The PlayStation Portable was an iconic homestead for niche RPGs, cementing the likes of Nippon Ichi Software as small but permanent fixtures in video games. Cladun started there, a series that combined retro gaming aesthetics with the enduring features 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 on the scene, it’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 the Baddie?
Cladun X3 is about a death game—but not in the same way something like *Danganronpa* is. Instead, it’s centered around 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, you might as well power up and participate in the violence anyway. You only have so many options.
### Endless Dungeons to Explore
To power up, you’ll be entering dungeons. And there are a lot of them—dozens and dozens. There are story dungeons, random dungeons, map dungeons… 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 each; the idea is to run through as fast as you can, blasting 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
Grinding you will absolutely need, because it’s easy to hit walls in Cladun. Progression is odd in these games — it’s not 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 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, 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 all this.
### The Slow Grind and Incremental Gains
The gains are incremental as well—for example, one point of ATK costs three mana, then two points cost seven. Gaining mana 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 advance 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.
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 fill the screen with enemies who have massive area-of-effect attacks.
Combat slows way down as a result, forcing you to play more cautiously as enemies get faster, stronger, and more numerous.
### Ran-geons and Map-geons: Bonus Grinding or Frustration?
Being able to hop into ran-geons and map-geons should be a vehicle for further grinding. After all, they’re bonus dungeons with randomized elements that show up nice and early!
However, you can easily find yourself in a bad situation with no chance against enemies and no choice but to escape. Normal escape exits are just as random, so if one doesn’t show up, you essentially have to run for gates until an exit spawns, give up, or die.
The penalties for dying are huge, taking away all your items as well as most of the experience and money you found. So it’s often more productive to just replay a recent story dungeon you cleared over and over 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. You might have noticed the mention of main and sub-characters, but these aren’t defined, written story participants. Instead, they’re custom recruits, Dragon Quest 3 style.
And 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, including equipment. You can also customize flavor text and design your own hub map.
There’s even 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 where you design the surrounding elements—their 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 it 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 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 offer, but the ways in which this game demands time in exchange for flimsy rewards make it struggle to actually capture my attention.
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**Cladun X3** is available on September 26, 2025, for Nintendo Switch, PC, and PlayStation 4 and 5. A Switch code was provided by the publisher for review.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/146007/cladun-x3-review-score