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Blobbing Along - Talking About First Person Dungeon Crawling
- Thread starter Yimothy
- Start date
The Steam release/update of Wizardry Gaiden: Itsutsu no Shiren is still on the way, and should be available as an early access title next week!
store.steampowered.com
(It's difficult to keep them all straight in my head but I believe this is the last Gaiden game, and that it comes with an editor for creating your own full-length campaigns.)
Wizardry: The Five Ordeals - "Wizardry: The Five Ordeals" Release Date and Notice of Change - Steam News
"Wizardry: The Five Ordeals" Release Date and Notice of Change
(It's difficult to keep them all straight in my head but I believe this is the last Gaiden game, and that it comes with an editor for creating your own full-length campaigns.)
Last edited:
Yeah but it sounds like they're using up at least 4 of them just on trying to understand what they're actually releasing.
With the impending end of the 3DS eShop, I had a bit of a look for titles I'd missed. I downloaded the latest version of Shovel Knight, which I hadn't updated since Plague Knight's campaign, but didn't find anything else too essential on the eShop. I did come across mention of ラビリンスの彼方, AKA Beyond the Labyrinth, a 2012 first person dungeon crawl-em-up that I remembered being interested in back then. So I bought a copy online, finally hacked my 2DS, and loaded it up with the game's translation patch. Bit of an aside - 3DS hacking is really good. Just having the custom firmware on there gets rid of the region lock, which is great, but I was also able to put the patch on my SD card and have the game apply it on the fly to my cartridge copy of the game. Love it.
Sadly, the patch doesn't translate the game's 3DS menu display. It's a game cart - looks more or less like a famicom cart, specifically a Konami cart - the ridges and hole at the sides near the top are Konami additions, I think. This ties in with the game's menu icon, which I've inset in the upper picture here, and with the frame story of the game - you start out playing a simple looking first person dungeon crawler with a few random online companions. The cart label kind of undercuts this, though - looks more like the main part of the game than the introduction.
Here's the title screen, and an explanation for the Konami cart - they published this. Anyway, right off the bat there's a bit of a retro aesthetic - all pixelly. Let's just turn that translation patch on:
That's more like it! I don't know a great deal about this patch. My own limited experience with ROM hacking tells me that it's hard to do, and I'm impressed off the bat by the change to the text on the upper screen. Presumably that's one bitmap changed for another, I guess. Less impressive is the way the word "Checkpoint" juts out the end of the box it sits on - I've noticed a couple of times in-game where the text is too long for its display space. That said, I do not wish to criticise the technical elements of this hack - it is already clearly more technically impressive than my own work in the field. One thing to mention is that the creator of the patch, in the thread where I got it, apologises for using of the r-word at one point and says they recently tried but failed to make a new patch without it, not having worked with the game since 2015. I haven't encountered that yet, I hope it's not prominent.
Here's what the game looks like, at least at first. I neglected to take a shot of the very beginning, when there was slightly less on the map, but it's basically the same. The upper screen shows the labyrinth in first person, the lower the map. As you can see, it looks like an old game in the style - Bard's Tale or whatever. I think it's actually rendered in 3D rather than being customised tiles made to look like it. Like, you can see individual pixels, but their size is variable. Iunno. I'm not sure exactly what era of computing this is supposed to be - famicom? 80s PCs? A retro-styled game on a more recent system?
Anyways, at the moment my party is just the player character. You get four letters, I went with Jams. If I'd thought more about posting this it'd be Yim, but oh well. My status box has my stats - I have 1000HP, two attacks, and my time counter is currently at zero. Below that is the map - it draws in what you can see, not just where you've been. My usual practice in this style of game is to step on every map square, but it's tricky to keep track of where I have and haven't been when it draws itself like this. That's a good thing, by the way - hopefully it'll limit my obsessiveness as I play. Below the map are three icons - the crossed swords bring up the battle controls, the speech bubble gets recent dialogue, and the curly arrow shows the map. These can be selected with the touch screen, though it'll go back and forwards between battle and map automatically.
I guess at this point I could mention the controls. The control layout for dungeon navigation in this game is diabolical. I think I know why they did it they way they did, but I still hate it. The d-pad moves the map around on the lower screen. The circle pad handles party movement - up to go forwards, down for back, and left and right to move left or right (without changing facing direction). To turn, you have to use the shoulder buttons. It is awful, though after a couple hours of play I'm somewhat used to it. That said, since I have custom firmware on my console I can remap the buttons and I'm planning to try that out - gonna put forwards, backwards, and turning on the d-pad, sidesteps on the shoulder buttons, and the map movement on the circle pad. The only problem I see with this is that I'll have to use the circle pad in the battle menu - if there's anything worse than being made to use an analogue controller for digital movement inputs it's having to use it for menu inputs. I'll see how it goes. Another advantage of remapping the controls is that it apparently messes up the key combo for taking screenshots with the CFW, so I'll be able to just play the game instead of continuing to take shots for this thread.
Not that I was doing a great job of it anyway - I missed Prof showing up. Prof is the second member of my party. The conceit of the game is that we're playing this online dungeon crawl together - the first player to join the game (me) controls movement, the others become party members. I'm not sure if in the fiction they are controlling their own actions in battle, but in practice I'm doing it. Their main contribution is chatter - they talk about what's going on, tell me what they want me to do, stuff like that. Prof, as the name suggests, is kind of a nerd and often the source of tutorials - here he's telling me how to access the in-game manual.
Also on view here is the combat screen. It's pretty basic - I can choose which enemy to attack and how hard to hit. The harder I hit, the more points are added to my time counter, which must count down to zero before I can attack again.
Here's my full party. Edge is kind of edgy, I guess - more caustic than Prof, less likely to tell me how to do something and more likely to just tell me to do it. LiLy is kind of in between. Their boxes are different colours because they have different elemental affinities. I'll get to that later.
These little text boxes pop up pretty regularly with the party members chatting. After this one I got a couple of dialogue options - "Hello" or "Nice to meet you". Deep role-playing stuff.
This is kind of clever - I didn't get a shot of it but the next line is one of the others saying that I'm not talking much because I'm busy controlling the party's movement. An above-average explanation for a silent protagonist, I think.
Here's the manual, reached by pressing the start button and choosing it from the menu. The elemental system is pretty simple - red beats green beats blue beats red.
And here's a more complicated battle screen. The series of coloured boxes in the middle of the lower screen is the turn order - the boxes with numbers in are my party, and those with letters are the enemies. Here it's Edge's turn. He's currently looking at attacking the enemy on the left with a level 2 attack, which would add 20 points to his time counter and move him to the back of the turn order, and do 57 points of damage. Edge being green, he can only do half damage to this enemy, so he'd probably be better switching to the green one. But! The red enemy will get an attack sooner than the green one, and both of my red characters will get (double strength) attacks before the green one. LiLy, who is strong against red, will go before the red enemy, but will she be able to finish it in one shot? Probably, but to be sure it makes sense for Edge to chip off a few HP while he can. I don't remember how this actually played out. The other new thing on this screen is the red number 53 in the upper image - if you hit an enemy with the element it's weak to, the damage will appear in this box and the next character of that colour to take a turn can absorb it to replenish their HP. Sometimes this means you hit an enemy, their HP goes up there, and they get the next turn and get it all back.
As you wander about the opening maze, you start hearing a voice - like, through the speakers. The rest of the party start commenting on it, and then eventually the screen fills with static.
A figure starts to appear through the fuzz, and the voice is heard again. Fortunately there are subtitles (turned off by default - it's in the menu under options), because the patch doesn't extend to the audio. The map screen has faded out and back in, in more detail. You can now see clearly, and I am in fact only noticing this myself as I write this, that the element icons are hands making the rock-paper-scissor shapes. Maybe I'll have some chance of remembering the direction of the triangle now. There are also some extra icons around the map - these are for going between floors and zooming in and out.
Story-wise, the barely-visible figure in the upper screen seems to be seeing us as a window of some sort. Are we present as a screen? Just what is going on?
The rest of the party have no better idea than I. Again, I'm unsure of the technology level we're supposed to be at here - are my party all sitting in their living rooms with their famicoms? Was there a famicom modem? Famicom keyboard? Are the much fancier visuals we're about to see impossible on their systems?
The image clears, and a woman becomes clear (most sources seem to refer to her as a girl, including the other members of my party - I'm not sure if that's just sexism or if she's supposed to be a child). Welcome to the game proper. There's a fair bit of dialogue here, both from the woman and my party, and I didn't get shots of all of it, but basically she's trapped in this labyrinth and we are now in some way present. We can hear her speaking, but she doesn't seem to have access to our chat. It's not clear what my party look like to her, and the party comment on that in the chat.
She moves forwards and beckons us to follow, then points out this pillar. Let's take a look:
I guess this is the plot - we're trapped in a labyrinth sealing some source of magic. I think. Both the woman and my party comment on this. It's sometimes hard to keep up with the dialogue in this game.
Just around the corner from the pillar is thiswrestling ring elevator. Also on show here - I've changed my viewing angle. You can look up and down with the X and B buttons.
Up the elevator is a much more open area.
It's quite pretty up here. Kind of wish I was playing on a 3DS instead of my 2DS so I could see it in 3D. Also of note - I'm facing diagonally. In the opening dungeon all turns are 90 degrees. Since we came to this new world, it's been 45 degree increments. You can also move diagonally, but only if there isn't a corner in the way. So here, for example, I can't move forwards. You're still stuck on a grid. Kind of odd that they didn't align the grid in the backround of the lower screen with the dungeon map laid over it.
Moving forwards, we hit a save point. There's a little tutorial about it - the woman (I wish the game would name her) trips and hurts herself, then moves into the save point and the scrape is healed. Basically, these glowing pillars heal you and allow you to save. There's also kind of a funny element to the story here - the woman explains that she's trapped in the labyrinth because she fell into it from above. How did she survive such a fall? Well, she landed on the save point and it healed her. Lucky!
This is just a neat little effect, kind of hard to capture in screenshot - when you occupy the same space as the woman, there's interference on the screen. Looks better in motion. I guess we're here as some kind of etherial presence?
