Tag: dragonquest

@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

Kit & Krysta Explore a Secret Game Dev Hangout in Tokyo

I am SO ENVIOUS. Kit & Krysta, formerly of the official Switch video podcast Nintendo Minute, currently of their own projects and Youtube channel, got cell phone video of an amazing place, a location in Tokyo somewhere that gamedevs sometimes meet at, and is crammed tightly with game memorabilia. It’s almost a museum all to itself, and unlike the Nintendo Museum, seems like they don’t mind video footage escaping their confines, although on the other hand this doesn’t seem to be open to the public. It doesn’t look like a lot of people could fit in there at once, anyway!

I usually steer well clear of the hard sell, or “prompt for engagement,” when it comes to asking you to follow links and view videos from here. I figure if you’re interested you’ll click through, and if you’re not, then maybe tomorrow. But I’m breaking through that reserve just this once, as this place is amazing. You really have to see this if you have any interest in Nintendo, APE, Pokemon, Dragon Quest or their histories (12 minutes):

Our Private Tour of the Top Secret Nintendo Game Developer Hangout in Tokyo (Youtube, 12m)

Who the Heck is Dragon Quest’s Mutsuheta?

Kurt Kalata’s Hardcore Gaming 101 posted an article telling us about Mutsuheta, renamed Mahetta in the English localization for the NES. Mutsuheta is one of those figures who only appeared in the original game’s manual. Mutsuheta was the prophet who foretold that a descendant of the great Loto/Erdrick would arise and defeat the armies of the Dragonlord. Other than his mention in the manual, however, he doesn’t appear in any of the games of the Erdrick trilogy, and never appeared onscreen until the first Dragon Quest Builders, where he’s an NPC. He was renamed Myrlund in its English translation, but in Japanese he’s got the name of the character from the manual.

The story from Dragon Warrior, the original English port of Dragon Quest (image from HG101)

Reading this, I was reminded of https://zeldawiki.wiki/wiki/Impa, Zelda’s nursemaid/servant, who was a similar kind of manual-only backstory figure until Ocarina of Time, where Impa not only appeared as an important NPC, but was revealed to be of the secretive Sheikah tribe, and had ninja skills to boot. She looked a lot different from the aged figure in The Legend of Zelda’s manual.

Impa in the manual to The Legend of Zelda
Impa in Ocarina of Time. Quite a different interpretation.

Time Extension: Why Do So Many Japanese RPGs Use European-Style Fantasy Worlds?

Time Extension has come up here a lot lately, hasn’t it? It’s because they so often do interesting articles! This one’s about the propensity of Japanese games to use medieval European game worlds, the kinds with a generally agrarian society, royalty, knights, and their folklore counterparts elves, dwarves, fairies, gnomes and associated concepts.

They often fudge the exact age they’re trying to depict, with genuine medieval institutions sitting beside Renaissance improvements like taverns and shops. Nearly of them also put in magic in a general D&D kind of way, sometimes institutionalizing it into a Harry Potter-style educational system.

Notably, they usually choose the positive aspects of that setting. The king is usually a benevolent ruler. It’s rare that serfdom and plagues come up. The general populace is usually okay with being bound to the land. The Church, when it exists, is sometimes allowed to be evil, in order to give the player a plot road to fighting God at the end.

Hyrule of the Zelda games is likely the most universally-known of these realms, which I once called Generic Fantasylands. The various kingdoms of the Dragon Quest games also nicely fit the bill. Final Fantasy games were among the first to question those tropes, presenting evil empire kingdoms as early at the second game.

Dragon Quest
(All images here from Mobygames)

John Szczepaniak’s article at Time Extension dives into the question by interviewing a number of relevant Japanese and US figures and developers, including former Squaresoft translator Ted Woolsey. I think the most insightful comments are from Hiromasa Iwasaki, programmer of Ys I and II, who notes that this Japanese conception of a fantasy world mostly comes from movies and the early computer RPGs Wizardry and Ultima, that the literature that inspired Gary Gygax to create Dungeons & Dragons (which in turned inspired Wizardry and Ultima), especially Lord of the Rings and Weird Tales, were generally unknown to Japanese popular culture. Developer Rica Matsumura notices, also, that there is a cool factor in Japan to European folklore that doesn’t apply, over there, to Japanese folklore.

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

It’s a great read, that says a number of things well that have been bubbling up in the back of my head for a long time, especially that JRPGs recreated both RPG mechanics and fantasy tropes at a remove, that they got their ideas second hand and, in a way similar to how a bunch of gaming tables recreated Dungeons & Dragons in their own image to fill in gaps left in Gary Gygax’s early rulebooks, so too did they make their versions of RPGs to elaborate upon the ideas of Wizardry and Ultima without having seen their bases.

