Success / Atlus
Reviewed by Anthony
Oh geez. Ever wondered what it would be like if RPGs were just a smidge more threatening? You know, where enemies would attack you in huge numbers rather than in neat little pairs of four. Or where getting to a new area didn’t necessarily mean “Oh yay, I’ll check out the new armor store”, but instead meant “Uh oh, how likely am I to die when I enter this door?”. Enter The Dark Spire.
I’ll level with you - though every review ever seemed to focus on how The Dark Spire should only be played by hardcore, old-school dungeon crawler RPGers, I ignored that. Whenever I saw the game, there was a certain allure to it - the cool design of the artwork, the prospect of grinding up a strong party, and the inevitable feeling that I could die at any minute. Somehow, the idea clicked to me. I’ll readily admit I would’ve had no chance at beating this game efficiently alone on a desert island; I needed a guide in a number of places to figure out some of the numerous puzzles or to find the locations for vague quests. It harkens back to a day where people would play a game for months trying to figure the puzzles out, generating theories, trying stuff out until it worked, and deciding whether to tell a friend to help him/her out or to forge on ahead for bragging rights.
As such, this is a difficult game to review quickly. This is a modern recreation of a genre long since gone, where you’re given precious little advice, less information, and way more terror on your path to climbing the spire. Because of that, certain things that many people would hate are just par for the course. But here goes anyway.
What’s good:
- You can quickly save anywhere inside or outside of the spire. Given the imminent dangers possible at every turn, this absolutely saves the game from being unfairly difficult.
- The game is hard. Why is that a good thing? Well, it’s appropriately hard. Partly because that’s the kind of game this is supposed to be - it will require you to tread carefully, save often, consider your actions very carefully, and understand that certain areas or decisions carry the risk of wiping your party clean. At its worst, it means you may be ambushed and finding yourself at the title screen in seconds... but that happened to me only a handful of times in the main game. At its best, it means that after having struggled through new challenges in the types of enemies you fight, that you come up with a new strategy for your party that has you able to easily progress the floor without burning through all of your Spells. It’s pretty satisfying to work through the hordes of problems the game sends your way.
- The graphics have a dark, menacing style to them. Although there’s no animation other than walking through the spire, there’s a lot of personality to the enemy designs and the various floors of the spire. The enemies genuinely look like they’re planning to kill you, and with the typically dark environments, it helps paint a pretty accurate picture of what’s in store for you. The fact that each floor of the dungeon has a different design is a very nice touch that again, adds a certain element of dread and/or excitement to what’s in store for you. If that’s not enough, they included an option to play the game in “Classic” mode instead of “Modern” mode, which replaces all graphics with what looks like a DOS game, consisting of wire-framed environments and enemies as small sprites. It’s pretty amusing to see what looked like a hideous killer rabbit or menacing warlock in modern mode turned into sprites of a simple bunny or a generic wizard standing rigidly. The fact that the entire game is programmed for either mode of play is pretty cool.
- The game comes with a free CD, which is a nice touch especially since some of the songs are quite good. In particular, the training grounds, boss battle, and especially the fifth floor and final boss songs are all awesome, though the last two are sadly absent from the soundtrack. A few tracks are mired in the unfortunate presence of what sounds like a male operatic priest wordlessly chanting in the background. It works for ambiance in some of the environments, but it sounds somewhat grating on the CD. However, I still put this as a good aspect because should you choose to play the game in “Classic” mode, you get treated to again, a lo-fi midi-style version of whatever music you’d be hearing. It’s a cute touch, it helps with the retro feel, and again it’s impressive that every song exists in the game in two different ways.
- The X button is a permanent “help” button that will display information on anything you find in game. Although it doesn’t tell you everything you’d need, it’s a very helpful inclusion.
- On top of the typical Attack, Defend, and Spell commands, they have separate options available for each depending on your job classes or weapons. For example, while a warrior can attack regularly, depending on his weapon choice, he may have the option to attack quickly in the round with reduced accuracy, attack later with greater accuracy, do extra damage but forfeit the next turn, attack even the back row but at the risk of lower defense... there are several more options that exist and these really help flesh out the strategic aspects rather than just mashing A.
- In most cases, when you sell items to the shop, they’ll carry those items in the shop inventory from then on. So if you get rid of a piece of armor taking up space that you might later need, there’s no fear of having to farm enemies to get the rare drop again. Nice touch.
- There’s a good amount of light-hearted humor in the game. It’s nice to get a chuckle out of a game of a brutal nature; the bonus “true ending” made me smile too.
