In addition to just attacking your enemies with a barrage of physical attacks, you can also charge the drill. The amount that you can charge it is represented by three gauges at the top of the screen. The longer you hold down the attack button, the more it will charge. Charging the first two bars will have Parin start spinning her drill and thrust it forward. If you charge it all the way to third bar, Parin will do a dive forward with her drill spinning towards an enemy. Using these charge attacks is incredibly important because many enemies and bosses will be armored. As long as an enemy is wearing armor, you’re more than likely going to do 0 damage to it unless you attack them with a charged up attack, so you’ll want to make sure you get rid of it fast.
Each time you break off a piece of their equipment, it’ll drop on the ground and you can collect it to use as a currency to upgrade one of your many accessories. You can also use your charge attack to drill holes into the wall to find secret pathways! You will need to watch your drill’s power, though. Each time an enemy successfully attacks you, the three gauges will start to deplete and your drill will get weaker. There are healing items for your drill, and the more you attack with it, the more its power will slowly rise. This isn’t as much of a problem as it sounds, as you always have plenty of opportunities to bring its power right back up.
As you progress more in the story you’ll also find fire, ice and lightning upgrade for your drill. The elemental power ups can be used for attacking as well as solving simple puzzles. Each enemy generally has an elemental weakness that will allow you do a lot more damage if exploited. Finding the weakness isn’t particularly hard, since there are only three elements to choose from, and luckily you can swap between them quickly with the use of the 3DS’s touch screen. The puzzles you’ll solve with the elements generally boil down to just lighting a torch, using your ice parts to extinguish a torch, or supplying a lightning rod with electricity.
In the main town you can also purchase new attacks for the drill that are fun to do, and very useful when attacking groups of enemies. The only thing I don’t really like about this is the way they are executed. In order to do a special attack, you have to rotate the 3DS’s circle pad and press the attack button. I wouldn’t normally mind this, but every single special attack is mapped this way, with only minor differences in its execution. It’s not the worst thing, and using the special attacks never failed for me, it was just something I didn’t really like. Thankfully, the combat in general is very fast and fun like I would expect from a Falcom game.
The boss battles, while simple, are a delight. Most boss fights boil down to the same formula as most enemies, but they last longer and sometimes you’ll need to figure out how to be able to damage them effectively. You likely won’t have many problems with them as I found all but one to be very easy. One boss towards the middle end of the game gave me a lot of trouble. It started out easy enough once I figured out how to properly damage it, but towards the end of the fight the difficulty really ramps up as it constantly makes up to three clones of itself. Even if you defeat the clones, it’ll just recreate them again. This fight was really frustrating as the arena is fairly small, and I felt there was just way too much going on in such a little space.
Occasionally when you enter a new area you’ll be greeted with a puzzle that you need to solve in order to proceed. Most of these puzzles are very simple like lighting a bunch of torches without breaking them. Some, however, are very cryptic. One puzzle in particular stands out to me as confusing. The hint for the puzzle asks you to round up all the money in the world. The solution to this is to just have the number 666 in the amount of coins you have. I really never quite got the grasp of this puzzle, but thankfully if you fail the puzzle several times, you’re offered a hint for 1000 coins. If you still manage to not be able to figure it out, you’ll be given the option to just bypass the puzzle entirely for 5000 coins. I managed to solve most of the puzzles on my own, but some I definitely needed help on, and that one in particular was one I was thankful for the bypass feature.
Throughout my 11-hour playthrough, I found Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure 3D to be a wonderful title that was one of the most pleasant games I’ve played in a long time. The story is adorable, the characters are charming, and the combat is really fun. Given the game length and how pleasant it is, I do find this to be a title that I’ll likely come back to at some point, especailly since there are so many unlockable outfits for Parin! It’s really hard to go wrong with Gurumin 3D, especially with its low price of only $14.99 on the Nintendo eShop. If you’re looking for something adorable, pleasant and fun, or are just a fan of Falcom games in general, look no further than Gurumin 3D!
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Review copy provided by the publisher
