Adventures in Dungeon Crawling (Map Spoilers, maybe NSFW)

[Grauken]

Okay, so I have this idea to dump in here pics from Dungeon Crawlers while I play through them. Won't be a let's play, more musings and observations, but not really a review, just assorted thoughts and stuff.

Not sure how often I update, might be dead after a few posts, might be going as long as I find it amusing

Lady Sword (PC Engine)
To Hell With Guns (PC / itch.io)
Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk (PC / Steam)

Papa aweigh's Dungeon Design lessons
#1 - Junctions and Wizardry 5

 

[Grauken]

So the first game is Lady Sword, a dungeon crawler for the PC-Engine (also TurbGrafx-16), which was never released outside of Japan, but thanks to busy fan-translators we got a patch (https://www.romhacking.net/translations/1574/)

The prologue for the game is pretty nice to look at, even if the story is just generic monsters took over, a hero killed them with a powerful magic sword (the Lady Sword), and now they're back and a threat again.

 

[Grauken]

First level, and you already see the wall set (and doors, up ahead) you'll see likely for the rest of the game (I'm only up to level 3 of 10, and so far no difference, so I assume this won't change later either).

Combat wise, the game gives you 4 options, attack (both you and and the enemy get one swing in, and hopefully yours connects and the enemy misses), defend (which is basically a combination of defend and heal, and if it fails you do neither), chance (if you succeed you get multiple attacks per round, but there is a higher chance of failure, while all enemies can take two swings at you) or retreat.

Sometimes the monsters retreat as well, and even rarer, attack you again later.

Since this is a single-char dungeon crawler, what combat comes down to is you alternating between attack and the occasional defend to replenish HP. Each level has a variety of easy enemies that chip only a bit of your HP away, but each level has also enemies that can take out large chunks of your health in one go, like the monster in the right pic below, and if you're unlucky and your defend options miss, you die.

There's a reason the game has save-everywhere, but while this helps in getting ahead in the game, it doesn't make the combat seem less sporadic and boring. At least in real-time dungeon crawlers like Anvil of Dawn I can understand with going only with a single char like this, as it relies somewhat on your reflexes, but a turn-based dungeon crawler with a single char seems like a really stupid idea.

Each level you also find a different talking head, who once belonged to one of the girls taken to this tower and imprisoned here. Besides the talking heads, you also meet other people, but the game doesn't really have NPCs, its more a one-time event picture of someone occasionally spouting useful remarks (most often its just useless drivel) and then vanishing.

Outside of fights you can do full heals by resting, which gets you up to 100%, but occasionally you get attacked by the Dream Flayer, but since you have save-everywhere, it's not really a problem

 

[Grauken]

Older games usually don't have automaps, or if they do, they have serious flaws. The automap in Lady Sword looks quite nice (even shows one-way doors later on), but it does change direction according to where your character is looking, instead of being fixed with the north in the north, which I find seriously annoying, but at least I have GridCarographer to deal with this. Also, you can't miss the map item (even if you don't want it), it's directly on your path and you get it either way. There's one thing useful about it, later on in level 1 you get an item (looks like a skull) that marks secret passages

The tachyon-stone is basically a set-up-a-teleport-location item, and you can teleport to that location later at will. Probably useful at some point, but so far I haven't needed it.

Also, each level you have a number of fixed battles with sub-bosses, who you have to defeat to actually fight the level boss. Once that's done, you've earned your low-res pornographic picture of the maiden you've saved this level. Might be NSFW, but its really tame.

So the first level is basically the tutorial, gives you the basic items you need to survive, and the countless speech bubbles show all the hints about the how and the why from resident dungeon smart-asses. There's definitely more talking than I appreciated, since some of it is quite inane.

Level architecture is extremely linear here, which few branches (most of them very short).

 

[Grauken]

The big theme of the second level is illusionary one-way walls, basically you won't see that something is a one-way wall until you've passed them and can't go back (the maze of wandering in Wiz4 is full of them and has driven lots of people to abandon the game right there). I decided to draw my own sprites to mark them in GridCartographer, since the one-way wall icons don't have enough contrast and aren't easy to see on the maps.

