The PlayStation Portable was an iconic home 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 staples 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.
### A Different Kind of Death Game
Cladun X3 is about a death game, but not in the same way something like *Danganronpa* is. Instead, it centers on an immortal jellyfish person who runs 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, you may as well power up and participate in the violence anyway. You only have so many options.
### Dungeon Deluge: So Many Dungeons
To power up, you’ll be entering dungeons. And there are a lot—dozens upon dozens. There are story dungeons, random dungeons, map dungeons, and more. You get the picture.
The basic gameplay loop is fun and simple, designed for fast and furious, bite-sized sessions. Cladun’s dungeons only last a few seconds, with 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 generally, you’re discouraged from doing so unless you need to grind.
### Sphere Grids for Spreadsheet Nerds
And grind you will absolutely need to, because it’s easy to hit walls in Cladun.
Progression in these games is unusual, because it isn’t just about leveling up. That’s there too, but the bigger pieces are Magic Circles—progression maps that have you assigning sub-characters to tracks fueled by mana points. On these tracks, 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 character, 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. This can derail 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.
### Slow Gains and Mana Math
The gains feel incremental. For example, one point of ATK costs three mana, and two points cost 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 additional character slots.
Choosing a new Circle means starting over with artifact placement, 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. Unless you get lucky with item drops, there’s only so much your equipment can do beyond improving your stats.
Eventually, even taking a few hits becomes risky (your defense is cut in half when you run, by the way). A few hits can knock a sub-character out and nullify your gains in seconds. This can be incredibly frustrating, especially as later dungeons fill the screen with enemies who have massive area-of-effect attacks.
Combat slows down as a result, forcing you to play more cautiously as the enemies grow faster, stronger, and more plentiful.
### Grinding: A Necessary Evil
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 it’s easy to get into a bad situation with no chance against enemies and no choice but to escape. Normal escape routes are random too, so if one doesn’t show up, you have to either run until an exit spawns, give up, or die.
And the penalties for dying are huge—losing all your items and most of the experience and money you found. So it’s often more productive to just pick a recent story dungeon you cleared and replay it over and over to gain 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. The main and sub-characters aren’t defined, written story participants—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 your own sprites, starting from scratch or using existing templates. That includes equipment.
You can also customize flavor text and design your own hub map. There’s even fully-fledged music composition software included, letting you write and assign your own BGM tracks across pretty much the entire game.
It’s absurd—in a good way.
If you’re a creative type who just wants 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 where you design the surrounding elements to make your own little retro RPG world.
It feels like a sort of *Animal Crossing* for RPG enthusiasts, stopping just short of being a new kind of RPG Maker-like experience.
And if that doesn’t suit you, you can ignore this aspect entirely and play through the story without missing anything.
### Final Thoughts
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 bite-sized dungeons for some numbers-driven dopamine sounds like a great time.
But having to sit and tinker with 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 asks for is a bit too much.
I respect the wild level of creativity its customization tools offer, but the ways in which this game demands time in exchange for flimsy rewards make it struggle to capture my attention.
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**Cladun X3** is available on September 26, 2025, for Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5. A Switch code was provided by the publisher for review.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/146007/cladun-x3-review-score