Wow, thanks for the link. Elona looks to be quite good! It's a little quirky in some regards, but that makes a game more enjoyable, for me.
My only complaint with it thus far is the harshness of the dungeons. A Danger Level 1 forest gave me five enemies at once, one was a "kobolt" that was extremely hard to kill. The others (crabs and snails) made me have to save up my magic (as a warmage) to kill. I slept on a bed ('t' key, for tools, when standing on it) and in a dream a wizard taught me Lightning Bolt, which was pretty cool.
But very fun. Look at that! Your sprite changes depending on what you wear? What attention to detail. Can't wait until the translation improves; I just got robbed by bandits speaking Japanese, and apparently chose the "give them what they want" option.
If the dungeons are difficult, it helps to spend some time traveling about doing quests. The roads are less dangerous than the actual wilderness, and if you travel on them you can run into traveling merchants as well, with those merchants generally being the source of the best equipment you'll be able to buy. It's good to save up a small fortune by doing quests that involve delivering to Noyel, since they almost always pay at least 10,000 gold, though you'll want to be careful that you don't take the ones that give you short time limits because it takes a while to get there (particularly because movement speed is slowed when you walk around). You also get platinum coins for doing quests, and once you've managed to amass twenty of those you can bring them to the trainers (they're usually found in the building that have a cloak on them) to learn useful new skills that'll let you do things you can't already.
Once you've done all of that, and used that fortune you've amassed to buy yourself some solid equipment, it's good to dive into Lesimas (a dungeon to the south of your shelter) and make your way down to level 3, where you'll find someone who'll further the main quest. He gives you a chest full of fairly good and useful equipment. From that point on, you can keep working on the main quest (if you can't figure out what to do because the actual dialogue isn't translated, hit the J key to check your journal - even though the quests you're given aren't translated, the journal entries for the main quest are, which makes the main quest itself technically playable) or you can move on to do other things.
There's also quite a few interesting touches that I've found from machine translations of the game's Wiki, among other things. For example, if you can bring those red faces on an ally's dialogue screen all the way down, and the blue ones all the way up, you can marry them. Afterwards, you can actually play as the offspring of your character and his or her spouse. You can also get a "gene machine" and learn a skill that allows you to combine two allies, sort of like what you might have seen in any number of Pokemon-type games. Also, you can buy deeds that allow you to create property like shops and museums, which you can then set up to generate you a greater salary (apparently, museums give you more cash for leaving the "figures" in them). There's a gambling game, but it's completely untranslated (seems to be a bit like blackjack, and after fiddling with it I think I've figured out the basics of controlling it, but I'm still not sure), and there's some kind of political system where you can enter your name at towns and they have several positions to be filled and such but I have absolutely no idea how that works (maybe I need to get my reputation higher - having it at -100 certainly can't help
). There are quite a few other things, like being able to play piano for money, but basically the game feels like it's mostly finished aside from the translation, and it has a
lot of stuff to do that's pretty hard to actually figure out without some English text to tell you that it's there.
Basically, I'm just a little excited to see a roguelike with really good graphics, really good music,
and the amount of content and level of depth and variety that I've come to expect from the text-based ones. It's almost refreshing.
