May no Monogatari: Part Two (Saturn)

The May Marathon this year is all about fan translated games! Which is perhaps another way of admitting that my time spent learning Japanese on Duolingo didn't quite go anywhere. For more details on the choices being made and what's going on with the post-script, be sure to check out Part One first.

Dungeon Master Nexus (Victor Interactive Software, 1998)

The Sega Saturn is a rich vein of less-known retro gaming potential, being the last system to really embrace high-quality 2D over the inchoate 3D that was becoming the norm in the mid-'90s with its 32-bit consoles. Saturn's biggest rivals PlayStation and Nintendo 64 did, of course, show off their polygonal chops at every opportunity, often forgoing 2D games altogether (with a handful of notable exceptions: Valkyrie Profile or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on PS1 and Ogre Battle 64 or Harvest Moon 64 on N64) but Saturn seemed more keen on exploring what was possible with the current format of gaming taken to new extremes with the advanced hardware. Sadly, the Saturn crashed and burned in the States and Europe due to some miscalculations—it launched early to snap up a head start on that generation, much like the Mega Drive did to hold a narrow lead over the SNES everywhere besides Japan, but that meant a limited launch library and an opportunity for Sony to undercut it with a cheaper SKU, which they of course seized—and Sega were never quite able to find their feet again, even as the Dreamcast seemed poised to put up a real fight against the Sony PlayStation 2 and the Nintendo GameCube. Anyway, ancient history. Let's get more modern around here already and instead talk about a game released in 1987.

Dungeon Master is that game: American studio FTL Games put it out on the Atari ST home computer around the same time Square was applying the finishing touches to their first Final Fantasy (FF actually came out a mere three days later; both debuted in mid-December) and was soon ported to similar platforms like the Amiga and DOS-enabled PCs. Touted as the world's first real-time dungeon-crawler RPG, it took some general structural ideas from fellow first-person games like Wizardry or The Bard's Tale but then filled the rest with original notions and an excellent grasp of atmosphere: the former was supplied largely by some quite in-depth environmental puzzles and a novel skill-based character progression system where bonus stats could be earned through repeated actions rather than arbitrary XP rewards for defeating monsters, while the latter was perfected with a luminosity mechanic that kept dimming the lights at the least opportune moments all the while you could usually hear monsters moving around before you'd ever see them, heightening the tension for when you finally rounded that corner and into an ambush. One of the most influential RPGs of all time, Dungeon Master went on to inspire games like Eye of the Beholder, Lands of Lore, Ultima Underworld, and (some considerable time later) The Legend of Grimrock. I've covered Dungeon Master before, long ago, with a brief LP I did of the first few floors as a way of showing off one of my most formative gaming experiences (it was, in fact, the very first game I ever played—definitely a scary baptism of fire for a six-year-old but I've never looked back since).

All of this is to say that, when choosing what game to cover for the oft-overlooked Saturn and its small selection of fan-translated titles, Dungeon Master Nexus was definitely the one that jumped out at me. Created by Victor Interactive with support from FTL Games and its parent company Software Heaven, Dungeon Master Nexus is a remake of sorts of Victor's previous DM adaptation for the Japanese home computer the Sharp X68000 in 1990. The biggest change is that the game has now become fully 3D, with polygonal enemies to slay and full panoramic movement with which to navigate a buffed 15-floor dungeon. I might imagine the choice to go 3D was due to how Ultima Underworld had raised the bar for the genre but it might just be because FromSoftware's King's Field was a modest success for PlayStation and Saturn owners were looking for a glacially slow first-person dungeon crawler of their own. Either way, it's definitely more a remake than a sequel, once again dragging in the Gray Lord and his apprentice Theron (of Theron's Quest fame) as the latter seeks to rescue the former by recruiting a party of resurrected adventurers to go in his stead after he's cursed to become a disembodied ghost for a while.

In brief, the goal of Dungeon Master is to clear all the floors and defeat the antagonist Lord Chaos once you've procured the parts to and subsequently assemble the only weapon that will harm him: the Firestaff. Each floor has its own distinct set of enemies to fight, hazards to overcome, puzzles to solve, and a selection of treasures such as weapons or accessories or consumables that might aid you, some of which might be hidden behind invisible walls or require you to find a concealed switch to open a path to where they await. Your characters have four classes they can progress in: Fighter rank goes up whenever you perform melee actions; Ninja rank goes up whenever you throw items, fire them from a bow or sling, or fight unarmed; Wizard rank goes up whenever you use combat magic or utility spells like torchlight; and Priest rank goes up whenever you create potions or use heals and buffs. These classes all have named ranks, starting at neophyte and going through novice, apprentice, journeyman, craftsman, artisan, adept, expert, and finally master. The thing is, even if you decide your party's roles ahead of time—when you recruit them, they start with a few ranks in some classes to give you some idea of what they're built for—it benefits them to practice all four disciplines since every level up, regardless of class, confers some amount of bonus stats and increases maximum health. One of my characters, Sonja the She Devil (a not-so-subtle nod to barbarian comic heroine Red Sonja, the '80s movie adaptation of which had recently been released), was geared almost exclusively for brawn and had only two mana to start with, as you can see in the above screenshot—that's not even enough to turn the lights on. By the end of the game she'd reached Expert rank in both Wizard and Priest, using those extra stats to be an efficient additional spellcaster when my main two at the back were temporarily drained of mana. It's an easy trap for newcomers to fall into, not adapting everyone for any role and instead sticking to what works for them, but the rewards are typically worth the effort.

