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 on the horizon, it feels like 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 quite like it. Am I a baddie? Oh well.
### A Different Kind of Death Game
Cladun X3 centers around 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 goal appears to be forcing these villains to beat each other up, thereby 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 chaos anyway. Your options, however, are limited.
### Dungeon Delving and the Core Gameplay Loop
To power up, you’ll be entering dungeons. Lots and lots of dungeons. 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, the idea being you run through as fast as you can, blasting enemies and avoiding traps while searching for 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 is absolutely necessary because it’s easy to hit walls in Cladun. Progression here is unusual—not just about leveling up (which is part of it) but more about Magic Circles. These are progression maps that have you assigning sub-characters to tracks fueled by mana points, on which you place stat-boosting artifacts leading to your main character.
If that sounds complicated, that’s because it is!
The sub-characters act as shields, taking damage before your main character does. But if they get knocked out, you lose the benefits of their lanes on the equipped Magic Circle, potentially derailing your offensive or defensive capabilities for the remainder of the dungeon.
As you play, you’ll gain more mana, stronger artifacts, and new Magic Circles to experiment with. Managing this stuff can be a real pain. The gains are incremental—for example, one point of ATK costs three mana, two points cost seven. Since you typically gain mana at a rate of one or two per level, progress can feel slow. This is (in theory) balanced by unlocking more complicated Magic Circles with more character slots.
Choosing a new Circle means starting over with artifact placement, which means you’ll spend a lot of time poking through menus, doing mana math, and desperately trying to optimize your setup.
### Rising Difficulty and Combat Frustrations
Meanwhile, enemies gain deeper HP pools and hit harder as you progress through the story. Unless you get lucky with item drops, there’s only so much your equipment can do beyond your stats.
It reaches a point where taking a few hits—your defense is cut in half when you run, by the way—can 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 down as a result, forcing you to play more cautiously since enemies become faster, stronger, and more numerous.
### Ran-geons and Map-geons: Grinding or Frustration?
Being able to hop into ran-geons and map-geons should offer vehicles for extra grinding. After all, they are bonus dungeons with randomized elements that show up nice and early! But this introduces its own problems. It’s easy to find yourself in a bad situation with no chance against certain enemies and no option but to try and escape.
Normal escape exits are random too. If one doesn’t show up, you basically have to run around until an exit spawns, give up, or die. And dying carries a heavy penalty—you lose all your items and most of your experience and money.
Therefore, it’s often more productive to replay recently cleared story dungeons over and over until you level up enough. Yuck.
### Making Cladun Your Own
Grinding is a bummer, but Cladun X3 offers an aspect that might fly under the radar for most players: customization.
The main and sub-characters aren’t fixed story participants. Instead, they’re custom recruits in a Dragon Quest 3 style. But the customization here is utterly unhinged.
Nearly every element of Cladun X3 is customizable. You can design all your own sprites from scratch or use existing templates as starting points—equipment included. You can also customize flavor text and even design your own hub map.
There’s even fully-fledged music composition software included, which lets you write and assign your own background music tracks pretty much across the entire game. It’s absurd.
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 loop, you can do so in an environment where you design the surrounding elements to create 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 you’re not interested, you can ignore this aspect entirely and play through the story without missing a thing.
### Final Thoughts
If Cladun X3 was tuned just a little differently, it could have been the perfect time-killing grindfest for me. Being able to pick characters, customize them to my tastes, then take them into bite-sized dungeons for numbers-driven dopamine sounds like a great formula.
But having to spend so much time tinkering with Magic Circles for gains that feel disproportionately small compared to the effort, all while being quickly outpaced by how fast the dungeons ramp up in difficulty, makes the pace feel arduous.
I like grinding to a reasonable extent, but what Cladun X3 asks is a bit too much.
I respect the wild level of creativity its customization tools offer, but the way the game demands time in exchange for flimsy rewards makes it hard to stay fully engaged.
### Availability
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.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/146007/cladun-x3-review-score
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