Here's combat in the new world. Enemies are visible on the map (there are a couple more in the distance in this shot), and they and you can move during combat, though it's still turn-based. You can move once per turn, move twice and you lose the turn. You might notice that everything in this shot looks slightly skewed - the key combo to get into the custom firmware menu and take a screenshot is LeftShoulder/Down/Select - I'm turning to the left in this shot because I didn't hit them all simultaneously. One other thing in this shot - underneath the red enemy there's a black circle on the ground with a black drop above it. Enemies leave these behind when they die. I don't know what they do yet.
I mentioned earlier that I think I know why they gave the game such bad controls, and this is it. You can move during battles, so the menu controls and movement controls have to be seperate. They put menu on the d-pad and movement on the circle. Doesn't explain why they put turning on the shoulder buttons and side-stepping on the pad, though.
My party attack with glowing projectiles in their own elemental colours, to the initial surprise ("Magic!") of the woman. She is also a participant in battles - she'll throw a rock for one point of damage, accruing 50 points to her time counter. She can also be attacked - the blue bar at the top left of the upper screen shows her HP. It hasn't happened to me yet, but if she dies it's game over. Party members can die without a game over, but if they all go down that's game over too. I've had one death so far - I came across a silver enemy (not one of the elements I have access to, thought maybe the same element as the woman) with 3000HP. I was able to chip away a couple hundred through several rounds of attack, and then it one-shotted Edge and I ran away.
Something I didn't get a direct screenshot of but which you can see here - I've levelled up my team a bit - they've each got an extra 50HP, 100 for Jams. I had to approach a specific spot on the map for this. I can also upgrade my attack, which I assume increases the counter next to the sword icons but which was too expensive to try yet, and I can change the characters' elements. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to know in advance which elements I need, but I guess if I lost to a scissor element boss I could change my whole team to rocks for the next attempt.
Approaching the next save point I got some more dialogue from the party. This seems as good a place as any to show the dialogue recap tab on the lower screen. I enjoyed the first three lines here. Note that Edge is still dead here from the silver enemy earlier. If there's a way to resurrect besides going to the save point I don't know what it is.
And that's it for screenshots! Thank goodness. I'm gonna keep going with this one, but apparently remapping the buttons like I'm gonna do will cut me off from the screenshot function. That means I can stop taking them and try to just enjoy the game - I've spent much more time on this post than I've spent playing the game so far.
Sadly, the patch doesn't translate the game's 3DS menu display. It's a game cart - looks more or less like a famicom cart, specifically a Konami cart - the ridges and hole at the sides near the top are Konami additions, I think. This ties in with the game's menu icon, which I've inset in the upper picture here, and with the frame story of the game - you start out playing a simple looking first person dungeon crawler with a few random online companions. The cart label kind of undercuts this, though - looks more like the main part of the game than the introduction.
Here's the title screen, and an explanation for the Konami cart - they published this. Anyway, right off the bat there's a bit of a retro aesthetic - all pixelly. Let's just turn that translation patch on:
That's more like it! I don't know a great deal about this patch. My own limited experience with ROM hacking tells me that it's hard to do, and I'm impressed off the bat by the change to the text on the upper screen. Presumably that's one bitmap changed for another, I guess. Less impressive is the way the word "Checkpoint" juts out the end of the box it sits on - I've noticed a couple of times in-game where the text is too long for its display space. That said, I do not wish to criticise the technical elements of this hack - it is already clearly more technically impressive than my own work in the field. One thing to mention is that the creator of the patch, in the thread where I got it, apologises for using of the r-word at one point and says they recently tried but failed to make a new patch without it, not having worked with the game since 2015. I haven't encountered that yet, I hope it's not prominent.
Here's what the game looks like, at least at first. I neglected to take a shot of the very beginning, when there was slightly less on the map, but it's basically the same. The upper screen shows the labyrinth in first person, the lower the map. As you can see, it looks like an old game in the style - Bard's Tale or whatever. I think it's actually rendered in 3D rather than being customised tiles made to look like it. Like, you can see individual pixels, but their size is variable. Iunno. I'm not sure exactly what era of computing this is supposed to be - famicom? 80s PCs? A retro-styled game on a more recent system?
Anyways, at the moment my party is just the player character. You get four letters, I went with Jams. If I'd thought more about posting this it'd be Yim, but oh well. My status box has my stats - I have 1000HP, two attacks, and my time counter is currently at zero. Below that is the map - it draws in what you can see, not just where you've been. My usual practice in this style of game is to step on every map square, but it's tricky to keep track of where I have and haven't been when it draws itself like this. That's a good thing, by the way - hopefully it'll limit my obsessiveness as I play. Below the map are three icons - the crossed swords bring up the battle controls, the speech bubble gets recent dialogue, and the curly arrow shows the map. These can be selected with the touch screen, though it'll go back and forwards between battle and map automatically.
I guess at this point I could mention the controls. The control layout for dungeon navigation in this game is diabolical. I think I know why they did it they way they did, but I still hate it. The d-pad moves the map around on the lower screen. The circle pad handles party movement - up to go forwards, down for back, and left and right to move left or right (without changing facing direction). To turn, you have to use the shoulder buttons. It is awful, though after a couple hours of play I'm somewhat used to it. That said, since I have custom firmware on my console I can remap the buttons and I'm planning to try that out - gonna put forwards, backwards, and turning on the d-pad, sidesteps on the shoulder buttons, and the map movement on the circle pad. The only problem I see with this is that I'll have to use the circle pad in the battle menu - if there's anything worse than being made to use an analogue controller for digital movement inputs it's having to use it for menu inputs. I'll see how it goes. Another advantage of remapping the controls is that it apparently messes up the key combo for taking screenshots with the CFW, so I'll be able to just play the game instead of continuing to take shots for this thread.
Not that I was doing a great job of it anyway - I missed Prof showing up. Prof is the second member of my party. The conceit of the game is that we're playing this online dungeon crawl together - the first player to join the game (me) controls movement, the others become party members. I'm not sure if in the fiction they are controlling their own actions in battle, but in practice I'm doing it. Their main contribution is chatter - they talk about what's going on, tell me what they want me to do, stuff like that. Prof, as the name suggests, is kind of a nerd and often the source of tutorials - here he's telling me how to access the in-game manual.
Also on view here is the combat screen. It's pretty basic - I can choose which enemy to attack and how hard to hit. The harder I hit, the more points are added to my time counter, which must count down to zero before I can attack again.
Here's my full party. Edge is kind of edgy, I guess - more caustic than Prof, less likely to tell me how to do something and more likely to just tell me to do it. LiLy is kind of in between. Their boxes are different colours because they have different elemental affinities. I'll get to that later.
These little text boxes pop up pretty regularly with the party members chatting. After this one I got a couple of dialogue options - "Hello" or "Nice to meet you". Deep role-playing stuff.
This is kind of clever - I didn't get a shot of it but the next line is one of the others saying that I'm not talking much because I'm busy controlling the party's movement. An above-average explanation for a silent protagonist, I think.
Here's the manual, reached by pressing the start button and choosing it from the menu. The elemental system is pretty simple - red beats green beats blue beats red.
And here's a more complicated battle screen. The series of coloured boxes in the middle of the lower screen is the turn order - the boxes with numbers in are my party, and those with letters are the enemies. Here it's Edge's turn. He's currently looking at attacking the enemy on the left with a level 2 attack, which would add 20 points to his time counter and move him to the back of the turn order, and do 57 points of damage. Edge being green, he can only do half damage to this enemy, so he'd probably be better switching to the green one. But! The red enemy will get an attack sooner than the green one, and both of my red characters will get (double strength) attacks before the green one. LiLy, who is strong against red, will go before the red enemy, but will she be able to finish it in one shot? Probably, but to be sure it makes sense for Edge to chip off a few HP while he can. I don't remember how this actually played out. The other new thing on this screen is the red number 53 in the upper image - if you hit an enemy with the element it's weak to, the damage will appear in this box and the next character of that colour to take a turn can absorb it to replenish their HP. Sometimes this means you hit an enemy, their HP goes up there, and they get the next turn and get it all back.
As you wander about the opening maze, you start hearing a voice - like, through the speakers. The rest of the party start commenting on it, and then eventually the screen fills with static.
A figure starts to appear through the fuzz, and the voice is heard again. Fortunately there are subtitles (turned off by default - it's in the menu under options), because the patch doesn't extend to the audio. The map screen has faded out and back in, in more detail. You can now see clearly, and I am in fact only noticing this myself as I write this, that the element icons are hands making the rock-paper-scissor shapes. Maybe I'll have some chance of remembering the direction of the triangle now. There are also some extra icons around the map - these are for going between floors and zooming in and out.
Story-wise, the barely-visible figure in the upper screen seems to be seeing us as a window of some sort. Are we present as a screen? Just what is going on?
The rest of the party have no better idea than I. Again, I'm unsure of the technology level we're supposed to be at here - are my party all sitting in their living rooms with their famicoms? Was there a famicom modem? Famicom keyboard? Are the much fancier visuals we're about to see impossible on their systems?
The image clears, and a woman becomes clear (most sources seem to refer to her as a girl, including the other members of my party - I'm not sure if that's just sexism or if she's supposed to be a child). Welcome to the game proper. There's a fair bit of dialogue here, both from the woman and my party, and I didn't get shots of all of it, but basically she's trapped in this labyrinth and we are now in some way present. We can hear her speaking, but she doesn't seem to have access to our chat. It's not clear what my party look like to her, and the party comment on that in the chat.
She moves forwards and beckons us to follow, then points out this pillar. Let's take a look:
I guess this is the plot - we're trapped in a labyrinth sealing some source of magic. I think. Both the woman and my party comment on this. It's sometimes hard to keep up with the dialogue in this game.
Just around the corner from the pillar is this
Up the elevator is a much more open area.
It's quite pretty up here. Kind of wish I was playing on a 3DS instead of my 2DS so I could see it in 3D. Also of note - I'm facing diagonally. In the opening dungeon all turns are 90 degrees. Since we came to this new world, it's been 45 degree increments. You can also move diagonally, but only if there isn't a corner in the way. So here, for example, I can't move forwards. You're still stuck on a grid. Kind of odd that they didn't align the grid in the backround of the lower screen with the dungeon map laid over it.
