Generally, combat is what the game does best. Enemies react to your moves, acting ahead if your actions get too simplistic, dodging your attacks, taking advantage of the pauses in your movement, and inflicting status ailments. They also block, flank, stun-lock you, fly, jump, do leap and ranged attacks, cast powerful spells, heal themselves, float out of your attack or spell range, and move faster than you do.

Much of the game's difficulty comes from managing your timing and momentum (which may prove frustrating to some). The companion AI is competent enough that the player might find themselves worse at controlling the girls (in particular Arche) than the AI, but also highly customisable.

Fortune Summoners never holds your hand. Dungeons get labyrinthine and span many screens, featuring puzzles that involve jumping, switch-pulling, crate-pushing, and discovering hidden passages. Unfortunately, exploration can get fetch quest-y and linear, with a back-and-forth design that often expects you to find the one NPC amidst a hundred of others to advance the plot.

Starting off with Arche, the transfer student on the way to her new school, the game's story and dialogue are nothing if not cliché-laden – luckily treated playfully, not seriously. The pervading spirit of light-heartedness and camaraderie, perfectly captured by Carpe Fulgur's translation, eases you into the whole nonsense pretty well, too.

Fortune Summoners takes pride in its old-school design, with good reason and to good effect. The combat is engaging and challenging, the writing is upbeat and charming, and the dungeon-crawling, while at times artificially prolonged by backtracking, is enjoyable with many secrets to find. As a result, it remains one of my favourite.