Posted by Strider on 4/28/2009, 6:46 pm
Very little of the gaming press seems to be aware that this game exists- it was released last week and didn't even have a Wikipedia page until a few days later- so, as the one person who actually went out and bought it, I thought I should write up something sooner rather than later.
Unfortunately, I have to talk about Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land first, as I feel obligated to every few months.
Nobody's heard of Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land. It was an early-generation PS2 game, a descendant of the venerable Wizardry dynasty that began in 1981- the earliest days of commercial gaming. Like those games, it was a first-person dungeon crawler; you journeyed to a town, recruited party members, accepted quests, and explored the One Big Dungeon. While it retained the oldschool structure and feel, though, it mixed in a good dose of new-school sensibilities- the notoriously uneven difficulty of the Wizardry series was balanced out, some additions were made to the bare-bones Wizardry combat system, the dungeon and its' environs were rendered in pretty polygons, and an actual plot was added to drive the action. The plot, while it eventually resorts to a set of standard anime tropes, takes its' time getting there, sends you through a setting that is more unusual than it appears at first, and populates its' world with an array of interesting, likable characters. The art style is more westernized than most Japanese RPGs, and- if nothing else- provides a welcome change from the "Generic Anime" look that many JRPGs of the time developed.
It had its' faults, sure- the graphics were very first-generation-PS2 and the level designs in the latter third of the game were significantly weaker than what had come before, but it was fun. It was refreshing. It was quite possibly the most enjoyable RPG I've played in the past five years, and since then I've been trying to hunt down anything else like it and failing.
While there have been a couple further sequels to Tale- presumably done in the same style- none of them made it to the US, and I can't stand playing RPGs where all the text is encoded in lunar sigils. The 'mainline' Wizardry games- particularly Wizardry 8- actually moved away from the traditional Wizardry model in the unimportant cosmetic ways and did not have the interesting storyline or more appropriate difficulty level that had been part of Tale's atraction. The emulated and translated Shin Megami Tensei games weren't really what I was looking for, and at times seemed entirely constructed of rough edges- my wierd relationship with this series is the stuff of another post, I think, but at any rate they didn't scratch the right itch. I picked up Deep Labrynth shortly after I picked up my DS hoping for something similar to Tale, and was sadly disappointed in it. Etrian Odyssey retained the feel of some of the early games, but lacked Tale's plot and kept the punishing difficulty curve of the originals (and I can't say I enjoyed drawing my own map, either).
This brings me to The Dark Spire.
The Dark Spire is the most recent first-person dungeon crawl I've invested in for experimental purposes. Like many of its' brethren on my shelf, it's an Atlus release, so I do reccomend going out and picking it up sooner rather than later if what I'm about to say interests you. It first came to my attention when one of the promo videos was posted over on the Hardcore Gaming 101 forums, showing off the unique art. I kept an eye on it, and noting the Atlus-ness of the game, picked up a copy as soon as it hit the stores and have now played for a couple hours.
Like the Wizardry series and Etrian Odyssey before it, the game is mostly an oldschool dungeon-crawl through (mostly) one huge dungeon, the titular Dark Spire. You control a party of four adventurers; as far as I know, all of these characters are custom-generated. It's not clear at this point how much customization is really available for characters- each character begins with randomly-generated stats and can be assigned to one of four initially-accessible classes (Fighter/Theif/Mage/Cleric), but you are free to 'buy' levels in any of the primary classes as you go (and, according to the manual, 'hybrid' classes become available later on, but I haven't played nearly long enough yet). You are also allowed to upgrade your statistics (which has a huge price tag) or buy any of a number of different 'skills', which vary from the useful ("Lockpicking") to the bewildering ("Dancing"). A seperate section for "oaths" that a character has taken is available as well, and various systems seem dependent on the alignment of your characters and the favor of the gods. I'll have to play more before I can really comment on any of that.
The equipment and battle system is kind of interesting- it seems to operate like D&D (and many of the earlier Wizardry/Bard's Tale games) under-the -hood; you've got an armor class that starts at 10 and goes down as you equip more armor, and weapons don't seem to bear any indication of attack power save price. A number of 'special' attack and defense commands (to, say, make a strong attack at the cost of AC or counterattack when defending instead of reducing your AC) seem to be dependent on what equipment you have, but the internals aren't really documented at all. Price seems to be a rough indicator of a weapon's power, but again, it's going to take a while to muddle through everything.
The graphics and sound are very nice. The music is catchy, and I really dig the chunky, stylized comic-book look and feel everything has. The various icons and things might become a problem- they used seemingly-random abstract icons instead of the more standard icons to indicate what type of item a particular item is- but I'll have to see whether I get used to it or not. As a bit of a gag, a "classic mode" is available, which replaces the dungeon walls with wireframes straight out of the early Ultima games, enemies in combat with Dragon Warrior-style 8-bit sprites, and the music with chiptune remixes. It's entertaining for novelty purposes, but I can't see myself playing it that way for a long time.
I've actually enjoyed the game a lot so far. The overall package and presentation is good, and it brings a new-school approach to interface which does away with a lot of the little warts and annoyances that mar many of the older games I've mentioned above. The difficulty level is more reasonable than Etrian Odyssey's so far, and much more reasonable than the oldschool games it imitates ever were. Despite the fact that many of the game's features aren't documented at all yet, I feel like I have a much better idea of what I'm doing than I did in Etrian Odyssey. Part of this is likely thanks to the more straightforward character development system and familiar D&D-ish class selection as opposed to Etrian's MMO-derived and wierdly-named selection (I've played enough D&D-derived games to know what a Theif does, but what the hell is a 'Landsknecht'?). The fact that character development is fairly strictly level-based rather than skill-based also makes me feel like I'm less likely to make an unfixable and irrevocable error in charcter 'builds'.
The down side to all of this is that the plot- well, so far, it's borderline-nonexistent. This is pretty much de rigeur for a game of this type, but Tale did such a good job of it that I've been hoping for something more ever since. I can't really comment beyond this, but it's a bit of a shame that it seems to have fallen by the wayside.
Have I found another Tale of the Forsaken Land? Well, with the apparent emphasis away from plot in The Dark Spire, the answer, sadly, appears to be not quite- but what I have found is a solid dungeon crawler which seems to be lacking many of the warts that typically mar the genre, and one that I think deserves more attention than it seems to be getting.
- HC
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