The level also has the first teleports, but not a lot of them. There's a large section of the level (marked in green) that once entered doesn't allow you to go back to earlier parts or the previous level, so if you want that you could set up a fallback-location with the Tachyon stone

 

[Grauken]

This level is very fond of teleporters. Also introduces damage fields and pits (actually only one pit) that makes you fall down to the second level. Given how each level introduces new elements that then get used excessively in the next level, I assume we will see more of them later on. Lots of water-themed enemies here, mermaids, angry fish and the level boss is called the sea wolf, although it's more like a massive water dragon/water snake drake thing.

There's an item you need to proceed that the game calls a Water Popo. I'm clueless to what it actually does or what the name is supposed to stand for, but you still need it. Odd

 

[abnaxus]

 

[Grauken]

So fourth level. Another floating head (they seem to get more and more damaged with each level). Flybeast are some of the enemies that can kill you in a few rounds, but from this level on their attack powers gets weaker, as your char grows strong. Level ups are automatic and happen occasionally, often after boss fights. Other than that your attack power gets a random upgrade from time to time (also HP I think).

Hm, a look at the map reveals that there's more to the walls. And then we get one-way doors again. The game loves doing this.

Another maiden to free. More interesting, someone tells us to find the 5 pieces of the isis armor, of which we find the Isis Guard promptly afterwards. The game is weird about that, telling us about something and then you find it a few spaces later. Pacing is something alien to whoever designed this.

The Dream Flayer has been upgraded to Dream Master, who can kill you with one swing even at 250 HP (as you can see I had neither, and died). The pit at the right-top corner throws you back to the first level (actually there were each a space on the 2nd and 3rd level I couldn't access, turns out its the chute for this pit). Then we meet our first sub-boss, Sky Chief Barth. The other one is Sky Chief Barda (every level has a two to four sub-bosses with very similiar sounding names).

 

[Grauken]

So this time it's quite obvious for what we need this items. The enemy on the right just looked cool, no other reason. I have to say, lots of the monster design here are pretty neat.

So another level boss. As cool as their visual design is, mechanically, they are just somewhat strong enemies, although not really much stronger than some of the random monsters you meet. One lucky chance attack with multiple hits and some more attacks and he's history. Afterwards one of the NPCs who has turned up since the beginning takes away my flying gadget, probably to make sure pits can still be used as part of the level design, although I kinda dislike this authorial intervention style. Not as bad as throwing my character into prison, but still.

There's one part of the level that isn't reachable, I assume we may be able to visit this later from higher above. Also the first time we see that the levels (like old Wizardry levels) are connected at the borders, the one-way walls at y0/19-x-11 and x-15. Also, as can be seen from my screenshots, the overall level design remains highly linear, most levels can be broken into distinct parts that have to be done one after the other, there's no explore-in-all-directions at once approach. It's still somewhat, as the level itself is neat with throwing lots of traps at you, but the combat system is at this point just aggravating. And still 6 more levels to go.

edit: forgot to mention, the game also throws the first few spinner at you on this level. Considering the game has an in-build automap, this seems kinda pointless, but the spinner here function a bit different from the ones in other dungeon crawlers. Instead of just randomly changing your direction, they spin you around and then fix you in one direction. You can try to spin more (there's a slight resistance to easy manual direction changing on these field, but you can force it to spin again) to get fixed into the direction you want to move in, but often this means you spin a few times more until you get it right, often in-between attacked by random monsters. Someone clearly thought about how to improve spinner design in the presence of an automap, nice.

 

[Grauken]

The fifth level gives up any pretension of being a representation of real architecture (just like classic Wizardry levels) and just builds its level around the corner. There are lots of corners here.

And then I stepped into a teleporter. I know that the game has supposed to be 10 levels, so to my surprised I was teleported to an 11th level (from how the level is encoded in RAM), that throws all around darkness at you. With the (double) automap no problem, still unexpected. I'm thinking of changing the GC profile somewhat to put it into a region of its own, maybe call it Shadow Realm or somesuch. The rest of the level makes me believe we have at least three further visits to this place

I'm wondering if the maidens you free each level and the floating heads of all-new different girls each level are connected, but I couldn't remember if the girls tell you their names or not, like the floating heads. Have to keep track of that next time. And another piece of the Isis armor.