Moving forwards, we hit a save point. There's a little tutorial about it - the woman (I wish the game would name her) trips and hurts herself, then moves into the save point and the scrape is healed. Basically, these glowing pillars heal you and allow you to save. There's also kind of a funny element to the story here - the woman explains that she's trapped in the labyrinth because she fell into it from above. How did she survive such a fall? Well, she landed on the save point and it healed her. Lucky!
This is just a neat little effect, kind of hard to capture in screenshot - when you occupy the same space as the woman, there's interference on the screen. Looks better in motion. I guess we're here as some kind of etherial presence?
Here's combat in the new world. Enemies are visible on the map (there are a couple more in the distance in this shot), and they and you can move during combat, though it's still turn-based. You can move once per turn, move twice and you lose the turn. You might notice that everything in this shot looks slightly skewed - the key combo to get into the custom firmware menu and take a screenshot is LeftShoulder/Down/Select - I'm turning to the left in this shot because I didn't hit them all simultaneously. One other thing in this shot - underneath the red enemy there's a black circle on the ground with a black drop above it. Enemies leave these behind when they die. I don't know what they do yet.
I mentioned earlier that I think I know why they gave the game such bad controls, and this is it. You can move during battles, so the menu controls and movement controls have to be seperate. They put menu on the d-pad and movement on the circle. Doesn't explain why they put turning on the shoulder buttons and side-stepping on the pad, though.
My party attack with glowing projectiles in their own elemental colours, to the initial surprise ("Magic!") of the woman. She is also a participant in battles - she'll throw a rock for one point of damage, accruing 50 points to her time counter. She can also be attacked - the blue bar at the top left of the upper screen shows her HP. It hasn't happened to me yet, but if she dies it's game over. Party members can die without a game over, but if they all go down that's game over too. I've had one death so far - I came across a silver enemy (not one of the elements I have access to, thought maybe the same element as the woman) with 3000HP. I was able to chip away a couple hundred through several rounds of attack, and then it one-shotted Edge and I ran away.
Something I didn't get a direct screenshot of but which you can see here - I've levelled up my team a bit - they've each got an extra 50HP, 100 for Jams. I had to approach a specific spot on the map for this. I can also upgrade my attack, which I assume increases the counter next to the sword icons but which was too expensive to try yet, and I can change the characters' elements. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to know in advance which elements I need, but I guess if I lost to a scissor element boss I could change my whole team to rocks for the next attempt.
Approaching the next save point I got some more dialogue from the party. This seems as good a place as any to show the dialogue recap tab on the lower screen. I enjoyed the first three lines here. Note that Edge is still dead here from the silver enemy earlier. If there's a way to resurrect besides going to the save point I don't know what it is.
And that's it for screenshots! Thank goodness. I'm gonna keep going with this one, but apparently remapping the buttons like I'm gonna do will cut me off from the screenshot function. That means I can stop taking them and try to just enjoy the game - I've spent much more time on this post than I've spent playing the game so far.
What a fascinating game concept! A little surprised I hadn't heard of this one before.
There's another oddball dungeon crawler whose name I've forgotten - I learned about it in a thorhighheels video - where you alternate between a classic 8-bit style dungeon and a creepy door-opens-slowly horror survival game. This one seems a little more digestible, but both of them are meta takes on a vintage genre.
There's another oddball dungeon crawler whose name I've forgotten - I learned about it in a thorhighheels video - where you alternate between a classic 8-bit style dungeon and a creepy door-opens-slowly horror survival game. This one seems a little more digestible, but both of them are meta takes on a vintage genre.
Beyond the Labyrinth was the first game that made me want to get a 3DS, and it was a bitter pill to swallow that it was never picked up for localization. Glad it's out there, belatedly, and for this coverage.
Sounds like Nanashi no Game (or The Nameless Game). It consists of a duology for the DS released in 2008 and 2009, with them being among the select games for the system where you'd hold the system sideways for the first-person 3D exploration, a presentational factor that makes them some of the most beautiful on the system and some of the most compelling use of that screen format next to the Kyle Hyde twosome. The RPG sections are interesting visually too because you might note how close they hew to Final Fantasy sprite art--the telltale character brows, for instance--and assume the team is affecting a very convincing retraux aesthetic, but it's actually much closer to the source, as Kazuko Shibuya herself worked on the sprites. It's notable in her career arc because this was within the decade or so that she wasn't very actively involved in sprite art anymore, and it predates the landmark interview since translated on Shmuplations that made her known in English-language circles to begin with, so it's this great little window into a more lowkey phase of her work. Both of the games have been fan translated so they're very worth trying out.
Sounds like Nanashi no Game (or The Nameless Game). It consists of a duology for the DS released in 2008 and 2009, with them being among the select games for the system where you'd hold the system sideways for the first-person 3D exploration, a presentational factor that makes them some of the most beautiful on the system and some of the most compelling use of that screen format next to the Kyle Hyde twosome. The RPG sections are interesting visually too because you might note how close they hew to Final Fantasy sprite art--the telltale character brows, for instance--and assume the team is affecting a very convincing retraux aesthetic, but it's actually much closer to the source, as Kazuko Shibuya herself worked on the sprites. It's notable in her career arc because this was within the decade or so that she wasn't very actively involved in sprite art anymore, and it predates the landmark interview since translated on Shmuplations that made her known in English-language circles to begin with, so it's this great little window into a more lowkey phase of her work. Both of the games have been fan translated so they're very worth trying out.
There was something like a modem for the Famicom called the Family Computer Network System but it did not allow person to person communication.
I would say yes about the impossibility of the fancier visuals - those look more like a PS2 game to me.
Well, I said last time I was gonna remap the controls and wouldn't be able to take screenshots any more. I tried remapping, and got the movement controls on the d-pad just how I wanted them, but the shoulder buttons weren't working at all. Not sure if I screwed up the remap or if there's some incompatibility in what I wanted to do, but I turned it off and went back to the default controls, which I am now getting used to. I'd still prefer to have sidestepping on the shoulders and turning on the pad, but it's acceptable. And that means I can still take screenshots:
But I wasn't planning to when I started playing so I missed some stuff. We are now inside the tower which was sort of visible in the last screenshot of my previous post (up the stairs on the right), and the woman has gained access to magic. We came across another inscription like the one where we first met her. She was surrounded by light and started freaking out, causing the party to freak out, before she revealed that this had happened before and was nothing to worry about - presumably at the other inscription before we got there. This new inscription talked about a sealed mark, like the old one did, and also mentioned people from another world i.e., us. Afterwards Prof asked if we'd noticed a change. I had not, but wanting to appear observant I said that I had. Fortunately I was not then asked to identify the change - Prof told us it was a mark that had appeared on her right arm (the two lines visible in the image above). Shortly afterwards she noticed for herself. Anyways, from that point a counter appeared at the upper left (initially an unexplained 0/1500). If you look at the picture above, the prediction for the damage the woman will do is now the full 53 HP this enemy has remaining instead of just one.
And now instead of throwing a rock she's using magic too. And it's pretty powerful, if you do it right. I was a little concerned earlier in the game that the combat was going to be too simple and not that interesting, but this wrinkle has really opened it up. And it makes exploring the labyrinth more of a collaboration between my party and the woman, rather than her being largely helpless, which I think is a good thing. One other thing to notice in this picture is the line between her shoulderblades - my party commented on it earlier in the game but I don't think I got a screenshot. Presumably this showed up after she saw the first inscription but she didn't realise because she couldn't see it. The first mark I think gave her the ability to open a sealed door which I also didn't show last time.
She's pretty excited. The way her magic works is that every time my party attack the damage is added to her counter. When her turn comes around (always fifty time clicks between her attacks), she attacks an enemy of her choosing. The damage done is the number in her counter multiplied by her HP percentage. Each time she kills an enemy a few points are added to her counter max (see that it's gone from 1510 to 1520 between screenshots here). So as well as damaging enemies, I also want to be considering when her turn is going to come and how I can best add to her damage total.
Moving along, there's an earthquake. This screenshot is actually a composite of two - the upper screen is earlier in the conversation, but by the time the whole thing was on screen the woman was standing up again and there was no visual sign of the quake. Anyway, the conversation highlights my party's investment in the game world. They seem to have accepted that the world in the game is real - LiLy takes a moment to realise that the quake is only in the game.
I think I took this one to show what the items look like in-game. It's kind of hard to get a shot of them because you don't actually collect them yourself, the woman does. By the time I'm close enough to get a good shot, she's already running up to take it. The lower screen is showing my party's thoughts on the game. The lines before this were "That dark room from before..." "That place had a weird vibe to it...", referring to where we got the woman's magic from. And then they talk about the minimap - a disguised tutorial from Prof.
Anyway, items! Last time I hadn't figured out how to use them - now I have. The box icon on the lower screen reveals the items page. Pretty obvious in retrospect, so much so I guess that they didn't feel the need to include it in the in-game manual. The items here, from left to right:
-Change a character's element.
-Switch a character's contribution to the woman's magic counter between additive or multiplicative (which is what the + symbols next to each party member refer to).
-Skip a turn.
-Absorb all HP shown at the upper right of the top screen (which comes out when you hit an enemy with the element they're weak to). Can also be used to revive a character.
-Reclaim all EXP. Lets you respec.
These are all obviously pretty useful and open the combat system up, particularly being able to skip turns.
Further along, the party give me a tute on hidden doors (the first three lines are battle barks). The differently decorated walls are pretty obvious, at least in this dungeon.
I guess they have Y button keys on their keyboards. Anyway, the hidden doors can be seen, but you won't be prompted for them. My main prompt for finding them is likely to be conspicuous vacancies in the map, though. Press Y facing the wall and it slides away.
I switched Jams to multiplication. This can really boost the woman's attacks, but you have to start with some additions to get something worth multiplying. Here I'm using him to attack a green enemy, which is weak to his level 3 red attack, so I get a 2.20x multiplier. If I were attacking a blue enemy at the same level it would be I think 1.33x. Lower level attacks give smaller multiples too.
This bit of dialogue was the first thing telling how to use items. I'd figured it out myself by this point, but I feel it would have been nice if they'd included it earlier.
