@Play: Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon Finally Localized Into English

‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.

EDIT: Fixed one of the notes ab0ut herbs not giving you fullness, they do, it’s a little sneaky about it is all.

Due to other things going on I haven’t done a recap of the recent Nintendo Directs, but there was one thing mentioned that was extremely relevant to this blog: at long last, Square Enix has released a localization of the first Mystery Dungeon game into English. Here’s a trailer. (2 minutes)

I’ve represented this game before as Taloon’s Great Adventure, and it’s long had a fan translation. Now it has an official way to play it, though it seems like Spike Chunsoft had nothing to do with this recreation. The play seems mechanically very similar to the original, just with much sharper graphics. The characters and monsters are still represented using the original 2D pixel art, just presented in 3D dungeons.

Title screen

There are a few modern Mystery Dungeon niceties, like a bar showing progress towards the next experience level and an on-screen display for fullness, but other than that, and the graphics, and the names localized according to current Dragon Quest sensibilities (lots of onomatopoeia and puns), it’s presented as it was originally released back on the Super Famicom, only now there’s an option for English. (Japanese is still offered as a language option.)

Early monster den

While a surprising amount of Torneko 1 persists even into the most recent Mystery Dungeon game, Shiren 6, there were some minor rule changes that will catch players who haven’t played the earliest game:

  • Equipping arrows uses a turn, even though it’s mostly a user interface help, for there is no play difference between using L to fire one or going into the menu to launch it.
  • In more recent Mystery Dungeon games it is impossible for traps or pregenerated sleeping monsters to block the ways into rooms, but I’ve seen it happen three times here.
  • Torneko 1 is the only Mystery Dungeon game to use Rogue’s idea that, you’re going down into the dungeon to get an item, and once you get it you have to come back out again, through all the levels, the monsters getting easier as you go but no items generating on the way back up. All the later games just have you progress through the dungeon to the goal.
  • On changes I approve of, monsters are more likely to choose directions other than straight ahead in dark intersections, and character healing is much more in line with Rogue than in recent Shirens: it starts slow and increases as you gain levels, instead of starting fast, but decreasing in effect relative to your maximum HP as that goes up.

I always say that the first Torneko Mystery Dungeon game is a lot like Rogue, and the first Shiren is quite a bit like Hack. Well, Torneko is more like Rogue than Shiren’s like Hack. Many monsters have direct analogues. Drackys are much like Rogue’s Bats, Muddy Hands are like Venus Fly Traps, Mimics are similar in both games (some versions of Rogue call them Xerocs), Funghouls are similar to Rattlesnakes and Walking Corpses degrade shields similarly to Aquators degrading armor. And of course Torneko’s Green Dragons are like Rogue’s ordinary Dragons.

Fell into a pit trap

Torneko 1 is most interesting to play if you’re entirely new to the Mystery Dungeon series. Lots of great monsters and items would come in later games, but they’re all absent here. There are no dungeon shops, no pots/jars at all, no monster promotions (though they can gain levels), and no allies, dungeon NPCs or bosses.

The intended progression of Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon is to complete a “Minor Mystery Dungeon,” which teaches the basics. It can be pretty difficult for newbies, even though it’s just 10 levels.

After that’s over, you’re expected to play the normal Mystery Dungeon many times, dying often, but the money you earn going to increasing the size of your shop and the town around it, which adds more amenities to them and more conversations with NPCs there, who go on about their whimsical JRPG lives, engaging in their own petty adventures and dropping more hints to playing the dungeon.

There’s many of these shop upgrades you can earn, but if you know what you’re doing, if you’re experienced at playing Roguelikes in general and Torneko in particular, you can complete the main Mystery Dungeon quest quickly, even on your first try. The ending was written expecting you to have fully developed your shop by this point, so if you win before that point, when Torneko returns to town it’ll be instantly advanced to nearly its ultimate state, and characters you’ve never met will congratulate you on finishing the quest as if they were your oldest friends. All this was true of the original game too, and it was just as jarring there.

It’s best not to wake Legerdemen until you far outlevel them, unless you have the means to safely handle them.