Another sub-boss, or is it. Instead of managing to kill him, he run away before I could, which makes me wonder if I'll meet him a few more times where he will ran away instead of getting defeated, until the final fight.

That's all for today

 

[Grauken]

Okay, this clears up whether the floating heads and the girls you free each level are one and the same, talk about a convoluted idea (just to recap, each level you free a new girl, and a new, somewhat disfigured floating head from another girl gives you hints about whats going on).

We see a tablet that spells some of the letters of Lady Sword, no clue yet what that's about. And as predicted, we meet the skeletony-ghost-like sub-boss again, and again he leaves before I can kill him. Heard there's an item that helps with etheral enemies, which I assume is for making sure he ghost-skeleton can't escape during a fight.

And there's the powerful item that will allow me to finally kill the ghost-skeleton. No idea why it looks like a fallen over question mark, but then it's not the strangest thing I've seen so far in the game. And another level boss, the mighty Scryll. Looks like the ghost-skeleton on steroids.

Man, I though the floating heads couldn't get more creepy, and yet here we are in level 6. Talk abot a bad hair day.

Level 5 was easier than I expected. Someone was far too much in love with the wavy-like corridor patterns here, but overall nothing too difficult.

 

[Grauken]

It's also interesting that you can easily show just how linear each level is by coloring the areas from level 2 to 4 that you have to traverse in sequential order. Level 5 still has a somewhat sequential order for the differently coloured areas, even if it's less obvious what that order is at the beginning

 

[Grauken]

We're told some backstory about the Demon God Demos from various NPCs, only to not matter at all on this level. I assume it becomes more important later on. The sub-bosses on this level are three knigths, but the name of the first one doesn't exactly strike the right note. The part to get to him was nicely done, a couple of pits you had to circumvent via secret doors, or you fell down one level and had to backtrack. Also that part 2 levels back that we couldn't map, it's a passage with branching teleporters that you're teleported to from level 6, only to then get back to level 6.

The floating head on this level became quite whiny, although with this look it's hard not to piety her, even when she wished she could throw the hijacked maidens under the bus and get saved instead. Second pic is a shoutout to all the people in fear of fairy pixel nippels.

The third part of the Isis armor. Only thing left is the helmet, although I remember it was supposed to be 5 pieces, not sure whats left (we already have arm guards, mail, and greaves).

The third of the three sub-bosses didn't take me seriously and vamoosed out of there, I probably see him back again on one of the higher floors. Instead I got to fight with Sorcerer. Somehow that sprites reminds me of the picture Alamar Rides from the guy who drew the covers for M&M 4&5.

Hmm, overall not very difficult either. Most of the stuff the game throws at you here, the pits and a couple teleporters are intended to force you to backtrack, but otherwise nothing difficult. I did die in one of the trap fields as I underestimated how much damage they do, and they're somewhat findish in that you aren't only damaged when you step on them, also whenever you take a turn in either direction.

 

[Grauken]

This is probably the first, vaguely puzzle-shaped object in the game (apart from needing the Nubian fly in level 4, but that was even less of a puzzle). Can't go forward without the Eclarion, whatever that is. Basically, you have to go back to the 3rd knight who refused to fight you in the previous floor and kill him, and you get the Eclarion, which is basically a key.

We find the Abstone, whatever that is. Floaty girl head Nr. 7 looks even worse, but she agrees that floaty head Nr. 6 was a horrible person, which make her automatically the better person.

That monster looked just too cool. Seems like it was nicked from a Godzilla movie or Greek mythology. The sub-bosses this level are Wise men, which is the point where I was wondering what the hell is going on, as these look more like NPCs than enemies. Due to the way how the game parcels out information about its backstory and setting, a sentence here and there from different NPCs, you sorta stop keeping attention and later once you actually interested in what is going have no way to find it out. Also, you don't really fight the Wise men, if you have the Abstone they lose instantly.

