This is solely based on Quest Mode. It also has the standard mode with never-ending Gauntlet fare, as well as a Battle Mode where you can fight each other -- while, according to the manual, it seems like a really cool feature to be able to use your Quest Mode in Battle Mode; according to its manual, Master of Monsters: Disciples of Gaia (PS1) seems like a totally awesome game.
I used Valkyrie for my playthrough. I've never really been a fan of Gauntlet's fighting through endless extremely similar levels, but someone on these boards recommended this to me (I think because I brought up Dungeon Explorer (TG-16) in a topic and how I liked how it is basically a Gauntlet RPG) because of the Quest Mode. What I like the most about this game is the puzzle aspect of finding all the Trap Tiles in each level of each tower and final castle. A few in the Towers get a bit hairy, but the final Castle is a beast. Since the battle system is still Gauntlet, I really wasn't too keen on that aspect.
I really like how there is complete freedom to raising your stats. It's just too bad that the icons for each stat aren't identified ANYWHERE, not even in the manual.
The graphics are decent. The dragons are very good looking. I was surprised that there is almost zero slowdown with as many sprites that can be onscreen at once. The only problem is that when the screen is nearly filled (or maybe just a row), it does not display the bottom half of some of the sprites. This doesn't affect anything gameplay wise, so I found no issue with it.
I really like the music and how each tower and the castle have their own themes. While repetitive, I never got tired of it.
Unfortunately, there is very little challenge to Quest Mode (outside of solving the final Castle's maze). Much like Cadash (TG-16), once you start upgrading your adventurer, surviving becomes very easy. This happened by the time I finished the first of the four towers. While it is very nice that once you activate all Trap Tiles for a level, no monsters will ever appear on that level again, this really lowers the difficulty. All of the bosses are almost identical, including the final boss. I used almost the exact same strategy on every one of them. Really, the only thing you need to do differently is equip whatever item nullifies the special tiles in the arena, if needed. They all have the exact same vulnerability, and all have the exact same pattern (a couple just have a different forward attack). The final boss in an ARPG really shouldn't take one attempt to beat it with ease (it actually glitched on me the first time and it started me with about 30HP (instead of my 4000HP Max) for the "real" end battle, so I had to spend an extra 5-10 minutes to beat the boss a second time).
All in all, it took me a little over 14 hours, but a few of those were due to my mapping out the final Castle (Microsoft Excel (the spreadsheet program) actually does REALLY well for mapping this game). If I actually took the time to map a game myself, that means I really enjoyed it.