As a typical with Mystery Dungeon games, the main quest is not the biggest challenge. There awaits a bigger task, with more kinds of items and full item identification and that disallows taking items in with you, called the Major Mystery Dungeon. And both the normal and Major dungeons have 99 levels, so if you choose you can explore down to the bottom of both of them.

I should warn you about a problem that has caused great frustration in my experiences with this remake. Mystery Dungeon games let you hold the R button to constrain movement to diagonals. This is necessary because it is really difficult to press two directions on the control pad at once in a single frame. This Torneko remake has this feature, but by default it takes a half-second to kick in. This version plays more slowly than most MD titles, with enforced pauses after actions to make sure the player sees that the monsters don’t act simultaneously with you, that they take their turns after yours. This will make experienced players, like me, try to rush through, and that will result in them making unintended moves when the R button doesn’t kick in instantly, as it does in every other Mystery Dungeon game. This has directly caused me to lose at least two runs, and I hate it.

Another early monster den.

On top of that, probably the worst thing about this game, is its price: $25 for a glowed-up Super Famicom game. You can get its great-great-great-plus-several-more-greats-grandchild Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate (Switch, Steam), for five dollars less, before any discounts, and at this moment on Steam it’s only four dollars! All the Shiren games are much deeper games, loaded with extra content and bonus dungeons. The recently-made Shiren 6 for $36/$40 (Steam currently half off, Switch) is a pretty good version.

I note that the credits to this game have a section for AI content. I don’t think that necessarily means it was used to make this game. On one hand, it would explain that concerning problem with the R button, and a couple of other UI problems. But on the other hand the credits are very long, and seem like they must list every employee at Square Enix. So I don’t know if they used it, but if they do then that’s despicable, and if they did it in order to avoid hiring Spike Chunsoft to port the game they made then that would be extra despicable, and then to charge so much for it on top of that. But I don’t know if is true at this point, so I won’t pass judgement… yet. It might explain the R button problem, and a couple of other weird sloppy bits I’ve noticed.

There is a charm to Torneko, and there are some changes in the later Chunsoft Mystery Dungeons that I don’t approve of, but it’s obvious that Square Enix made it mostly for the nostalgia money. It still makes for a good introduction, but you might want to wait until it goes on sale unless you’re desperate to have it.

But yeah, I was desperate.

What follows is my obsessive notes on this version, largely unedited, in case you’re desperate too.

Some differences from the original:

  • The game plays more slowly, with an enforced pause between player and monster turns
  • Torneko doesn’t automatically turn to face attackers when struck
  • The ‘R’ button doesn’t immediately constrain diagonals, it takes about a half second for it to activate, longer if there’s a message box on the screen (changing the setting “Lock Movement to Diagonal” to Either in Game Settings corrects this, but is annoying in other ways)
  • You can change game balance options to customize your runs, although it might make run ineligible for high scores and achievements
  • Items don’t have descriptions in their item menu like basically every other Mystery Dungeon game, including, I notice, the original. Instead, to find out an items function (provided that it’s identified), you press ZL while selecting it.
  • In addition to the classic B+A button combination to pass turns in place, ZR also does it
  • The game lets you retry a dungeon immediately after failing it, with a Large Loaf in your inventory
  • Land mines destroy nearby items, which I don’t think happened until later Shiren games
  • The options for naming items include a “guess” option that lets you pick from items discovered in all past runs, although it doesn’t seem to actually name the item, it just checks it off of a list
  • In the Play Records menu in the dungeon, there are a number of interesting lists, including all the items and monsters you’ve found among all your runs.

Things it’s useful to know:

  • Equipping arrows uses a turn, which is not common in Mystery Dungeon games
  • High score tables return, a fun but largely unnecessary feature
  • Misses are much more common, from both you and monsters, than in recent Shiren games, don’t be surprised if you miss four times in a row once in a while
  • Herbs don’t give you any fullness (EDIT: this was incorrect; they do give 5 fullness, but it’s added immediately, right when you use the item, not along with the other effects of the herb)
  • Enemies gain experience and can gain levels, but don’t promote into new species as in Shiren
  • Some general advice: Ledgerdemen (a.k.a. Magicians) can easily end your adventure at DL2.