You find a decoder for the tablet on level 5 and apparently one later on, on level 10. I'm not sure I really want to go back to find out what the tablet really had to say. Also as predicted, you find the Isis Helm on this level.

So almost before the level boss, you fight W-alliteration wizard who gave you a lot of backstory those past levels. I have no idea why he is fighting me, but hey, it's your death. Afterward, we meet the real level boss, Magic Master. Then another NPC informs us that the black-clothed Wizard who gave us tips all the time betrayed us. Alas, since I don't keep attention, I don't know why or how, since I barely interacted either with the good Weintein or the black wizard. I probably feed him to the fishes later on anyway.

Wow, this was a damn annoying level. It doesn't add lots of challenges in terms of level design (it has lots of invisible one-way walls that don't actually gate you in any perceivable way, so I'm not sure what the point was), but it's chock full of new enemies that can one-shot kill you and with how terrible the combat system in the game is, this means you're forced to save scum through the whole level almost constantly. This got annoying very fast.

 

[Grauken]

Level 8 and we find the last piece of the Isis armor. I'm not sure why the black wizard is still giving me tips, wasn't he the one who betrayed everyone last level. Also, yeah, another fetch quest to complement the search for the Isis armor.

The only sub-boss you meet this level, the Cauldron. Looks like a mean flying dragon thing, but is easily disposed of. What was really mean, was the area on the left-bottom quarter, that was basically all single rooms with only secret doors, lots of one-way passages and fights on almost every square, mostly with monsters that could easily kill you. Fun times I tell you.

Oh neat, the find the first two of the five dragon balls, the pink one and the black one.

So following the tread from earlier levels, floaty head Nr. 8 looks even worse. Also, there seems to be a bug in her speech, both times I met her there was a 4 at the end of her sentence.
The boss this level is the Hydra, and from what I parsed from the story it's controlled by the black-robed wizard who is still guiding me if I understand everything correctly.

I just realized that red-on-blue looks terrible and replaced all the secret walk-through walls with screaming green. Better contrast, although the green doesn't really say secret to me. Anyways, the hardest part was the maze in the left-bottom corner. Then there was the pit in the top-right corner that allowed me to access an area in level 7 I couldn't get to be before, and which is needed to advance in level 8. Also, there were a few places where I had to go up to the 9th level and get back down again, but nothing complicated. Looks like I'm close to the end.

 

[Strange Fellow]

This thread is really cool. I love seeing the maps and how you divide them up into chunks. Keep it up!

 

[Viata]

Cool thread, don't let it die, man, it's always great to see some dungeon crawlers images.

 

[Grauken]

Don't worry, I think I'm close to the end anyway. Next one after this is most likely the NDS crawler Dark Spire. Played that when it came out on a friends NDS, but never finished it, so it will be neat going back to it.

 

[Grauken]

The most amusing thing about the game is probably the following, a diary the fan-translators found in the script of the game of one of the developers working on it (from the readme to the translation patch)

This puts into perspective how well done the overall dungeon design is (I think its kinda awesome), but also how terrible a lot of the rest is. Combat and the plot are just bad, there's no character system, no itemization, no party, no spells. That said, I do like the graphics a lot, even if they were done by an amateur, it definitely doesn't show.

"Ah, I'm tired. I don't have much energy these days. Perhaps it's my age... The head-women and the girly pics were appended later, they're just kinda thrown in. I wanted to put in more monsters rather than broads. Without the dames, I probably could have put in about 100 new monsters- but I guess coming up with that many monsters is tough. New magic would have been nice too. But spells eat a lot of space, so we couldn't do it. I mean we planned on 2 megs and now we're at 8. Huh. Some development plan.

July, 1990 Without any planning, at the time the 3D work was being done there was still 2 megs of magic that was
not being considered. We had a different title then, too. It was kind of a fairy-tale setting then.

August, 1990 The designer disappeared. "A man that's toyed with by a fickle lady." It's kind of funny, but I don't think I want to play that game.

