By Lucas White

Copyright shacknews

The PlayStation Portable was an iconic homestead for niche RPGs, cementing the likes of Nippon Ichi Software as small but permanent fixtures of video games. Cladun started there, a series that combined retro gaming aesthetics with the enduring fixtures of contemporary, premium handheld gaming. Cladun struggled a bit to survive the Vita’s relative floundering, but with the Nintendo Switch (and Switch 2), now’s the perfect time for a comeback. Cladun X3 is a weird one for a few reasons, but in a world full of dungeon-crawling RPGs, there isn’t much else like it.

Am I a baddie? Oh well.

Cladun X3 is about a “death game,” but not in the same way something like Danganronpa is. Instead, it’s about an… immortal jellyfish person running a mysterious island called Arcanus Cella, where villains have been summoned from across time and space. The idea seems to be forcing them to beat each other up, thus keeping them away from being menaces to society. You’re one such villain, apparently, waking up on the island with no memories from before. Still, while you’re here, may as well power up and participate in the violence anyway. You only have so many options.

To power up, you’ll be entering dungeons. So many dungeons. Dozens and dozens of dungeons. There are story dungeons, random dungeons, map dungeons, and… you get the picture. The basic gameplay loop is fun and simple, especially because it’s designed for fast and furious, bite-sized sessions. Cladun’s dungeons only last a few seconds though, the idea being you run through as fast as you can, blasting through enemies and avoiding traps in search of the exit. You can be more thorough to find treasures and hidden goodies, but you’re generally discouraged from doing so unless you need to grind.

Sphere Grids for spreadsheet nerds!

And grinding you will absolutely need, because it’s easy to hit walls in Cladun. Progression is odd in these games, because it isn’t just about leveling up. That’s in there too, but the bigger pieces are Magic Circles, progression maps that have you assigning sub-characters to tracks fueled by mana points, on which you place stat-boosting artifacts all leading to your main character. If that sounds complicated, that’s because it is! The sub-characters act as shields for your main, taking damage before you do. But if they get knocked out you lose the benefits from their lanes on the Magic Circle you have equipped, potentially derailing your offensive or defensive abilities for the remainder of a dungeon.

As you play you’ll get more mana, stronger artifacts, and new Magic Circles to experiment with. And boy can it be a pain in the ass to manage this stuff. The gains are incremental as well, with, for example, one point of ATK costing three mana, then two points costing seven. Gaining mana typically at a rate of one or two per level feels slow, which is (in theory) offset when you unlock more complicated Magic Circles with more character slots. Choosing a new Circle means starting over with artifact placement of course, meaning you’ll spend lots of time poking through menus, doing mana math, and desperately trying to optimize as best you can.

Meanwhile, enemies get deeper HP pools and hit harder as you go through the story, and unless you get lucky with item drops there’s only so much further your equipment can take you beyond your stats. And it gets to a point at which taking a few hits (your defense is cut in half when you run, by the way) will knock a sub-character out, nullifying your gains in seconds. This can be incredibly frustrating, especially as later dungeons will fill the screen with enemies who have massive area of effect attacks. Combat slows way down as a result as you’re forced to play more and more cautiously as the enemies get faster, stronger, and more plentiful.

Being able to hop into “ran-geons” and “map-geons” should be vehicles for further grinding. After all, they’re bonus dungeons with randomized elements that show up nice and early! But the problem is they have these randomized floor exit gimmicks, many of which blow up enemy levels via rolls. So you can easily get in a bad situation in which you have no chance against enemies with no choice but to escape. Normal escape exits are just as random though, so if one doesn’t show up you basically have to either run for gates until an exit spawns, give up, or die. And the penalties for dying are huge, yanking away all your items and most of the exp and money you find. So it’s more productive to just pick a recent story dungeon you cleared and play it over and over again until you gain some levels. Yuck!

Making Cladun your own

Grinding is a bummer, but there’s an aspect of Cladun X3 that might fly under the radar for most players. I mentioned main and sub-characters, and these aren’t defined, written story participants. Rather, they’re custom recruits, Dragon Quest 3 style. But the customization aspect is utterly unhinged. Nearly every element of Cladun X3 is customizable. You can design all your own sprites, starting from scratch or using the existing templates as starting points. That includes equipment. You can also customize flavor text and design your own hub map. There’s even a fully-fledged music composition software included, which lets you write and assign your own BGM tracks pretty much across the entire game. It’s absurd.

If you’re a creative type and just want to vibe out and grind levels at your leisure in a simple space designed for that kind of dopamine production loop, you can do so in an environment in which you design the surrounding elements to make, like, your own little retro RPG world. It feels like a sort of Animal Crossing for RPG sickos, stopping just short of being a new kind of RPG Maker-like experience. And if it doesn’t suit you, you can ignore this aspect entirely and play through the story without missing anything.

If Cladun X3 was tuned just a little differently, it could have been a perfect time-killing grindfest for me. Being able to pick some characters, customize them to my tastes, then take them into little bite-sized dungeons for some numbers-driven dopamine has “good time” written all over it. But having to sit and tinker with the Magic Circles for gains that feel disproportionately small compared to the time I put in, while being quickly outpaced by how fast the dungeons scale up makes the pace feel arduous. I like grinding to a reasonable extent, but what Cladun X3 seems to be asking is a bit too much. I respect the wild level of creativity its customization tools have to offer, but the ways in which this game demands time in exchange for flimsy rewards make it struggle to actually capture my attention.

Cladun X3 is available on September 26, 2025 for the Nintendo Switch, PC, and PlayStation 4 and 5. A Switch code was provided by the publisher for review.