Some other points of interest:

  • This remake borrows the minus-charges convention from recent Sirens, for use of unidentified wands; if you use an unknown wand, it’ll say it’s “-1,” or minus-one, but this is just to remind you how often it’s been used
  • It also displays Fullness on the display, and an experience progress bar
  • The game makes you escape the dungeon after collecting a goal item; carrying the goal item turns off hunger, as it did in Rogue when you found the Amulet of Yendor (and were wearing no rings)
  • No pots or dungeon shops in this game
  • Food items eaten at full do not increase maximum fullness
  • Traps can be generated in room doorways, unlike more recent MD games.

A list of enemy properties:

  • SLIME: weak
  • DRACKY: weak, may move randomly
  • MAULUSC: weak
  • GHOST: moves fast
  • PLATYPUNK: average
  • DROOLING GHOUL: divides sometimes when attacked
  • FUNGHOUL: may caused poisoning
  • BODKIN ARCHER: fires arrows
  • LEGERDEMAN: can put you to sleep, always generates asleep, hard to awaken
  • MUMMY BOY: strong
  • BAG O’ LAUGHS: steals money, leaves money if defeated, may warp away when attacked
  • IMP: Steals an item
  • RESTLESS ARMOUR: high defense
  • WALKING CORPSE: rusts shield
  • LUMP SHAMAN: may teleport player away
  • POWIE WOWIE: generates in groups of four, moves and attacks fast, whole group wakes up when one does
  • LIVING STATUE: looks like dungeon feature statues, remains inert until you approach it, strong
  • ROCKBOMB: stops moving and attacking when low on HP, may explode if then reduced in health without killing it (10 HP left), reducing a nearby player to 1 HP (explosion range 2 spaces in all directions)
  • MUD MANNEQUIN: may perform a weird dance that drains a level
  • MUDDY HAND: may grab Torneko and prevent escaping
  • GOLEM: strong
  • MIMIC: looks like an item until awakened
  • GIGANTES: strong
  • FLOAT-O-COPIER: weak, looks like another kind of enemy but doesn’t have its properties or strength
  • POCUS POPPET: can reduce player maximum strength by 1, or maximum HP by 5
  • SILVAPITHICUS: fast to move and act
  • WINKY: can mess with player controls, can affect from anywhere in sight
  • ARCHDEMON: strong
  • SHADOW: invisible, may move randomly; if you try to move into a space but can’t for some reason, it’s because a Shadow is in the way
  • GREEN DRAGON: strongest monster, may breathe fire, worth 3,000 XP

A few items:

  • PEEP SCROLL: this game’s name for the famous Scroll of Identify
  • SUSTAINING RING: Torneko doesn’t get hungry!
  • MOD ROD: Transforms target into another monster
  • PROFITIER RING: sells for a lot, that’s all, no other effect
  • SANCTUARY SCROLL: prevents adjacent monsters from attacking in melee
  • SNOOZE WAND: puts target to sleep
  • EVAC SCROLL: escapes the dungeon
  • CHEST OF CHEER: Your objective

Some items that appear, unidentified at first, in the Major Mystery Dungeon:

  • SANDS OF TIME SCROLL: resets the dungeon level (including your stats, inventory and level) to the state it was in when you first entered it
  • WANDERFUL SCROLL: asks you to pick an item like the Peep Scroll does, but charges a wand
  • BREAD SCROLL: asks you to pick an item like the Peep and Wanderful Scrolls do, but turns the selected item into a Large Loaf
  • COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO RING: doesn’t keep you awake as you may expect it to do, instead monsters wake up when you enter or leave a room.
  • GOBSTOPPIBG SCROLL: player cannot use their mouth, meaning, no eating food or herbs or reading scrolls
  • REVEALING RING: Shows invisible things
  • SAFETY RING: Prevents being caught in traps

Gamefinds: Entropy

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

Unexpectedly today SquareEnix not only announced but released a remake of the first Mystery Dungeon game, plus the first of the new Rifftrax Experiment episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 hit theaters, so it’s been a full day on top of recovering from DragonCon.

