with this developer. And even when they aren’t showing off with the Astral Finish sequences, all the concept art shows a lot of love and attention.
The last thing that I need to mention is the Online Mode. They bring all the bells and whistles that you are expecting from their most recent release, Chrono Phantasma Extend, to the party. That is for the better and for the worse. There is not much innovation here, but most online multiplayer fighting game players would choose stability over new systems any day. And, in my limited experience, I would say that they nailed the stability so far. These games have not always been very stable in the beginning, often requiring patches to get them working right, but by keeping the system static they seem to have made it functional right off. The netcode seems to be exactly the same, and there is no major delay that I could see from the PlayStation 4 version. Granted, I’m not really a pro player at this game so falling out of my combos is not really a concern, but I also haven’t seen too many complaints online. So my final thought on this game is that it is far and away worth the full MSRP price of entry at $59.99. They packed so much glorious content into this one and it looks like it will probably be the last game in the series. If this is to be the last game, what a send off they had. They poured all their love and attention into this title, and made my favorite game of the entire BlazBlue series in the process.
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