Here's me about to lose to the first boss. It's just a big version of the smaller large spirit enemies (the one selected on the lower screen is the little one at the top, not the boss). I'm just realising typing this now that it's a spritual sludge rising through the ground that has the floor stuck to its face to form a helmet shape. Cool design. Anyway, it took out LiLy (who is weak to green attacks) on its first turn and I could not manage any significant damage to it. I had several of the revival items earlier, but I used all but one up fighting one of the silver enemies I referenced in the previous post. This boss has a special property where it absorbs all of the HP from the upper screen (e.g., the 206 green points seen here, but it will also take other colours) on each of its turns.
After dying, I was taken back alone to a corridor in the opening dungeon. I advanced for a bit and got this encounter with a Death Tree. It destroyed me in one attack, and then I got a game over screen. I wonder if I'll reach a point where I'm tough enough to take this thing out?
Turns out I didn't take any screens of my second attempt at this boss, so here's the first one again so I can talk about how I beat it. At this point, I'd upgraded my whole party to have access to level three attacks. I probably should have changed LiLy to red or green so she wouldn't be weak to the boss' attacks, but I got away with it. She still went down to the first attack, but I revived her (one thing about getting hit by an attack you're weak to is that all the HP goes to the upper screen to be resorbed, so you can just get it all back if the turn order goes your way) and it attacked other characters for most of the rest of the fight.
So basically, you want to ensure that you're getting the woman's attack power up between her turns, and that you're not giving the boss too much HP to resorb. The way to do this is to pay attention to the turn order. Level one attacks add 10 points to your clock counter, level 2 add 20, and level 3s add 30. Higher level attacks do more damage and add more to the woman's counter, but it's longer before you can act again. So when you're trying to damage the big enemy, you want the red characters to be hitting it, because it's weak to them, but this also sends large amounts of green HP to the upper screen. To deal with that, choose the attack power that will give Edge his next turn as soon before the boss' turn as possible - then he'll absorb all the HP instead and the boss won't heal as much. I also tried to have Jams take his turn as soon before the woman as possible so that he could do a strong attack on the boss for a 2.2x multiplier to her attack. The minor enemies I took out when the opportunity arose - having LiLy in blue helped with the red ones, and Edge in green was strong against the blue. Long term, it didn't matter if the boss absorbed some of their HP in the process. LiLy went down again to a strong attack from the boss near the end of the fight, but by then I'd taken out the minor enemies (should've changed her element once the red ones were gone) and the others were able to finish off the boss.
Beyond the boss was a path upwards, and I'm outdoors again. On top of the tower, presumably. I had found hidden doors in the tower opening a shortcut back to the bottom, but the game seems to be mostly a forwards trip rather than having a hub from which you go to different areas.
Quite a view up here.
But I wasn't planning to when I started playing so I missed some stuff. We are now inside the tower which was sort of visible in the last screenshot of my previous post (up the stairs on the right), and the woman has gained access to magic. We came across another inscription like the one where we first met her. She was surrounded by light and started freaking out, causing the party to freak out, before she revealed that this had happened before and was nothing to worry about - presumably at the other inscription before we got there. This new inscription talked about a sealed mark, like the old one did, and also mentioned people from another world i.e., us. Afterwards Prof asked if we'd noticed a change. I had not, but wanting to appear observant I said that I had. Fortunately I was not then asked to identify the change - Prof told us it was a mark that had appeared on her right arm (the two lines visible in the image above). Shortly afterwards she noticed for herself. Anyways, from that point a counter appeared at the upper left (initially an unexplained 0/1500). If you look at the picture above, the prediction for the damage the woman will do is now the full 53 HP this enemy has remaining instead of just one.
And now instead of throwing a rock she's using magic too. And it's pretty powerful, if you do it right. I was a little concerned earlier in the game that the combat was going to be too simple and not that interesting, but this wrinkle has really opened it up. And it makes exploring the labyrinth more of a collaboration between my party and the woman, rather than her being largely helpless, which I think is a good thing. One other thing to notice in this picture is the line between her shoulderblades - my party commented on it earlier in the game but I don't think I got a screenshot. Presumably this showed up after she saw the first inscription but she didn't realise because she couldn't see it. The first mark I think gave her the ability to open a sealed door which I also didn't show last time.
She's pretty excited. The way her magic works is that every time my party attack the damage is added to her counter. When her turn comes around (always fifty time clicks between her attacks), she attacks an enemy of her choosing. The damage done is the number in her counter multiplied by her HP percentage. Each time she kills an enemy a few points are added to her counter max (see that it's gone from 1510 to 1520 between screenshots here). So as well as damaging enemies, I also want to be considering when her turn is going to come and how I can best add to her damage total.
Moving along, there's an earthquake. This screenshot is actually a composite of two - the upper screen is earlier in the conversation, but by the time the whole thing was on screen the woman was standing up again and there was no visual sign of the quake. Anyway, the conversation highlights my party's investment in the game world. They seem to have accepted that the world in the game is real - LiLy takes a moment to realise that the quake is only in the game.
I think I took this one to show what the items look like in-game. It's kind of hard to get a shot of them because you don't actually collect them yourself, the woman does. By the time I'm close enough to get a good shot, she's already running up to take it. The lower screen is showing my party's thoughts on the game. The lines before this were "That dark room from before..." "That place had a weird vibe to it...", referring to where we got the woman's magic from. And then they talk about the minimap - a disguised tutorial from Prof.
Anyway, items! Last time I hadn't figured out how to use them - now I have. The box icon on the lower screen reveals the items page. Pretty obvious in retrospect, so much so I guess that they didn't feel the need to include it in the in-game manual. The items here, from left to right:
-Change a character's element.
-Switch a character's contribution to the woman's magic counter between additive or multiplicative (which is what the + symbols next to each party member refer to).
-Skip a turn.
-Absorb all HP shown at the upper right of the top screen (which comes out when you hit an enemy with the element they're weak to). Can also be used to revive a character.
-Reclaim all EXP. Lets you respec.
These are all obviously pretty useful and open the combat system up, particularly being able to skip turns.
Further along, the party give me a tute on hidden doors (the first three lines are battle barks). The differently decorated walls are pretty obvious, at least in this dungeon.
I guess they have Y button keys on their keyboards. Anyway, the hidden doors can be seen, but you won't be prompted for them. My main prompt for finding them is likely to be conspicuous vacancies in the map, though. Press Y facing the wall and it slides away.
I switched Jams to multiplication. This can really boost the woman's attacks, but you have to start with some additions to get something worth multiplying. Here I'm using him to attack a green enemy, which is weak to his level 3 red attack, so I get a 2.20x multiplier. If I were attacking a blue enemy at the same level it would be I think 1.33x. Lower level attacks give smaller multiples too.
This bit of dialogue was the first thing telling how to use items. I'd figured it out myself by this point, but I feel it would have been nice if they'd included it earlier.
Here's me about to lose to the first boss. It's just a big version of the smaller large spirit enemies (the one selected on the lower screen is the little one at the top, not the boss). I'm just realising typing this now that it's a spritual sludge rising through the ground that has the floor stuck to its face to form a helmet shape. Cool design. Anyway, it took out LiLy (who is weak to green attacks) on its first turn and I could not manage any significant damage to it. I had several of the revival items earlier, but I used all but one up fighting one of the silver enemies I referenced in the previous post. This boss has a special property where it absorbs all of the HP from the upper screen (e.g., the 206 green points seen here, but it will also take other colours) on each of its turns.
After dying, I was taken back alone to a corridor in the opening dungeon. I advanced for a bit and got this encounter with a Death Tree. It destroyed me in one attack, and then I got a game over screen. I wonder if I'll reach a point where I'm tough enough to take this thing out?
Turns out I didn't take any screens of my second attempt at this boss, so here's the first one again so I can talk about how I beat it. At this point, I'd upgraded my whole party to have access to level three attacks. I probably should have changed LiLy to red or green so she wouldn't be weak to the boss' attacks, but I got away with it. She still went down to the first attack, but I revived her (one thing about getting hit by an attack you're weak to is that all the HP goes to the upper screen to be resorbed, so you can just get it all back if the turn order goes your way) and it attacked other characters for most of the rest of the fight.
So basically, you want to ensure that you're getting the woman's attack power up between her turns, and that you're not giving the boss too much HP to resorb. The way to do this is to pay attention to the turn order. Level one attacks add 10 points to your clock counter, level 2 add 20, and level 3s add 30. Higher level attacks do more damage and add more to the woman's counter, but it's longer before you can act again. So when you're trying to damage the big enemy, you want the red characters to be hitting it, because it's weak to them, but this also sends large amounts of green HP to the upper screen. To deal with that, choose the attack power that will give Edge his next turn as soon before the boss' turn as possible - then he'll absorb all the HP instead and the boss won't heal as much. I also tried to have Jams take his turn as soon before the woman as possible so that he could do a strong attack on the boss for a 2.2x multiplier to her attack. The minor enemies I took out when the opportunity arose - having LiLy in blue helped with the red ones, and Edge in green was strong against the blue. Long term, it didn't matter if the boss absorbed some of their HP in the process. LiLy went down again to a strong attack from the boss near the end of the fight, but by then I'd taken out the minor enemies (should've changed her element once the red ones were gone) and the others were able to finish off the boss.
Beyond the boss was a path upwards, and I'm outdoors again. On top of the tower, presumably. I had found hidden doors in the tower opening a shortcut back to the bottom, but the game seems to be mostly a forwards trip rather than having a hub from which you go to different areas.
Quite a view up here.
I’m still playing Beyond the Labyrinth, and still really enjoying it. Not taking many screenshots any more though. After the sort of overgrown ruin area I’d reached at the end of my last post, there was a cave full of lava, and now I’ve reached a deserted castle. In the lore of the game we’re climbing out of a valley, which I think only sort of makes sense, which I think is intentional. The castle I’m in at the moment is surrounded by massive cliffs engulfed in clouds. The game remains very good-looking.
