A long time ago, RPGs were quite different than what we know now. They were in First-Person perspective, dungeons were “3D” wire-frames, and the gameplay was mostly taken or inspired from Dungeons & Dragons. And they were damn hard. Wizardry and Ultima are the grand-daddy’s of the genre. Well, this time I’ll touch upon a game that’s largely inspired by such games.

Actually, The Dark Spire, recently published by Atlus in the US, basically plays just like Wizardry 1, made way back in 1981, with a major facelift of course.

Now, this is more like a first impressions post, since I’m not very far at all in the game.I’m only a good ways into the second floor for now, but progressing pretty well. But I feel like I’ve gotten enough gameplay to review it and I’ll definitely be playing a lot more of it.

Read on!

Looks and sounds
The game looks good… if you’re not expecting too much.  Each floor in the Tower has a different look, but each floor is also stupidly repetitive. There’s a variety of monster types as well, but there’s a massive use of palette swaps, so Killer Bats look just like Giant Bats but darker colors are used. But enemies look pretty good anyways. It’s also important to note that the number of enemy sprites shows the number of enemy groups, and not the actual number of enemies. The graphics style is awesome and unlike most games on any console right now. The menus are okay as well, relatively simple to navigate.

The sounds are really nice. You know, when in a dark room, whether there’s a wall in front of you or not, the sound cues are good. There’s actually very few battles sounds, but they let you know what’s going on pretty well. The high part here is the music, it’s really good and gives off a really epic feel.

But it doesn’t look or sound really oldschool. Well, that’s where the settings come in play. In the settings, you can choose 2 types of display. What I just described is the “modern” display. There’s also an option for a “Classic” display. This makes the graphics as simple and barebones as possible. No more textures on walls, instead it’s wire-frames, showing rectangles  for doors, and square on the ground or ceiling when there’s stairs to the next level. Detailed enemy sprites are replaced with small 8-bit sprites in big rectangles on the top screen. There’s no more stylish windowing on the top-screen or any kind of design in the menus anymore, all replaced by boxes with text and nothing else. And to make it feel more classic, the music is replaced for 8-bit version of the normal tracks, and they sound almost as good. And there’s actually advantages in playing that way: slightly shorter “animations” in battle, and moving through the dungeon is almost twice as fast.

Though the graphics are not great by any means, and there’s literally no animation, the style is nice and the Classic view is awesome. If you liked this kind of game before, the graphics will make you feel right at home. If you’re a stupid graphic-whore, stay away at all cost.

Story
“There’s an evil magician on top of the tower whole stole some stuff, go kill him”.
That’s it. It doesn’t go much deeper than this. There’s a variety of quests to do, and a few villages and such in the tower, but there’s no big storyline beyond killing the magician. You’re a group of adventurers, and you have to power up enough to get to him and eventually fight him.

Definitely do NOT expect big plot twists or any kind of emotional attachment to the nameless characters or anything of the sort. Simple and to the point, but that’s it.

Gameplay
Well, I mentioned that this was basically like Wizardry, so if you played that you know exactly what this game will be like. Otherwise, here’s the gist of it.

Character Creation and Leveling
At the start you have no characters in your party. Here you have 2 choices: Make your own characters, who will start at level 1 but will have stats more like you want them, or pick up the 4 pre-made level 2 characters with pre-determined stats. The better choice is to make your own, of course. You have some choices to make here: choose the race of your characters: Humans, Elves, Dwarves and Halflings are the choices you have. Each has its own specialty, and if you’ve been playing RPGs for any amount of time you know what each of them specialize in. You also have to choose one of the four basic classes: Warrior, Priest, Mage and Thief. Those are pretty self-explanatory, other than priests which are relatively good physical attackers and tanks. Then you have to get the stats for them. That’s the random part… literally. The numbers for each stat are going fast and you have to press a button to stop them, and you do that for each stat (Strength, Vitality, Intelligence, Dexterity, Charisma). For each race, there’s a maximum and minimum number for each stat, and getting certain stats high enough give you access to the various classes (example: you can’t become a Warrior if your strength is too low). Those are apparently determined by invisible dice rolls. When all the stats are determined, you can decide to keep those or you can re-roll the stats.

After building your party, it’s time to get quests and go exploring. But you have to know how leveling works. Well, after each battle, or when finishing a quest, you get EP. Those can be used for a variety of things. Leveling up classes gives you more skills and HP (HP increase is random, so you might want to save before leveling to reload if the HP increase sucks). Also, leveling multiple classes can lead to completely new classes altogether with skills beyond the normal classes(like mage-types that can wear warrior armor… nice). For mages and priests, leveling their base class leads to getting more points that can be assigned to spells. Oh, and leveling the class of your characters makes the inn and reviving/curing in churches more expensive. Learning skills is almost self-explanatory, I’m pretty sure that each of them actually have some kind of bearing but I can’t say for sure… Finally, Boosting stats is the last thing you can do with EP, and probably something you won’t do very often. This takes a lot of EP, so you might as well just increase your class level instead. For example, leveling my dwarf’s Vitality from 16 to 17 requires 33000 EP, while going to my next level in warrior class only requiring  a few thousands instead. Just seems like a waste, unless you’re already fully leveled and have a lot of leftover EP.