But I just noticed that Roger Dodger over on Metafilter posted a link to a daily cryptogram puzzle, and that seems like the kind of thing all of you may enjoy, maybe long enough to tide you over to tomorrow.

Cryptograms are a pretty old concept, taking the old idea of a Caesar cypher, a code where each letter throughout a message is replaced with a different letter consistently throughout the whole code, and making it into a puzzle. Although true Caesar cyphers shift the letters down the alpha instead of arbitrarily as in most cryptograms. By default punctuation and spaces are revealed from the start, but if you like your puzzles extra hard you can disable even these helps.

If you want a few tips?

  • Single letters are probably A, or once in a while I.
  • Every word is bound to have at least one A, E, I, O, U or possibly Y.
  • The most common three-letter word is, of course, THE.
  • There are only so many two-letter words likely to appear in a puzzle like this.
  • Double letters are great for narrowing things down. Also be on the lookout for possible plurals.

DragonCon 2026 Aftermath

Well another DragonCon is done for the year. I currently sit in the Westin, a high class hotel I ordinarily could never afford, here after the con has concluded only by the grace of a roomshare, a bunch of people who chip in for a room together, an arrangement I think is ordinarily against the rules, but hotels put up with because it ultimately gets them more business for a thing like DragonCon.

DragonCon bills itself as “the largest multi-genre and pop culture convention in the world.” That may seem artfully put, and it may be, but DC casts a very wide net of subjects. A few examples, it hosts an “Apocalypse Rising” track of world-ending fiction, a Military Sci-Fi track in addition to tracks for general sci-fi, Star Trek and Star Wars, a Digital Media track, a British culture and media track, Anime and general animation tracks, a puppetry track that’s a lot of fun, and much more.

DragonCon crosses with this blog’s umbrella via the Video Gaming track and associated events, including two arcades, a console gaming space, and (though it takes a bit of exploration to find) a couple of installations of Artemis Cosmos, formerly known at the Artemis Starship Bridge Simulator.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is not directly involved, but has a relationship with Electronic Frontier Georgia, and they maintain a small but informative presence there. Yet while there is are fair number of game-related activites there DragonCon is not generally thought of as one of the big video gaming conventions, in a field containing the PAXes, or even Southern Fried Gaming Expo, which takes place in the same city a month earlier, and has hundreds of video arcade and pinball machines.

This was the 40th anniversary of the convention, which had 80,000 attendees in 2017, and fills five hotels and multiple floors of two other buildings besides. This year they hosted Richard Garriott, a.k.a. Lord British, who was involved in multiple panels. Garriott was in fact a guest at the first DragonCon back in 1987, and has returned occaisionally since. I met him at one of his panels, and he said he’d answer my questions via email. I haven’t written them yet, and when he sees the kinds of things I ask he may have second thoughts about it. We’ll see.

Stephen Seitz once again ran his multiple Gamecube gaming panels at night, where people could pop in to play video games like Smash Bros. Melee and the original Kirby Air Ride, set up to play using the Gamecube’s little-used LAN mode. Air Ride is starting to look a little long in the tooth now, finally, that a greatly expanded sequel is out for the Switch 2, but the original is still very playable.

The two arcades at DragonCon this year, as in recent years, were the retro-themed Joystick Gamebar, serving alcoholic drinks and classic arcade games and pinballs, and Save Points mostly Japanese lineup. Of the two I enjoyed Joystick’s more this time. Arcade games at cons often end up a little cursed; for example, the Twilight Zone machine never felt like its flippers lined up well with ramp shots, and the upper flipper was a bit weak making it hard to hit the important Piano shot.

The best-playing pin at Joystick this year was White Water, a classic Williams machine with high risk/high reward play. At one point I had the Grand Champion score on the machine at 524 million, although I got edged out later on. I got to show off Ed Boon’s secret “EJB” menu in Mortal Kombat II a few times to interested players. A few other great games there this time were Joust, Gauntletn Atari Tetris, NBA JAM, Donkey Kong, Frogger and multiple Pac games.