In terms of gameplay things have opened up a little more. There have been more interactive elements to the dungeons, with lava flows that can be redirected and holes that can be jumped down. The companion character has also gained a new power which allows me to assign one or more members of my party to act as shields - they will take damage in her place so long as their HP percentage is higher than hers, but they won’t be able to attack. This allows me to heal her, which is great because attrition of her HP was becoming a problem before I found this power. It also makes manipulating the turn order a bit easier because I can skip a turn by having a character briefly go on guard duty. The rock-paper-scissors battle system at first seemed very simple, likely to get boring over the course of the game, but its wrinkles are keeping me thinking through every fight.
I think earlier in the game I was levelling wrong. Levelling is very simple. For 10 exp you can increase a character’s max HP by 50 points. For 500 exp you can give them an extra attack. I was putting all my points into extra attacks and only a few points into HP, which I think gave me a party of glass cannons. I was reviving characters a lot. I’ve since started pouring a lot more points into HP, giving me a bit more staying power. Because any HP taken away by an attack a character is weak to remains on screen to be reclaimed, if you control the turn order adequately any strong enemy attack can be immediately fully recovered from, so long as the character survives the blow itself.
Story-wise, the party continue to chatter away - they talk about being hungry or thirsty, nominate a leader (the player character, surprise surprise), one of them asks if anyone has told anybody else about the other world in the game, another later expresses concern that they might encounter monsters like the ones in the game outside of it. The companion has a few times talked about how strong her magic is getting and joked about using it to take over the world. Possibly the plot implication here is that she’s actually going to do that? The plaques that give her extra powers talk about magic being sealed away, so I wonder if rather than having innocently fallen into this labyrinth she has either come here to gain power or if perhaps the thing sealed in the labyrinth is in fact her and my party are screwing up big time by working to get her out. Time will tell, I guess.
In terms of gameplay things have opened up a little more. There have been more interactive elements to the dungeons, with lava flows that can be redirected and holes that can be jumped down. The companion character has also gained a new power which allows me to assign one or more members of my party to act as shields - they will take damage in her place so long as their HP percentage is higher than hers, but they won’t be able to attack. This allows me to heal her, which is great because attrition of her HP was becoming a problem before I found this power. It also makes manipulating the turn order a bit easier because I can skip a turn by having a character briefly go on guard duty. The rock-paper-scissors battle system at first seemed very simple, likely to get boring over the course of the game, but its wrinkles are keeping me thinking through every fight.
I think earlier in the game I was levelling wrong. Levelling is very simple. For 10 exp you can increase a character’s max HP by 50 points. For 500 exp you can give them an extra attack. I was putting all my points into extra attacks and only a few points into HP, which I think gave me a party of glass cannons. I was reviving characters a lot. I’ve since started pouring a lot more points into HP, giving me a bit more staying power. Because any HP taken away by an attack a character is weak to remains on screen to be reclaimed, if you control the turn order adequately any strong enemy attack can be immediately fully recovered from, so long as the character survives the blow itself.
Story-wise, the party continue to chatter away - they talk about being hungry or thirsty, nominate a leader (the player character, surprise surprise), one of them asks if anyone has told anybody else about the other world in the game, another later expresses concern that they might encounter monsters like the ones in the game outside of it. The companion has a few times talked about how strong her magic is getting and joked about using it to take over the world. Possibly the plot implication here is that she’s actually going to do that? The plaques that give her extra powers talk about magic being sealed away, so I wonder if rather than having innocently fallen into this labyrinth she has either come here to gain power or if perhaps the thing sealed in the labyrinth is in fact her and my party are screwing up big time by working to get her out. Time will tell, I guess.
So I've been pretty addicted to the PC port of Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls. I played it a little bit on PS3 forever ago but didn't get far. Once I read this guide, everything clicked into place - how to make characters certain classes, the whole "back in and out of the menu to get a good roll for bonus points" thing, etc. It's a fairly barebones game - there isn't any dungeon music, though when a battle occurs some music starts up. You can hear distant moans while wandering the dungeon, but rather than feel creepy, it's a bit boring. The town music is good, though.
Anyway, you roll your characters and start exploring the dungeons. After reading the above guide, I rolled a Samurai for my main character (a human female), a Lord, a Fighter, a Thief, a Mage, and a Priest (who I've since reclassed to Bishop). It's a good party - the Thief allows you to pick locks, identify and disarm trapped treasure chests (which are kind of super dangerous early on, since you probably don't have a Cure Poison spell like I didn't right away lol). The Priest learns healing spells, of course, and the Bishop does as well, just at a seemingly slower rate. The Bishop, though, can identify unknown items for free, rather than forcing you to pay the EXORBITANT rate the shop asks for this task. They can also learn some attack spells as well. Meanwhile my Samurai has a "randomly hit all enemies a random number of times" ability for free which is sweet, the Lord can absorb all incoming damage for a turn, and the Fighter fights and the Mage casts spells as you'd imagine lol.
I decided after reading the above guide, I was going to play the rest of the game without looking anything up, just dealing with whatever happens (though I'll often reset if I get a crap level up, which is possible - you can lose stats on level up). The battle system is really fun, and being able to reclass your characters is cool - if a bit difficult. I'd like to reclass my Thief to be a Ninja, but he doesn't have the correct stats (15 for all of them) and alignment (Evil). Getting an Evil alignment isn't difficult, really, you just attack enemies that you encounter when they don't want to fight, and you'll usually lower the alignment of one of your characters randomly. The opposite works if you just leave. The problem is, my Theif doesn't seem to want to gain Intelligence, meaning he'll probably never be a Ninja. Oh well, I've explored into the sixth floor of both the Dungeon of Trials and Shi'in's Dungeon. The difficulty seems pretty fair - there are encounters that can wipe your whole team out if you're unlucky, so saving often is a good idea (and thankfully, you can save anywhere and everywhere, including in the dungeons).
It also plays and runs great on Steam Deck, so being able to play it portably and with a sleep function really improves the experience, imo. Anyway, I've put about 15ish hours into it, and I recommend it.
Anyway, you roll your characters and start exploring the dungeons. After reading the above guide, I rolled a Samurai for my main character (a human female), a Lord, a Fighter, a Thief, a Mage, and a Priest (who I've since reclassed to Bishop). It's a good party - the Thief allows you to pick locks, identify and disarm trapped treasure chests (which are kind of super dangerous early on, since you probably don't have a Cure Poison spell like I didn't right away lol). The Priest learns healing spells, of course, and the Bishop does as well, just at a seemingly slower rate. The Bishop, though, can identify unknown items for free, rather than forcing you to pay the EXORBITANT rate the shop asks for this task. They can also learn some attack spells as well. Meanwhile my Samurai has a "randomly hit all enemies a random number of times" ability for free which is sweet, the Lord can absorb all incoming damage for a turn, and the Fighter fights and the Mage casts spells as you'd imagine lol.
I decided after reading the above guide, I was going to play the rest of the game without looking anything up, just dealing with whatever happens (though I'll often reset if I get a crap level up, which is possible - you can lose stats on level up). The battle system is really fun, and being able to reclass your characters is cool - if a bit difficult. I'd like to reclass my Thief to be a Ninja, but he doesn't have the correct stats (15 for all of them) and alignment (Evil). Getting an Evil alignment isn't difficult, really, you just attack enemies that you encounter when they don't want to fight, and you'll usually lower the alignment of one of your characters randomly. The opposite works if you just leave. The problem is, my Theif doesn't seem to want to gain Intelligence, meaning he'll probably never be a Ninja. Oh well, I've explored into the sixth floor of both the Dungeon of Trials and Shi'in's Dungeon. The difficulty seems pretty fair - there are encounters that can wipe your whole team out if you're unlucky, so saving often is a good idea (and thankfully, you can save anywhere and everywhere, including in the dungeons).
It also plays and runs great on Steam Deck, so being able to play it portably and with a sleep function really improves the experience, imo. Anyway, I've put about 15ish hours into it, and I recommend it.
I've still been playing Beyond the Labyrinth, and have now finished it. I really enjoyed it, but I think it was too long - I had over forty hours on the clock when I finished. There was a time when I saw that sort of game length as a positive, now I'm less keen. Could have used either fewer or shorter dungeons, I think. That said, I probably could have finished much quicker - I looked for all the secret passages, spent some time backtracking, and didn't really get good at the battle system until shortly before the end. Anyways, more screenshots:
This is I think the third dungeon (second if you don't count the intro area). I forget why I took this one, probably for the dialogue. The companion's lines don't go into the log here, so it sometimes doesn't fully make sense. I assume she said something about being friends with the party after the "some kind of magic" line.
This is the fifth area, a deserted castle. I thought I was going to be climbing the tower in the middle of this shot, but actually it just occupies one square on the map and we passed around it. That reminds me - in one of my earlier posts I said I thought it was odd that the grid on the lower screen doesn't align with the map overlaid on it. I realised shortly afterwards that the party moves along the grid, so the map is aligned it's just that the walls aren't drawn along grid lines. Anyway, at this point I think I thought I was getting close to the end. The clouds in the background seem to give way to valley walls and the white area at the top could be sky? Maybe we're getting out of here soon?
Here's the save point after that area. It's kind of still a bit castle-y, but now it's autumn I guess.
Just beyond that is... this. The companion didn't seem to notice, but it freaked my party out. Some kind of hole in space.
I mentioned in a previous post that there's a static effect when the party are in the same space as the companion. I didn't realise for quite a while, but you can get the same thing from enemies, as seen here.
This is the explanation for the portal earlier. There are six sealed magical powers in this game, but it seems like they ran out of ideas after the first three (which were the companion's ability to open doors/activate things, her ability to attack enemies with magic, and her ability to use party members as shields and to regenerate). The fourth, not shown, allows me to change the colour and pattern of her clothes. The fifth allows her to interact with those creepy holes in space, of which there are two in the game - the one I saw earlier and another in the cave where you get the power. I backtracked to the first one and they're each the same as the other - the game prompts you to use an AR card. I didn't have any to hand so I did an image search on my phone. You then point the 3DS camera at the card and it projects the companion standing on it, the idea being that the new power allows her to travel into our world briefly. It makes no difference to gameplay but it is actually kinda neat.
Jumping ahead quite a bit, this is the exterior of the ninth and final dungeon (spoiler warning, by the way, I'm going to write up the ending). It's a big overgrown stone block.
