After exploring a forbidden area near home the twin leads end up in Manakaz, a realm that pulls from multiple dimensions and spits everyone out into a dungeon-rich land open for exploration -- well, should you choose to give it a go. Though there are the standard RPG loadouts for characters (reflected in the sprites, naturally), equipment and job classes are only half of your abilities while exploring the 99 randomly generated floors of any given dungeon.

As mentioned before, where you place your companions on a forked set of connected circles changes their base stats, and from there applying various upgrade items can bond with the pre-set ability nodes attached to each of the available spots for your party. It's a little difficult to explain (at least in the amount of time we had), but the gist is that it's not just who you have with you and their particular job class, but where they're standing when slotted into the grid. Given the sheer number of upgrade possibilities and various buffs/debuffs inherent in each of the slots, there's clearly a ton of strategy to be played with here.

Actually running around the dungeons is fairly simple, the pixelated visuals automatically force you to move in a slightly anachronistic up/down/left/right fashion, but there's far more agility in your character than was ever present in games that originally looked like this. Likewise, the dungeon floors are rife with pressure plates and enemies that have to be smacked around (complete with handy damage numbers, of course), but as you defeat them, all your party members end up leveling up much as they would in any other RPG.

The key to Cladun's ridiculous depth lies in the sheer number of variables allowed and the various risk/reward setups that have been built. For instance, you can go through a randomly-generated door on a particular floor to jump further down through the floors, but when you pop out a random effect may be applied to the entire floor -- stuff like spikes in enemy difficulty or an increased prevalence in traps or they may simply affect everyone's base stats. When coupled with the graphics editor and the random nature of the various dungeons, it's safe to say that no two players will have the exact same experience.

There's a ton more to Cladun that we simply couldn't dig into, but the game's cloudy Fall release date means we'll have plenty of opportunities to check things out at length before it hits stores. Until then, feast your peepers on the screenshotty luv we've provided for you, or just watch the trailer that should help explain plenty.