Save Point’s arcade tends to skew heavily towards Japanese rhythm and fighting games, some of them recent, which aren’t my favorite types so I don’t have a great deal to say about them. In previous years they brought out the Japan-only arcade version of Rhythm Heaven, Sega’s weird Cosmic Smash, a Point Blank sequel and, most interesting of all, Rainbow Bombergirl. The most interesting games there this time out were Sega’s Monkey Ball (the predecessor of the console Super Monkey Ball series), a Japanese Tetris game, the original Space Invaders, a sped-up Ms. Pac-Man and, in the arcade area, Bally’s classic World Cup ’93.

Next year my plan is to volunteer in the board gaming and RPG tracks. I hope that I get in for, while I know a number of money saving tricks, DragonCon gets more expensive for me to attend every year. Here are some photos from this year’s convention, with commentary.

From Mortal Kombat II’s EJB Menu
World Cup Soccer ’94
The ever-charming Richard “Lord British” Garriott, after his talk about his plans for reviving Ultima once he, due to a quirk of copyright law, wrests control of it away from Electronic Arts.
Monkey Ball! They also had The Typing of the Dead, but it wasn’t nearly as well-localized as the English Dreamcast version, and all the text was Romanized Japanese words.
The banner for the Joystick Gamebar, posted on the outside of its temporary location in a defunct Benihana.
BE ADVISE! ESTROOM FOR TRONS ONLY!

Sundry Sunday: Why ProZD Doesn’t Play Fighting Games

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Still DragonCon. Still low effort posts. Here’s ProZD on why he doesn’t play fighting games (23 seconds).

Tomorrow is the last day. Back at it then. Richard Garriott is at DragonCon again this year, maybe I’ll be able to make a post about his talk.

Gamefinds: Estimania

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

It’s Saturday and DragonCon is now in Day 3, so here’s another quick post that I prepared ahead of time.

Estimania is a simple web quiz game that asks you five numeric questions every day. It doesn’t expect you to absolutely know any of them, although in the rare chance that happens you’ll get a perfect score of 100 for that question. Most of the time though you’ll have to guess, making a good estimate of the answer, and the closer you are the closer to 100 your score for it will be.

A question from a few days ago….

After five questions you’ll be told your total score, and how your answers rank among the others who have taken that quiz for that day.

…and the answer to that question, with an explanation, along with my score for that day. I did okay that time.

It’s quick and fun! It also lets you try the previous day’s quiz, although your score won’t be counted in the stats for that day, or its leaderboard.

U Can Beat Videogames’ Top 100 Secrets & Strategies

We’re still in “low effort” mode here while DragonCon is going on, so here is a video list (2 hours 26 minutes long) of U Can Beat Videogames‘ 100 “top” secrets in games, whatever “top” means here. Most popular? Most famous? Can’t say. It does serve as an entertaining condensation of years of UCBVG’s strategy videos. Watch it directly to remember old games, or leave it on in the background while you do other things.

An Online Place Called Samhan

The internet has been around in one form or other since the 1960s, but we can date the creation of the first web browser to Christmas Day, 1990. But there have been other services upon the internet, and although people don’t mention this nearly as often as they once did, they deserve to be recognized separately. The internet is not the Web.

Some of these services, which actually began off the internet itself, as features on private networks, are MUDs, or “Multi-User Dungeons,” the first form of what are now called MMORPGs. And one type of these is the graphical MUD, where you don’t have just a parser and a text crawl telling you your surroundings and what’s happening, but you can see your character and what lies around them.

To my knowledge the first graphical MUD is not a settled question. Here are a few early MUDs and MUD-like worlds: Habitat, Club Caribe, Isle of Kesmai, Neverwinter Nights (the AOL version). Before all of these though there were the multiplayer dungeons on ancient PLATO systems, which were frequently presented graphically. Some later graphical worlds include Worldsaway, The Palace, Ultima Online, the oft-forgotten Sims Online, Runescape, Legends of Kesmai, Everquest, Second Life, World of Warcraft (of course), Conan Exiles, Glitch, and a slew of other titles. Now I think it’s safe to say there have been more forgotten online graphical worlds than remembered. Some of these forgotten games were even popular. Who remembers Asheron’s Call? Dark Age of Camelot? City of Heroes? The answer: a cadre of former members who retain fond memories of it, even after Capitalism demanded that the world they once lived in sink beneath the cold waves.