What’s bad:
- Everything in the game is based on dice rolls, which although it technically means everything is very luck-based, it rarely has a negative impact. However, when levelling up, it has a very unfortunate aspect: based on a character’s vitality, HP, and job levels, any time a character goes up a level in their chosen class, they’re guaranteed to gain at least 1 HP. However, depending on those factors, it may also mean they can gain up to 30 HP. Given that some characters start the game with 4 HP, you can imagine how significant each point is. That’s why it’s unendingly frustrating that this procedure is based on a die roll - it means that your best bet when levelling up is to save, level up, and if you get a 1 HP roll (which is extremely common), reset and try again several times to see if you can get something better. There’s simply no reason a player should have to accept a random 1 HP gain over and over when a 15 HP gain is available. Having to leave the guild and load the game each time is arduous and not fun, yet extremely important. Yuck. They should’ve allowed a “is this okay?/Re-roll” option for this like they do at character creation.
- If you have a decent thief, every battle leaves you with some amount of money and potential items. Given that you won’t use everything, you may, like me, be disappointed to find out that the equipment shop in the game very rarely updates its inventory. Though hefty at first, staying at an inn or healing at a shrine becomes inconsequentially cheap a bit into the game. That meant by the end of the game, I had hundreds of thousands of gold that I had nothing to do with. Inventory is limited, so as nice as it would be to just buy every strongest potion ever, that’d just mean I won’t get any drops. Kind of a bummer to earn so much, yet have nothing to do with it. At the very end, you’ll finally have an option to turn your life savings into experience points, yet it amounted to less than I get from a single random battle. Pointless.
- You can only see how many inventory spaces you have at the shop. That means you may not find out you’re out of space until you open a treasure chest and get no item for it. There’s not even a way to see what you would’ve gotten and exchange it for another!
What to be aware of: (I’m foregoing the “neutral” section for this review because these items are indicative of the genre but highly unusual for the average player)
- Although armor’s benefits are clearly noted in shops and when equipped, aside from vague descriptions, there’s no such indication for weapons. How would you know that the best first weapon for a warrior is an Estoc, and not a Warhammer, Battleaxe, Cutlass etc.? Aside from experimentation or checking a guide, you wouldn’t.
- An alignment system exists, and while they mention vaguely how it works, several details aren’t mentioned. A player may not realize that you can change alignments but only by bringing a single character to the opposing shrine. How and when it affects spells is not well documented.
- The balance of jobs in the game shifts significantly throughout. Should a player realize that warriors are the most powerful class early in the game, he or she may be in trouble if they don’t have one or more mages in later floors where arcane magic becomes absolutely vital to survival.
- Quests and Puzzles, mandatory or not, are often incredibly vague. You’re not given coordinates and you’re rarely given even a floor listing of where a quest’s destination is once it’s accepted. For instance, you get successive quests to destroy groups of monsters, and after you complete one on the second floor, you get access to the next in line... and that one can’t be completed until after you’ve taken a trip to the -fourth- floor, found an item from there, the first floor, and the second floor, and then repaired an elevator that allows you to access a portion of the basement where the enemies are. Gaining access to later floors will have you almost inexplicably jumping back to earlier floors to find items, and you can even purchase an item within the first ten minutes of playtime that can’t be used until after you complete the game! If you avoid guides entirely for this, you may very well tack another 10-20 hours of playtime onto the game just trying to find things.
- If you don’t save before attempting to pick a locked door, you’ll have to reload or exit the tower entirely before you get another chance to try, even if it’s mandatory to get through.
So basically, this is a very well made game on a modern system that’s a direct homage to games that are the furthest thing from modern. Although you benefit from having two screens and slightly more direction than old dungeon crawlers had, that’s about it. You’re still alone in that dark spire, trudging through to fill the maps and climb your way up as wave after wave of homicidal monsters come after you. And as soon as you get to feeling comfortable, monsters that can easily tear through your best equipment will knock you down a peg.
And while there’s hardly any story to be found, the fact is, this is a game that will burn in my memory. I’ll remember repeatedly re-rolling stats until I got the dwarf, halfling, and two elves I wanted. I’ll remember how after doing fine with enemies on the first two floors, the amazons who had spears to attack my mages in the third floor made me run, or how the djinns and mages on the fourth floor were way worse, and how I felt seeing a flock of 30+ bats that could attack my mages on the fifth floor, and how that was nothing compared to the venom dragons of the sixth floor, which pale in comparison to the red dragons and mist giants of the seventh floor, which is child’s play considering that basically any enemy ambush on the bonus floor means Game Over. Phew.
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