The last element of leveling is equipment. You can either find weapons in the tower or buy them in the shop, and each of them have various stats, most being invisible and requiring testing. Damage for each of them is determined by dice rolls+stats, others have different properties(attacking from back row, chance of hitting multiple enemies, stuff like that), and of course Armor Class. Armor class is basically… the lower the AC, the least likely you are of getting hit. Armor doesn’t affect the damage you’ll get, but whether or not you’ll be hurt by the attack. Or you could just click here for a proper explanation(link “might” not be appropriate for kids). Basically, your mage with an armor class of 8 is more likely to get pwnd than your warrior with an armor class of -4.
Also, some equipment is good for certain classes, and if you equip things that aren’t suitable for them, they won’t perfom well. If, for example, an armor is not good for mages, they won’t be able to cast spells. And if you have equipment that’s negative for any character class, you won’t be able to level up other classes to eventually get a “super class”.

You have quite a bit of control on how to boost your characters.

Exploring
This is the meat of the game.The game is played in a first-person perspective, basically in a grid-like map, where each time you move, you move 1 space in the grid. You can get in doors by pressing A. Some doors are locked, so you can lock-pick them (usually a thief is more able to do it). Pressing X makes you observe around you, or in front of you (for example, you won’t be able to read the graffiti on a wall if you’re not looking at it). That’s very important, since you won’t ever see anything in the dungeon unless you use the X button to look around. Is there a merchant in front of you? Well, press X to see that. There’s sometimes hints for that. You might get in the room that tells you that there’s something in the following room, or that there’s something on the wall. Also, it’s pretty useful to observe random walls, since some of them have secret doors. As you go around the tower, there’s gonna be random encounters, empty rooms, rooms that are completely dark, various traps, weird devices to open doors, and other random stuff.

But there’s a ton of puzzles. For example, on the first floor, you’re come across a bunch of doors, but you’ll be blocked by a statue. To get passed that, you are given a riddle and you must use an item on it to get beyond that point. There’s a ton of things like this. To get through most of them you have to remember everything that was said and get a hint out of that. And sometimes you just have to be lucky.

The exploration is made a bit easier because of the map. In games like this, usually, you have to bring out a piece of paper and draw your own map, but this game does them for you. There’s a slight problem of not knowing exactly where you are on the map when you look at it (by pressing Y), but there’s a skill for that, that will show it to you while you’re at that spot (but you’ll have to recast it if you want to see where you are again later). But still, having the map right in the game makes things a lot easier.

Fighting
This is handled in a turn-based fashion, with invisible die rolls(and some calculations) determining everything. You have a few things you can do in battle. Attack, defend, use spells, or attempt to run away. For each of those (other than running away), depending on the class, you can press Right and get other options depending on your class and equipment. If you have a sword, you can do a lunge attack, if you’re a mage you can cast spells fast or take your time for more effect, and thieves can try to counter attacks.

So after choosing your commands for all your characters, the turn starts, and each time a character attacks, there’s an invisible die roll for accuracy (which is also dependant of Armor Class), then another invisible die roll for damage if you hit(depending on your weapon and strength stat, or depending on the spell and intelligence stat). Enemies are set in groups, so for each enemy sprite there is on the top screen you have 1 group. Some attacks hit groups, other single enemies. There’s a good variety of enemies. Some are hard hitters, other give incredibly annoying status effects (poison, paralysis, sleeping), others are magic users that will be able to attack any of your characters regardless of which row they are on (you will always have at least one character in the back row, and at least one in the front row, the other 2 you set like you want).

So you win the battle if all the enemies are dead (simple, huh?). After the battle, you get EP, Gold and sometimes a treasure box. But those are usually trapped, so you can disarm the trap before opening it. Of course, Thieves come in handy here. Basically you inspect the treasure box first, and if it’s trapped you try disarming it, by choosing the options in the menu in order. Sometimes it will randomly start up the trap, sometimes that section won’t get disarmed but you can try again, and sometimes it will disarm and you can go to the next one. Whether or not you disarm it you still get what’s inside the box.
So overall the gameplay is really good… IF you like that type of game. The controls are a bit confusing, especially when casting spells or using items. You have to make sure that you have the proper character selected (using the L and R buttons) before using an item or you’ll just waste it.

Overall
If you’re interested in knowing what RPGs were like before Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy came along, this is a great way to experience it. But most people will not find this game fun, and that’s very understandable. But I think it’s well worth checking out.

There’s tons of grinding, solutions to puzzles aren’t obvious at all most of the time, sometimes finishing quests isn’t really obvious either, and you usually have to examine every nook and cranny to find everything or even to just advance through the game at all.
It requires a lot of patience to do it on your own, and even then the game requires to remember everything you’ve read and finding small hints in those to be able to move on.Sure, now there’s the internet for help on things like this, but if you’re going at it on your own, expect this to be a very long game.

jobocan Games, Handheld, Review