And here's the inside. I thought I'd taken more shots than this one, but oh well. It's quite a good level, I thought - you start off taking a short path to the top of the area where you encounter an invincible enemy you have to run away from, then you go down into the main part of the stage where there are four of five levels, all laid out in a similar grid of square rooms as you can sort of see in my map here. Most of the rooms have obstructions limiting your movement between them, so you have to figure out how to get around, sometimes needing to drop from higher levels to lower ones, while you find and defeat several minibosses that are powering up the big boss at the top of the stage. It's full of secret passages and things and I enjoyed making my way through it.
Here's the formerly invincible Malignant Core which I have now weakened. By this point I've figured out that the best way through fights isn't using my party to do damage (though that also helps) but using them to power up the companion. In this shot I've got two party members set to red, the element the green core is weak to, and two party members each set to addition and multiplication. The amount added or multiplied is effected by the colour system, so having LiLy in blue (which is weak to green) is not optimal. My basic method is to have one party member on defence (taking hits instead of the companion, very important since her death is game over but also because her damage is proportional to her HP - if she's healthy she hits harder), and the others building the companion's magic power.
Here we are after the fight - I've tweaked my party roles to improve my damage output. LiLy is now red, and I have Edge on defence instead of Jams. This gives me two units on multiplication, and all units contributing to the attack were strong against the enemy. Also note their clock counters - Prof (addition) on 22, then the multipliers on 23 and 25. I want their turns to all happen in between the companion's turns so that she doesn't use her magic power before I've built it properly. So the way the fight would go would be Prof attacks, adding a few hundred points to the companion's magic meter. Then Jams would attack, multiplying that by about ten, and then LiLy attacks multiplying it by about ten again and maxing out the attack counter. Ideally I'd then have Edge pop down out of defence to take a turn and absorb all the HP knocked loose by my party, healing him and stopping the enemy getting it, but because the unit on guard's clock timer doesn't count down he generally wasn't in a good position for that so sometimes I'd use items before LiLy's turn to pass the other two's attacks on to him and just accept that the enemy was going to resorb the damage done by LiLy (which would be something like a thousand points compared to the thirteen thousand done by the companion).
It took me a while to figure out I should be focused on increasing the companion's magic rather than just doing damage, but I think I was somewhat hampered by the game's systems - changing colours required either a levelling point (mostly only seen at the save points between dungeons) or using a consumable of limited supply. Admittedly, I had something like fifty of the consumable left over at the end of the game, but if I'd been optimising for every fight I would have run out very quickly. I think I would have preferred if changing colour just required skipping a turn or something, especially considering there are enemies that can change your colour (or switch you between + and x), which can really mess up your ability to deal with situations.
After the big tree we got the sixth and final power - not one whose use was obvious. The description was something about intelligence, and this time the mark appeared on the companion's face, which is sort of visible in this shot.
Up the stairs, and we reach the sky at last. This is the final save point. Maybe I should put the end sequence in a spoiler box.
Moving on, the path out of the valley comes into view. Looking good!
But as we move along the bridge, the stairway seems to recede ahead of us and our path stretches out seemingly without end.
She falls over.
And gets back up all glowy. The voice actor for this line is different to her usual voice.
Whatever's in her has noticed us.
Each of the inscriptions where we got our powers talked about someone ("he") being sealed away for the good of the world. I had wondered earlier if the companion was the thing sealed away, but it looks like she's not. Presumably the sixth power, intelligence, is what has let it come out again.
It throws us into the air and starts destroying the labyrinth and talking about taking over/destroying the world.
This line comes out in the companion's normal voice.
She breaks free.
And of course this thing wants to kill us. I think there was some dialogue here about how killing this thing will remove all magic (i.e., my party) from the world.
And now it's final boss time. This thing has a lot of HP, just to start with. And it's got three shields, one in each colour. I have to defeat them before I can damage it. Basically it's a mirror of our party, who are also able to act as shields for the companion.
This is kind of odd, now that you mention it - the companion's powers seemed to come from the marks on her body, which are now gone. Anyway, she can still attack, that's good for us, let's not question it. On the subject of the fight, the Sealed One's special ability is that it changes colour when you attack it with the element it's weak to (it was red in the last shot, now green). This is great for us, for a few reasons - it can't resorb its own HP if it's changed to a different colour since it came out, and it means I can have a mixed party while still doing good damage. So, like the fight against the core earlier, I have one party member on defence and three attacking. The attackers are all bunched up in the turn order with the + first and two multipliers after. When my red party member attacks the Sealed One while he's green, I do good damage, get a some points to the companion's magic, and the sealed one changes to red. Then my blue party member gets in a strong attack, multiplying the companion's magic by ten or so, and the enemy changes to blue, making him weak to my green party member whose turn is next and whose multiplication maxes out the companion's magic. My fourth party member is losing HP when the enemy attacks, but I've been hoarding healing items all game and now have a decent number of them so I'm able to send all the coloured HP I've been knocking loose to him. The enemy shields regenerate periodically, but there's one of each colour so I'm able to make strong attacks on each with my multi-coloured party, after which the companion attacks the Sealed One, they move in to take the hit and it finishes them all off.
Ah, here's the bit about all magic going away. What will happen if there's no more magic?
My party's magical link to this world will be broken. Oh no!
We defeat him anyway.
And we're back on the bridge with the starfish. One more hit should do it...
One hit which I didn't get a good shot of. Oh well. We hit it (can't remember if it was my player character or the companion who did it) and the static starts up again.
The path between worlds is fading. Even communication in our own world is fading - my party did a lot of chatting, but I don't remember them exchanging contact information at any point. I guess it's goodbye to them, too.
One last moment of clarity, then the fuzz takes over.
I'm back in the game from the start. Alone again.
I start moving through the labyrinth without any input. Oh, it's a credits sequence. For some reason much of it happens walking backwards.
Then we get one last glimpse of the other world. Our companion is climbing the stairs out of the valley.
Then the static returns.
And that's it! I saved clear data, which seems to have overwritten my end game save. Not sure what I get in the new game plus.
I really enjoyed this game, even if it went on a bit longer than I wanted. It looks really nice throughout, the battle system is quite novel and kept me engaged right through the game, and the translation patch is pretty darn good (though as I mentioned in my first post on it there is an instance of the r-word - how much of a problem that is will depend on the individual, but for me I think knowing that it was coming and knowing that the person who put it there regrets it helped). It's a shame it wasn't localised officially.
This is I think the third dungeon (second if you don't count the intro area). I forget why I took this one, probably for the dialogue. The companion's lines don't go into the log here, so it sometimes doesn't fully make sense. I assume she said something about being friends with the party after the "some kind of magic" line.
This is the fifth area, a deserted castle. I thought I was going to be climbing the tower in the middle of this shot, but actually it just occupies one square on the map and we passed around it. That reminds me - in one of my earlier posts I said I thought it was odd that the grid on the lower screen doesn't align with the map overlaid on it. I realised shortly afterwards that the party moves along the grid, so the map is aligned it's just that the walls aren't drawn along grid lines. Anyway, at this point I think I thought I was getting close to the end. The clouds in the background seem to give way to valley walls and the white area at the top could be sky? Maybe we're getting out of here soon?
Here's the save point after that area. It's kind of still a bit castle-y, but now it's autumn I guess.
Just beyond that is... this. The companion didn't seem to notice, but it freaked my party out. Some kind of hole in space.
I mentioned in a previous post that there's a static effect when the party are in the same space as the companion. I didn't realise for quite a while, but you can get the same thing from enemies, as seen here.
This is the explanation for the portal earlier. There are six sealed magical powers in this game, but it seems like they ran out of ideas after the first three (which were the companion's ability to open doors/activate things, her ability to attack enemies with magic, and her ability to use party members as shields and to regenerate). The fourth, not shown, allows me to change the colour and pattern of her clothes. The fifth allows her to interact with those creepy holes in space, of which there are two in the game - the one I saw earlier and another in the cave where you get the power. I backtracked to the first one and they're each the same as the other - the game prompts you to use an AR card. I didn't have any to hand so I did an image search on my phone. You then point the 3DS camera at the card and it projects the companion standing on it, the idea being that the new power allows her to travel into our world briefly. It makes no difference to gameplay but it is actually kinda neat.
Jumping ahead quite a bit, this is the exterior of the ninth and final dungeon (spoiler warning, by the way, I'm going to write up the ending). It's a big overgrown stone block.
And here's the inside. I thought I'd taken more shots than this one, but oh well. It's quite a good level, I thought - you start off taking a short path to the top of the area where you encounter an invincible enemy you have to run away from, then you go down into the main part of the stage where there are four of five levels, all laid out in a similar grid of square rooms as you can sort of see in my map here. Most of the rooms have obstructions limiting your movement between them, so you have to figure out how to get around, sometimes needing to drop from higher levels to lower ones, while you find and defeat several minibosses that are powering up the big boss at the top of the stage. It's full of secret passages and things and I enjoyed making my way through it.
Here's the formerly invincible Malignant Core which I have now weakened. By this point I've figured out that the best way through fights isn't using my party to do damage (though that also helps) but using them to power up the companion. In this shot I've got two party members set to red, the element the green core is weak to, and two party members each set to addition and multiplication. The amount added or multiplied is effected by the colour system, so having LiLy in blue (which is weak to green) is not optimal. My basic method is to have one party member on defence (taking hits instead of the companion, very important since her death is game over but also because her damage is proportional to her HP - if she's healthy she hits harder), and the others building the companion's magic power.
Here we are after the fight - I've tweaked my party roles to improve my damage output. LiLy is now red, and I have Edge on defence instead of Jams. This gives me two units on multiplication, and all units contributing to the attack were strong against the enemy. Also note their clock counters - Prof (addition) on 22, then the multipliers on 23 and 25. I want their turns to all happen in between the companion's turns so that she doesn't use her magic power before I've built it properly. So the way the fight would go would be Prof attacks, adding a few hundred points to the companion's magic meter. Then Jams would attack, multiplying that by about ten, and then LiLy attacks multiplying it by about ten again and maxing out the attack counter. Ideally I'd then have Edge pop down out of defence to take a turn and absorb all the HP knocked loose by my party, healing him and stopping the enemy getting it, but because the unit on guard's clock timer doesn't count down he generally wasn't in a good position for that so sometimes I'd use items before LiLy's turn to pass the other two's attacks on to him and just accept that the enemy was going to resorb the damage done by LiLy (which would be something like a thousand points compared to the thirteen thousand done by the companion).