September, 1990 It's starting to take shape. The graphics got done by an amateur, and I feel like it's going to look like an ancient NES game. I don't know much about how the system will work from here out...Doing this kind of judgment work...

July 1991 Just like I thought, those were some bad pictures. Added a designer. Now at 4 megs.

Aug. 1991 We've just worked out how the ladies are being worked in, and the basic story. Changed the title, too.

Nov. 1991 The graphics (only) are roughly finished. We were at 4 megs, but we're going to keep going without erasing. Lost our designer.

Feb. 1992 Got a new designer. Put in the head-ladies and the girly pics. Changed the title to LADYSW0RD. Somehow we're at 8 megs. Put in some story for the girls. Who likes that? Yep, it's the 'lady.' That, and 'beautiful' is popping up randomly. I guess that's how it goes. You can kinda grasp the story.

I was drunk the other day, and I spilled whiskey on my keyboard. The next day I moved it, and it came dribbling out. Gah! Crap! I took it apart and cleaned it, but it was already too late. Waahh. Must be karma. I should be glad the CPU isn't busted. Well, anyway, see ya."

The company who did the game also seems to have an interesting history. I find it funny that they consider the few half-naked girls porn, that so tame by modern standards you get more offensive stuff with a simple google search. But even by eroge-game standards back in the day, Lady Sword is pretty tame

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Grauken needs a vault to store my brofists.

Spoiler

posting in the epic thread

 

[Grauken]

Black Wizard is getting a little bit antsy, probably realizing that he's not the final boss and will soon meet his doom. And then we find the Lady Sword and I was wondering what was going on, but then Palermo, one of the four guys who were giving more or less useful tips and parts of the backstory since the beginning, steals the sword away.

Man, floaty head Nr.9 looks even more disturbing than the all-skeleton-y from last level. Looks like she met a taste test by Hannibal. Also, we meet and defeat Palermo, which means we killed 2 of the 4 NPCs who've been guiding us since the beginning. I get the feeling neither of the other 2 will see the end either.

And we collect another non-sensical item, the Hupar, which apparently activates some polytrons on this level (the name the game uses for teleporters). I feared I had to search the level all over again for those teleporters, but alas I found them in fast succession in an area I hadn't explored yet.

The last major enemies on the level, Mephistopheles looks okay, but damn, the sprite of Hellraiser looks cool (though with that name I expected more pinhead than this). The game really manages to make all the bosses look total boss.

The 9th level was pretty easy, but I liked how the layout led you around, starting with the middle section and then with paths that were layered around that middle section, crossing the tower walls all the time.

 

[Grauken]

Last level and we got another ominous warning from Lubo, while the Black Wizard seems to approach the whole situation a bit more fatalistic.

Last floaty head is a ghost head, a bit hard to see. Also we find the last of the altar stones, which allows us to wield the full Isis armor, which in turn means we can now also wield the Lady Sword, which we do not have yet.

Lubo seems to think his opinion matters at this point. Also should mention, the game throws all the boss monsters from the previous 9 levels as random monsters at you here. What makes it somewhat easier is that the Chance combat option yields far better results on this floor than on any floor previously. Although, only on this floor I realized that I had an Age stat and I seem to have grown quite old while going up the tower.

And here are the final fights with both the black wizard and Lubo. After the Lubo fight we finally get the Lady Sword and can go and kill the boss of he tower.

Cool looking sprite. This should be the climax of the game, alas the shitty combat system translates to getting lucky two times with the chance option and he's dead.

 

[Grauken]

Okay, you might think the game is over, but then we find the 2nd tablet. And twist and turn, Isis lost against the deeper darkness and turned herself into Deimos to contain it, and us killing Deimos meant the seal is broken and the Black Wizard, who for whatever reason is still alive, becomes the embodiment of said deeper darkness.

And then, instead of a final fight with the real boss, we see the epilogue animation with our hero running into the darkness and then the screen stopping at the one that shows the title animation again. At that point I was like WTF. I thought either something was wrong with my rom, the translation or maybe the emulator. So I loaded the sram battery file with a clean Japanese rom, and the same happened. Then, instead of using Mednafen through GridCart I used Ootake to load the sram battery file, and again the same happened. At this point, I assume this is the actual ending of the game and just a massive fuck-you to the player.