Why Do So Many Japanese RPGs Take Place In European Fantasy Settings? (timeextension.com)

U Can Beat Video Games: Dragon Warrior III

I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time! U Can Beat Video Games has finally covered the best NES Dragon Warrior, the third game in the series. It was Dragon Quest III in Japan, due to some trademark issue with TSR I think. IV isn’t bad, and has fun characters, but there aren’t as many variant strategies in it, and in the last chapter you don’t get to control the actions of most of your party members. DWIII always gives you full control of your characters, plus it lets you create characters with names and classes of your choosing, meaning, like the first Final Fantasy, you can make completely custom parties and play the game in many different ways. It was the game that spawned the urban legend that the Japanese government requested that Enix release Dragon Quest games on weekends, because so many people ditched work to stand in line to buy it. (I don’t know if it’s true, but the story has often been passed around.)

It’s also the first Dragon Quest/Warrior game that allows for class changing, which resets a character to Level 1 (similar to an human AD&D character who dual-classed), but only halves their stats, and lets them keep all the spells they learned. Since they’re Level 1 again, they gain levels very rapidly for a while, allowing them to quickly surpass their previous heights. It’s kind of an early version of the “prestige” mode of clicker games, where you reset all your progress in exchange for faster progress afterward!

It also has a cool story that eventually connects with the first two games, and has a good variety of activity, including growing a town from scratch like 25 years before Breath of the Wild and betting on monster fights! It’s also got all the challenge of the early Dragon Quest games, with later monsters who can cast instant death spells on everyone in your party at once, as well as doing other horrible things to them.

Because Dragon Warrior III doesn’t pull its punches against the player, the various tricks that the narrator does to use the engine’s bugs against it feel like playing fair, and yet, even with full knowledge of the game and multiple player leveling and cash gaining strategies he still has problems once in a while. It’s a really tough game!

This may end up being U Can Beat Video Games’ magnum opus, at least of the NES era, it’s a really long game that takes three videos, of almost 12 hours total length, to cover in its entirety! Here they are:

EPISODE ONE: Creating Your Party Through to Getting the Ship (3 hours, 59 minutes)

EPISODE TWO: Getting the Ship through to Defeating Archfiend Baramos (4 hours, 22 minutes)

EPISODE THREE: The Dark World to the Final Boss, Plus Extras (3 hours, 35 minutes)

Please enjoy, and Rubiss help us all!

Romhack Thursday: Dragon Warrior x10

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

The early days of JRPGs contain many games that are kind of difficult to play today. The genre was just getting formulated, and while there was a lot of ingenuity and interesting ideas being played with, there were also many games where difficulty, and grind, were the entire point. When a game as simple as Dragon Quest, known first in the US by its localized title Dragon Warrior, had to justify its sale price, it had to present players with an experience that would be as long as a challenging NES platformer, or longer, within its limited memory space, and it did so with grind, asking players to accept fighting hundreds of monsters one-on-one in a basic menu-based combat simulation as fun enough to make up for most of the game.

At the time, in Japan, it worked, but it’s telling that Dragon Quest II has much deeper combat, and many more kinds of monsters, than its predecessor had. Dragon Warrior had a tough time breaking into the US market because of its simple gameplay, enough so that eventually Nintendo, who published the game in North America, resorted to giving away copies as a subscription premium for Nintendo Power.

What was a tough sell to Western players even then is much more difficult to enjoy now. Compare it to the much deeper, not to mention longer and better animated, titles made later in the series. It’s mostly enjoyable only for nostalgia factor and historical interest.

I’m not going to claim it fixes everything the game, but this hack improves its play a lot by decreasing gold prices and experience requirements ten-fold. It decreases costs: changing the earn rate of these quantities would very quickly hit Dragon Warrior’s fairly low variable caps, since the game stores both in 16-bit values. You can take the 120 gold you get from the King’s chest, buy an 18 gold Copper Sword in Brecconary, then run to the north-west to Garinham and buy the sturdy Half Plate armor for 100! With these items, even at low levels, you should be able to vanquish all of the enemies in this section of the map, except perhaps Magicians, whose Hurt spells bypass armor. But it only takes defeating one Slime to reach Level 2, two more for Level 3, and two more than that for Level 4. Slimes won’t suffice for long, but by that point you can munch on much stronger foes. This greatly reduces the number of fights a player must win to complete the game, and makes it possible to finish in less than two hours.

You can very quickly rise to decent levels of power in the starting area! You’ll still be humbled if you try to rush late-game enemies, but you don’t have to spend long building your character at all.
This guy is the Magic Refill Wizard. Don’t pay those exorbitant Inn prices, use your Heal spell repeatedly and talk to him!

Preserving some modest amount of challenge, the gold costs of Inns are left the same, making them effectively ten times more expensive. Inns were never very expensive in the unmodified game, so this makes staying the night to restore your HP and MP more of a strategic choice. A tip: remember there’s a guy in Tantegel Castle who will restore all your MP for free!

If even a two-hour Dragon Warrior is too much effort for you, you could watch this playthrough of the hack on Youtube, which is about an hour and a half in length:

romhacking.net: Dragon Warrior – 10x Experience and 10x Gold