It took me a while to figure out I should be focused on increasing the companion's magic rather than just doing damage, but I think I was somewhat hampered by the game's systems - changing colours required either a levelling point (mostly only seen at the save points between dungeons) or using a consumable of limited supply. Admittedly, I had something like fifty of the consumable left over at the end of the game, but if I'd been optimising for every fight I would have run out very quickly. I think I would have preferred if changing colour just required skipping a turn or something, especially considering there are enemies that can change your colour (or switch you between + and x), which can really mess up your ability to deal with situations.
After the big tree we got the sixth and final power - not one whose use was obvious. The description was something about intelligence, and this time the mark appeared on the companion's face, which is sort of visible in this shot.
Up the stairs, and we reach the sky at last. This is the final save point. Maybe I should put the end sequence in a spoiler box.
Moving on, the path out of the valley comes into view. Looking good!
But as we move along the bridge, the stairway seems to recede ahead of us and our path stretches out seemingly without end.
She falls over.
And gets back up all glowy. The voice actor for this line is different to her usual voice.
Whatever's in her has noticed us.
Each of the inscriptions where we got our powers talked about someone ("he") being sealed away for the good of the world. I had wondered earlier if the companion was the thing sealed away, but it looks like she's not. Presumably the sixth power, intelligence, is what has let it come out again.
It throws us into the air and starts destroying the labyrinth and talking about taking over/destroying the world.
This line comes out in the companion's normal voice.
She breaks free.
And of course this thing wants to kill us. I think there was some dialogue here about how killing this thing will remove all magic (i.e., my party) from the world.
And now it's final boss time. This thing has a lot of HP, just to start with. And it's got three shields, one in each colour. I have to defeat them before I can damage it. Basically it's a mirror of our party, who are also able to act as shields for the companion.
This is kind of odd, now that you mention it - the companion's powers seemed to come from the marks on her body, which are now gone. Anyway, she can still attack, that's good for us, let's not question it. On the subject of the fight, the Sealed One's special ability is that it changes colour when you attack it with the element it's weak to (it was red in the last shot, now green). This is great for us, for a few reasons - it can't resorb its own HP if it's changed to a different colour since it came out, and it means I can have a mixed party while still doing good damage. So, like the fight against the core earlier, I have one party member on defence and three attacking. The attackers are all bunched up in the turn order with the + first and two multipliers after. When my red party member attacks the Sealed One while he's green, I do good damage, get a some points to the companion's magic, and the sealed one changes to red. Then my blue party member gets in a strong attack, multiplying the companion's magic by ten or so, and the enemy changes to blue, making him weak to my green party member whose turn is next and whose multiplication maxes out the companion's magic. My fourth party member is losing HP when the enemy attacks, but I've been hoarding healing items all game and now have a decent number of them so I'm able to send all the coloured HP I've been knocking loose to him. The enemy shields regenerate periodically, but there's one of each colour so I'm able to make strong attacks on each with my multi-coloured party, after which the companion attacks the Sealed One, they move in to take the hit and it finishes them all off.
Ah, here's the bit about all magic going away. What will happen if there's no more magic?
My party's magical link to this world will be broken. Oh no!
We defeat him anyway.
And we're back on the bridge with the starfish. One more hit should do it...
One hit which I didn't get a good shot of. Oh well. We hit it (can't remember if it was my player character or the companion who did it) and the static starts up again.
The path between worlds is fading. Even communication in our own world is fading - my party did a lot of chatting, but I don't remember them exchanging contact information at any point. I guess it's goodbye to them, too.
One last moment of clarity, then the fuzz takes over.
I'm back in the game from the start. Alone again.
I start moving through the labyrinth without any input. Oh, it's a credits sequence. For some reason much of it happens walking backwards.
Then we get one last glimpse of the other world. Our companion is climbing the stairs out of the valley.
Then the static returns.
And that's it! I saved clear data, which seems to have overwritten my end game save. Not sure what I get in the new game plus.
I really enjoyed this game, even if it went on a bit longer than I wanted. It looks really nice throughout, the battle system is quite novel and kept me engaged right through the game, and the translation patch is pretty darn good (though as I mentioned in my first post on it there is an instance of the r-word - how much of a problem that is will depend on the individual, but for me I think knowing that it was coming and knowing that the person who put it there regrets it helped). It's a shame it wasn't localised officially.
I've been interested in getting back to the early days of the genre and trying out some Wizardry. A bit of old school, wire frame, roll your party, austere, player vs maze dungeon crawlery. Instead, I'm playing:
It's not quite what I expected, though it certainly descends from it. Obviously I wasn't really expecting wire frames, but I did expect to be rolling my own party. Instead, you start the game as an outsider coming to town, and nobody takes any interest in you. You go to the bar and take some quests, and the quest givers join you. Only once you complete their quests and get a name for yourself in town do you get the option to recruit. By which point my party was mostly filled with story characters so I haven't actually rolled any characters beyond the MC.
In what I believe is the Wizardry tradition, there's a town and a labyrinth. The town has various facilities: a temple to heal status problems, the lodgings where you can recover HP/MP and level up, the guild for character creation, class changing, and obtaining special moves, the bar for taking quests and dropping/adding party members, the shop for identifying, buying, and selling items and for creating and learning spells, and a save point. The labyrinth always starts from the same point, but has shortcuts which open up along the way to save retreading the whole thing on every entry.
Here's the labyrinth. Pretty standard stuff, really. At the top right is my stamina (for running) and the mini-map (full map only available through a spell, unfortunately). Bottom right my party's HP and status (the first character if afflicted with fear, hence the green dot). Bottom left is the phase of the moon and my party's trust level (the Japanese characters - we're at level four). The purple thing on the right is an enemy party - all encounters (besides bosses) are visible on screen and move about. This one's a bit hard to make out, so here's another shot of it:
It's kind of a dog shape made out of mist. This is a really nice effect, actually, though it looks better in motion. The shape of the mist gives a clue about what sort of enemy you're going to encounter - bats for flying enemies, human shape for humanoids, and so on. Also visible here is a symbol over the moon at the lower left. I think it's my current trust level, though I have no idea why it's popped up like this. So, what's trust about?
It's about allied actions. The default action in battle in this game is not "attack", it's allied action. These are special moves some or all of your party can do together. The highlighted one here, Rush, causes your whole party to attack the entire enemy party for a fixed amount of damage which seems to be based on your party's levels. It's good for clearing out low level mobs while retreading the early areas of the dungeon. There are also moves which cause two characters to attack together with a damage boost, moves where party members will wait for an enemy to attack and then strike first, blocking the enemy attack and doing some damage, a move for the front row to defend the party, and so on. The higher the party's trust level, the more moves available to you and the more of them you can use per round.
The party's trust level derives from each member's trust of the player character. Kyo here is at the third level of trust and about halfway to the fourth. You build trust by winning battles and by doing things party members approve of - for example if you meet a friendly enemy mob you're given the choice to fight them or let them go - I think letting them go increases the trust of party members of the "Good" alignment. There are also plot choices - early on you encounter two NPCs and are given the option to defend one of them from the other - I think doing so gains approval from Good characters. I think trust also goes down if you let characters die or leave them status afflicted, but I'm not really sure. Alignment is also confusing. I made my player character, Jams, Good during character creation, but he's moved over to evil at some point. I think it's because I tend to mash the action button during the intro to battles and in so doing I've accidentally chosen to attack a lot of friendly mobs. Whoops.
Also visible in the above screen is the inventory system - you get ten slots per character, including equipped items. Let's be blunt: this is a pain. I'm spending way too much time shuffling things around. In a minor but recurring annoyance, you can't swap items between characters, only hand them over. This means if a character's inventory is full you can't even highlight them when you're trying to allocate an item - frustrating when you're deciding who might be best to give an equippable item to, for example. The game also has that classic mechanic - item identification. I can't identify those shields until I go back to town (if I had a bishop in my party, they could do it, but I don't). I think you can use-identify items by equipping them, but there's the risk that they'll be cursed so I haven't tried it yet.
One other dungeon mechanic is this guy - the reaper. It appears seemingly at random - supposedly when you've been on one dungeon level for a long time like Baron Von Blubba, but I've also seen it appear pretty much on arrival in an area so who knows. It chases you around, and if it catches you it'll possess one of your party members - if that character subsequently dies, they'll be turned to ashes. This is reversible at the temple, but I think there's a chance it'll fail and they'll be lost forever. I think in classic Wizardry the game automatically saved after everything and so if that happened it was permanent, but I think in this game I can just save before attempting revival and reload if necessary. I haven't actually had it happen yet. The reaper has also shown up once as a boss, which was a pretty cool encounter that I neglected to screenshot - the fear status in some of my screens is a relic of that battle.
Anyway, back to town: here's the lodgings. Note that two of my characters have "LEVEL UP!" next to their names. Yes, you have to go back to town to level. The old ways are kept. I thought I had a screenshot of the shop interface, but apparently not, so I'll continue my whinge about the items at this point: just as the items are a pain to navigate, the shop is too. Firstly, each time you choose an option a dialogue box pops up which must be dismissed before you can interact with the menu. Some of the actions take you deep into nested menus, and it's slow. You can't access the normal menu when you're in a shop, so if you want to check what spells your characters have before committing to making one (using enemy drops) you have to leave the shop. If you identify an item and give it to someone to equip, and you want to move the item they had equipped over to someone else, or even just check how it'll impact their stats, you have to leave the shop to do it. Basically it's too slow. Everything is multiple steps and there's a delay between steps.
My solution, since I'm playing in an emulator, is to use turbo - I'm turning the speed up to 200% in shops and battles, because both are too slow. Possibly my PAL copy of the game is also a factor in this, since it's an early enough PAL PS2 game that it doesn't have a 60Hz option. Anyway, with 200% speed both battles and the shop interface are bearable. I'd leave it on all the time if not for the moving enemies on the map and the trap interface, which requires you to enter the correct sequence of button presses in a couple of seconds.