One of these worlds was, and still is, called Nexus.tk. While Nexus continues to survive through the years, a while ago a number of players splintered off from it and started a new game along its lines, Chronicles of Samhan, which is now open for a “soft launch.” A friend-of-the-blog, the worthy Statue, is interested is involved in its running, and they care very deeply about it, and if they care, we care too. Here is a screenshot:

It has purposely pixel art-ish graphics, a tile-based game world, monsters to fight, items to earn and levels to gain. Right now there aren’t many players, but that itself is a point of interest, a way to get in early and gain wealth and stature when the competition is low. I know that Chronicles of Samhan is run on a shoestring budget, completely on the backs and out of the wallets of a handful of hobbyists. They are unlikely to go corporate and enshittify it to hell, and these days that’s another point in its favor.

There have been many of these worlds, hundreds of them, and there’ll probably be hundreds more before this Internet grinds to a halt. I think everyone should try a few of them. Joining up is free, so as I often say, why not give it a try?

A few images showing off the fairly large regions to explore:

A portion, zoomed out, of the town of Seasong and nearly areas
A portion of the Marvel Mines

Mr. Game & Watch’s Judge Isn’t Completely Random

We linked to videos in PKBeats’ long Smash Bros trivia series recently, but while perusing some other things they’ve uploaded this came up (18 minutes), and frogdarnit, it was too interesting to let pass. You could also load the video starting directly at the start of the discussion, almost three minutes in. Text info below.

Here’s the gist. In the Smash Bros. series, Mr. Game & Watch has a move called Judge, where he holds up a sign with a number from 1 to 9, and depending on the number one of nine different effects can happen, with possibilities like dropping food, producing a fire effect, damaging G&W himself, or, if a 9 comes up, executing an extremely powerful attack like a slightly weaker version of the game’s famous Home Run Bat item, that usually KOs an opponent.

The number that appears, and so the effect product, for the most part seems random, and a good thing too with Number 9’s immense power. Judge never executes the same move twice in a row, so if a 9 wasn’t the last result produced, you have a ⅛th chance to get it the next time… usually.

It had been noticed by some that, in certain circumstances, Judge produces a 9 result much more often, like half the time, but the details of the phenomenon were not fully known. Through sheer bloody-minded experimentation, PKBeats found out that the result is largely due to whether Mr. G&W is behind in scoring, and not just behind, but far behind. I’ll let the video give the precise lowdown, but in essence Mr. Game & Watch must have half or less of lives (sorry, “stocks” in Smash lingo) remaining compared to his opponent, and there must be 30 seconds or less left in the match.

So: it’s yet another catch-up mechanic, a way for G&W to clear opponents rapidly if it looks like he’s going to lose. Since it only comes into play at the end of a match, it almost never can make a difference though unless G&W is on his last life, and his opponent has two lives left. In that scenario G&W has a good chance of getting off a 9 and taking off a stock immediately… putting both characters on their last stock, and now G&W has to run up his opponent’s percent in the short remaining time without the increased Judge 9 chances. Doesn’t seem too useful, but then if it were actually useful, someone out there would probably have built a strategy off of it, so I guess it’s for the best that it’s so infrequent.

NeoGamer Presents 200 Weird Games

We’re approaching DragonCon again in a few days, meaning my time is going to be taken up with wandering around and probably playing more of Bombergirl in their game room. So for the next week it’s low effort posts to make our demanding once-daily schedule. Here we go!

NeoGamer on Youtube has an entertaining, not to mention loooong, video with short clips from 200 strange games they’ve played in their channel. (1 hour 27 minutes) Right off the bat they start out weird, and they don’t let up. Please consume responsibly.