Just to be sure, I backtracked to the 5th floor to decode the other tablet that was on there, but the decoded message was less than helpful.

I also found an old angelfire review (archived on the internet archive) of Lady Sword from someone who obviously managed to play through the game just as I did, and whose reaction to the ending mirrored mine.

Full GridCartographer map + profile to use for GC here.

 

[Grauken]

Just some final words on the game, to finish it off. Do I think its good? Obviously not, it's barely an RPG, it has minimal character development with automatic leveling up and only four stats (of which the age stats seems the most dubious, I wonder if I can die of old age in the game), no items, no weapons or armor, no classes, almost nothing I like about RPGs. Combat is simplified to such an extend that its just a coin throw every time. Save scumming to survive for long seems to have been intentionally, since as far as I can remember, few console games from that area had save everywhere. The graphics are pedestrian, if we're talking wall set and it never changes, but the occasional event graphic and the monster sprites are sufficiently cool looking. I always liked finding new enemies on each level, even if their combat behavior is not very varied, you have glass cannons, somewhat more durable two-shot killers and the monsters that were clearly designed so that you could replenish HPs during the fights.

If the game has one redeeming quality, its the dungeon design. If someone would rip out the terrible one-character system and the combat system and replace it with a Wizardry-style system, the game would be really good. Each level introduces new dungeon design elements, the 1st one has secret walls you can find via the automap, the 2nd one start withs lots of one-way "illusionary" walls (from one side they are not visible, you pass them and then it's a wall, ha) and introduces the idea of teleporters, the 3rd uses teleporters as a major level design element and introduces a field that can harm you and pits that let you fall down one level.

The 4th has the first spinner (and I love the design of the spinners in the game, whoever said that spinners are useless in the presence of automaps hasn't seen these, they obviously aren't intended to confuse mapping anymore, but more as an obstruction to move where you want to go) and combines harm fields and one-way walls in new ways. The 5th sends you off to a side dimension that's all darkness (sadly the only place in the game that uses this) as well as breaking through the wall and disregarding the expectations you might have for how the overall N/S/E/W level walls of the tower connect. The 6th is mostly a breather, although it has a neat corridor that combines pits and secret walls to get ahead.

The 7th is another breather to a large extend, and then we get to the 8th level that has probably the hardest maze in the game, 81 squares only connected by secret walls, secret one-way-walls, harms fields, one spinner and an increased random monster attack rate with most of them killing you in one or two hits. Once you clear that its smooth sailing almost to the end.

Whoever designed this was really good at it, not just at the pacing of how new level elements are introduced and then used more extensively on the next level, and later in combination with other elements, but as well as how the overall levels are designed. aweigh might scoff at the overall design approach to each level, its highly linear with almost no branching parts. You finish each level by going through sub-sections of each level in sequence, but the way how these sub-sections combine and are layered around each other is different each time. There's an art to doing this, and whoever did it here was quite good at it.

Again, moment to moment the game is pretty terrible to play and really tests your patience. But if you're in it for the mapping challenge, then boy is it fun at the same time. That's probably the one aspect that kept me going till the end.

Also found a website that shows all the monster sprites, neat.

 

[Grauken]

So, before I tackle Dark Spire, I though about doing something shorter, so I'll try To Hell With Gun by CryptRat, which he did for some Game Jam. I just hope it's not too long

I already like that even for a short game there's a sufficiently complex chargen. 4 classes and the rest you can see. Also, you can click on each part of the UI and you get something close to tooltips, neat for beginners.

There's no sound in the game, and no real transition animation between steps, like the earliest blobbers, which means the game can and will easily confuse anybody. At least you start with a shop and a clinic close-by.

And the game already starts nicely with direction barriers/move-alongs, a spinner, and some damage fields. The pentagrams, on the other hand, are neat for orientation, which I assume is why they are there.

Before anybody asks, there's no GC support here, I just moved the marker by hand