One thing I wasn't expecting with this game is the amount of plot. I kind of thought there'd be some exposition, then a dungeon, and then an ending of some sort many hours later. Instead, I'm constantly encountering other people in the labyrinth, and my party often stop to talk about events. This screenshot is from just after the reaper boss fight. If I were to roll a bunch of characters and drop all the plot ones out of my party I'd probably get less of this, but I'm the kind of dweeb who'll use always plot characters over generics.
Anyways, it's not exactly how I expected it to be and interface design has come a long way in the 20 years since it was made, but I'm really enjoying this so far.
It's not quite what I expected, though it certainly descends from it. Obviously I wasn't really expecting wire frames, but I did expect to be rolling my own party. Instead, you start the game as an outsider coming to town, and nobody takes any interest in you. You go to the bar and take some quests, and the quest givers join you. Only once you complete their quests and get a name for yourself in town do you get the option to recruit. By which point my party was mostly filled with story characters so I haven't actually rolled any characters beyond the MC.
In what I believe is the Wizardry tradition, there's a town and a labyrinth. The town has various facilities: a temple to heal status problems, the lodgings where you can recover HP/MP and level up, the guild for character creation, class changing, and obtaining special moves, the bar for taking quests and dropping/adding party members, the shop for identifying, buying, and selling items and for creating and learning spells, and a save point. The labyrinth always starts from the same point, but has shortcuts which open up along the way to save retreading the whole thing on every entry.
Here's the labyrinth. Pretty standard stuff, really. At the top right is my stamina (for running) and the mini-map (full map only available through a spell, unfortunately). Bottom right my party's HP and status (the first character if afflicted with fear, hence the green dot). Bottom left is the phase of the moon and my party's trust level (the Japanese characters - we're at level four). The purple thing on the right is an enemy party - all encounters (besides bosses) are visible on screen and move about. This one's a bit hard to make out, so here's another shot of it:
It's kind of a dog shape made out of mist. This is a really nice effect, actually, though it looks better in motion. The shape of the mist gives a clue about what sort of enemy you're going to encounter - bats for flying enemies, human shape for humanoids, and so on. Also visible here is a symbol over the moon at the lower left. I think it's my current trust level, though I have no idea why it's popped up like this. So, what's trust about?
It's about allied actions. The default action in battle in this game is not "attack", it's allied action. These are special moves some or all of your party can do together. The highlighted one here, Rush, causes your whole party to attack the entire enemy party for a fixed amount of damage which seems to be based on your party's levels. It's good for clearing out low level mobs while retreading the early areas of the dungeon. There are also moves which cause two characters to attack together with a damage boost, moves where party members will wait for an enemy to attack and then strike first, blocking the enemy attack and doing some damage, a move for the front row to defend the party, and so on. The higher the party's trust level, the more moves available to you and the more of them you can use per round.
The party's trust level derives from each member's trust of the player character. Kyo here is at the third level of trust and about halfway to the fourth. You build trust by winning battles and by doing things party members approve of - for example if you meet a friendly enemy mob you're given the choice to fight them or let them go - I think letting them go increases the trust of party members of the "Good" alignment. There are also plot choices - early on you encounter two NPCs and are given the option to defend one of them from the other - I think doing so gains approval from Good characters. I think trust also goes down if you let characters die or leave them status afflicted, but I'm not really sure. Alignment is also confusing. I made my player character, Jams, Good during character creation, but he's moved over to evil at some point. I think it's because I tend to mash the action button during the intro to battles and in so doing I've accidentally chosen to attack a lot of friendly mobs. Whoops.
Also visible in the above screen is the inventory system - you get ten slots per character, including equipped items. Let's be blunt: this is a pain. I'm spending way too much time shuffling things around. In a minor but recurring annoyance, you can't swap items between characters, only hand them over. This means if a character's inventory is full you can't even highlight them when you're trying to allocate an item - frustrating when you're deciding who might be best to give an equippable item to, for example. The game also has that classic mechanic - item identification. I can't identify those shields until I go back to town (if I had a bishop in my party, they could do it, but I don't). I think you can use-identify items by equipping them, but there's the risk that they'll be cursed so I haven't tried it yet.
One other dungeon mechanic is this guy - the reaper. It appears seemingly at random - supposedly when you've been on one dungeon level for a long time like Baron Von Blubba, but I've also seen it appear pretty much on arrival in an area so who knows. It chases you around, and if it catches you it'll possess one of your party members - if that character subsequently dies, they'll be turned to ashes. This is reversible at the temple, but I think there's a chance it'll fail and they'll be lost forever. I think in classic Wizardry the game automatically saved after everything and so if that happened it was permanent, but I think in this game I can just save before attempting revival and reload if necessary. I haven't actually had it happen yet. The reaper has also shown up once as a boss, which was a pretty cool encounter that I neglected to screenshot - the fear status in some of my screens is a relic of that battle.
Anyway, back to town: here's the lodgings. Note that two of my characters have "LEVEL UP!" next to their names. Yes, you have to go back to town to level. The old ways are kept. I thought I had a screenshot of the shop interface, but apparently not, so I'll continue my whinge about the items at this point: just as the items are a pain to navigate, the shop is too. Firstly, each time you choose an option a dialogue box pops up which must be dismissed before you can interact with the menu. Some of the actions take you deep into nested menus, and it's slow. You can't access the normal menu when you're in a shop, so if you want to check what spells your characters have before committing to making one (using enemy drops) you have to leave the shop. If you identify an item and give it to someone to equip, and you want to move the item they had equipped over to someone else, or even just check how it'll impact their stats, you have to leave the shop to do it. Basically it's too slow. Everything is multiple steps and there's a delay between steps.
My solution, since I'm playing in an emulator, is to use turbo - I'm turning the speed up to 200% in shops and battles, because both are too slow. Possibly my PAL copy of the game is also a factor in this, since it's an early enough PAL PS2 game that it doesn't have a 60Hz option. Anyway, with 200% speed both battles and the shop interface are bearable. I'd leave it on all the time if not for the moving enemies on the map and the trap interface, which requires you to enter the correct sequence of button presses in a couple of seconds.
One thing I wasn't expecting with this game is the amount of plot. I kind of thought there'd be some exposition, then a dungeon, and then an ending of some sort many hours later. Instead, I'm constantly encountering other people in the labyrinth, and my party often stop to talk about events. This screenshot is from just after the reaper boss fight. If I were to roll a bunch of characters and drop all the plot ones out of my party I'd probably get less of this, but I'm the kind of dweeb who'll use always plot characters over generics.
Anyways, it's not exactly how I expected it to be and interface design has come a long way in the 20 years since it was made, but I'm really enjoying this so far.
I remember Tale of the Forsaken Land being a really pretty game. It has some verticality within dungeon floors, which is rare to see in this genre, the monster models are detailed and well animated, and I liked the visual novel style character art and the first person attack animations. The battle system with the Allied Actions was cool, though I got a little tired of it eventually. I was really invested in the story by then, though. I guess it's less like a regular Wizardry game but more like a regular JRPG, and a very good one at that.
Yeah!
I've been playing through the Might and Magic series using Where Are We, I'm on 2 at the moment. I've always enjoyed 6, but the older ones just seemed a bit too old. This is a happy medium. It's wild how much of the series DNA was already there, and survived the transition to 3D.
Honestly I prefer this edgy reboot of The Noid
As I move through the third I'm struck by how much of these games is just the process of learning where the cracks are so you can push them. The games are mostly exploration focussed, with you putting together puzzle pieces like a more friendly La Mulana. The entire point is figuring out how to make your party stronger, so that you can break them wide open. If you started each game with a guide it would barely be a game at all.
Labyrinth of Galleria localization finally announced! Labyrinth of Refrain was an extremely mixed bag (lots of clever ideas and a unique, queer story with complex ladies taking the lead roles; awful, awful takes on sexual assault and some gross character designs) but I've heard that the sequel is an across-the-board improvement.
After finishing MM3 I took a break from Might and Magic to play 2 of the other games included on Where are we, Wizardry 1 and 2. Wizardry 1 is a fascinatingly unfinished feeling game. As far as I can tell
All in all to be honest it just makes the first might and magic feel even more impressive.
entire chunks of the dungeon are just unnecessary. You go on a key hunt to eventually get a golden key that does nothing. You go down stairs on each floor to get to the same floor an elevator takes you on, but in a worse place. Meanwhile Wizardry 2 feels like a bizarre add on, where you are required to import characters and as such there's no real progression. The game is also super short at 6 floors. Meanwhile there's a riddle that I'm not sure I even understand in retrospect on the final floor.
Any good dungeon crawlers in the GBA?
I’m sure that there are some Wizardry games on it, but I have no idea if there’s even a fan translation for them
I’m sure that there are some Wizardry games on it, but I have no idea if there’s even a fan translation for them
Shin Megami Tensei (the first one) has a good GBA port which fairly recently received an English translation, which ports the script from the official Atlus iOS localization from about a decade ago--a version of the game that you can no longer buy and play. This preserves the good work done there through a version that has the benefit of like... buttons.
I figured that Elminage would have some sort of a post-game, but I didn't realize how ridiculous the scaling was. I beat the game after a long break with normal Wizardy-like levels (a party in high teens to low 30s, depending on whether they'd re-classed at any point), but looking into it apparently the max level is in the Disgaea-esque 17,000s. I'll drop it if it gets really tedious or requires you to just grind levels, but it's still fun so far.
Hmmm, the quest to open up the post-game area in Elminage was interesting (another case where items are randomly place in dungeons throughout the world like the core premise of the main game, which I think is an interesting and unique approach), and there was a fun conversation in a new hub area when you get there that expands on the world of the game. But after that it seems strictly like a grind to make numbers go up. Maybe I'll come back to it if I want a mindless activity while listening to an attention demanding podcast or something, but for now I think I'm done with this. I think the amount of postgame that apparenty exists is cool, but I don't know if it's for me, at least not while I still haven't played Etrian Odyssey Nexus or Stranger in Sword City yet... (Or the main games of Elminage 2 and 3, for that matter...)