Even with the new 3D format and at least a decade of game design evolution, though, Nexus is far less sophisticated and challenging than its forebear. I didn't play much of the SNES and TurboGrafx CD versions of the game but I know they also had some balancing tweaks to account for players using controllers instead of keyboards and as such the accuracy and the juggling involved with tough combat encounters and timing-based puzzles would be compromised, so I suppose this version carries on in that spirit of greater accessibility. Even so, the vast majority of enemies here are extremely slow and stupid, easy to avoid by getting up close and then backing off as soon as they start their combat animations so they're just swinging at thin air, and they almost exclusively attack solo rather than the groups of four you'd sometimes have to deal with in classic Dungeon Master. The traps and puzzles, too, seem somewhat less overwhelming than they were in the original game, with a few areas with multi-tiered floors that don't really take advantage of this geographical feature for any unique set-ups. It's also much more generous with regards to needing to rest, which is to say you really don't ever need to catch 40 winks and put yourself at risk of wandering monsters or insufficient food: you can make endless health and stamina potions with little effort (and it's usually a good idea to do so anyway in order to improve everyone's Priest skill) whenever those gauges get low. Conversely, wizard magic seems very ineffectual when fighting monsters—some have magic resistance, but it doesn't feel like fireballs do much of anything and have also lost their splash effect for better or worse—and Ninjas still have the unenviable chore of walking around and picking up all their spent ammunition rather than have it be some automatic process.

However, for all its flaws and reduced difficulty, the game has just as many welcome QoL changes. For one, it finally deigns to tell you what most of the items do so you're not just carrying trash around everywhere, and any piece of armor has a discrete defense value you can use to compare to your current gear. Sadly, this isn't the case for weapons, the damage values of which remain as ambiguous as ever, so you kind of have to try out any new sword you might find to see what kind of output you get. All spells are taught to you eventually through scrolls found on various floors, and these spell combinations are helpfully then saved in a different referral menu. You can also create potions in this same menu at any time without going through the rigmarole of putting a flask in your off-hand (possibly temporarily replacing a shield) though the game remains "active" throughout—the main inventory menu helpfully includes a little picture-in-picture of the dungeon so you can see what's sneaking up on you as you tinker with your valuables. Another helpful addition is that of a magical auto-map, but the game insists on draining your mana for as long as you have it out to discourage relying on it too often—the original Dungeon Master basically required you create your own with graph paper or whatever was handy, so DM purists (such as this game's development team, I don't doubt) tend to keep that amateur cartography spirit alive in one form or another. The controller functions take a little while to acclimate to—you'll want to find the function that increases your movement speed ASAP, and it's a mystery why you aren't just moving at that pace all the time—but they're not quite as uncooperative as you might dread, part of that being the aforementioned simplification ensuring a minimum of frustration.

It's definitely an intriguing adaptation of the original that sought to ensure it could be played on a console while giving it a certain degree of showy spectacle, perhaps to avoid critiques of it feeling its age (DM would've been 11 in 1998). Many floors have undergone significant changes though the more memorable areas stay the same as before, like the multiple choice mini-dungeon instances on the third floor, the difficulty spike of the terrifying magenta worms on the fourth floor, or the mighty red dragon boss (now just one of three dragon bosses) who takes up almost an entire floor of his own. However, I did find it disappointing that, instead of outwitting Lord Chaos and trapping him long enough to fuse him with his mild-mannered counterpart (the game kind of has this whole Dark Crystal thing going on) you just kick his ass until he stops moving. I guess setting up fluxcages would've been a bit too fiddly in a fully 3D environment. Owing to the era you do get some scratchy FMV here and there too, mostly to further what little story Dungeon Master has: here, Lord Chaos has a "larvae" version which was some annoying imp called Borketh who needed a "power gem" to fully evolve into his true form. You fight both Borketh and Lord Chaos at different stages of the game, though both tend to go heavy on the spell usage necessitating some anti-magic shields. For as much consternation as Dungeon Master caused me in the past, I had a pretty breezy time with this one though I'm still not quite sure if that works as a compliment towards it or not.

Tsuzuku

Three (well, four) more Saturn fan translations that might've taken this slot:

• Sakura Taisen I & II: Mostly the inspiration for this year's May feature, though I chickened out on actually playing either of them, Sakura Taisen (or Sakura Wars) is a combination dating sim and turn-based mecha strategy game set in an alternative historical setting equivalent to the Japanese Taisho era (1912-1926). These games were well-acclaimed for their anime cutscenes and a unique combination of thematic and mechanical genres, a structural creativity matched only perhaps by Atlas's Shin Megami Tensei: Persona subseries (the two series debuted only a week apart).
• Princess Crown: What was once a semi-obscure JP-only Saturn action-RPG footnote, Princess Crown has since drawn some renewed interest due to it effectively being a precursor to the entire Vanillaware library, inspiring their inaugural game Odin Sphere with its 2D brawler-like gameplay and seeing an official sequel of sorts some sixteen years later with Dragon's Crown. Directed by eventual Vanillaware co-founder George Kamitani, I'm sure Princess Crown is going to feel very prototypical compared to those later games especially as it didn't review particularly well at the time—even so, I imagine it would be something of historical interest to the many Vanillaheads out there including those recently converted by Odin Sphere Leifthrasir, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, or Unicorn Overlord.
• Linkle Liver Story: This oddly named action-RPG was, at one point in development, intended to be the official sequel to Ragnacenty, best known in the US as Crusader of Centy (and in Europe as Soleil). Like that game, it's a breezy top-down action-adventure with perhaps more in common with Zelda than the RPGs of its era. I played Soleil for the first time just a few years ago (despite having owned a physical copy for a lot longer) and I'd be down to seeing what a successor looks like. For the same reason, I'm planning to one day check out The Legend of Oasis as well, which was the sequel to another Mega Drive Zelda contender by the name of Beyond Oasis (not covered here, since it was blessed with an official localization).