Coinciding with the Japanese Virtual Console release of Mysterious Dungeon 2: Shiren the Wanderer for the SNES, GameSetWatch columnist John Harris has posted (the first half of) an exhaustive writeup of the game. His @Play column, about roguelikes, is consistently excellent even for those of us who are completely oblivious to the genre, and we're glad to have an excuse to mention this especially involved entry.It's probably a good idea to read this before you jump into any roguelike (except for maybe Pokemon Mystery Dungeon). Shiren the Wanderer and other Mysterious Dungeon games are a little bit simplified, but still ridiculous in their complexity. Random items must be identified, monsters gain levels if they kill something, and it can take multiple playthroughs of a game to level up a weapon to satisfaction. Even containers are random and may turn out to heal you or destroy your items.
We have limited experience with the Mysterious Dungeon series-- we played the first few floors of Nightmare of Druaga, and then quit before it got into the serious stuff. After getting killed, of course. We don't know if we're brave enough to try another one.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-24-2007 @ 3:43PM
Jonathan Tran said...
I don't get it, why is this so complicated?
It sounds like you just described Diablo or Phantasy Star Online.
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7-24-2007 @ 3:45PM
hvnlysoldr said...
Chocobo Mystery Dungeon 2. My sister rented it. It was way too hard for her. I died some twelve times a dungeon until I could just force my way through without any equipment. Yeah that much grinding and dying.
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7-24-2007 @ 3:58PM
JC Fletcher said...
Jonathan: pretty good observation. Diablo and PSO both have elements of Roguelikes, but greatly simplified. Imagine if every single item of every kind had to be identified, and you couldn't see the monsters, most of which can kill you, until you're right up close. Also there aren't any 'telepipes.' You're right that I can't articulate all of the differences, but Mysterious Dungeon games (and "real" Roguelikes even more so) add more and more layers of difficulty and randomness on top of the formula.
I really love PSO.
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7-24-2007 @ 5:05PM
Mr Khan said...
I love PSO too
still trying to get my hands on a GC broadband adapter so that i can get back in (private server, of course)
This actually sounds good, though. A game of mystery and depth, something to keep your palms sweaty until the controller becomes unusable...
(Whatever happened to the rumored PSO DS?)
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7-24-2007 @ 7:05PM
John H. said...
I'll respond to the statement made by Jonathan "Doctor" Tran....
Diablo was directly inspired by a roguelike game called UMoria (it's mentioned in the game's credits), and many MMORPGs either knowingly or subconsciously take many cues from its design.
Yet, those games rarely attain the heights of roguelike gameplay. The key is that roguelikes make you figure things out, feature limited, randomly-determined resources, can inflict damage on the player in ways other than mere damage (items can be destroyed or cursed, you can have levels, stats or maximum hit points permanently drained, you can fall down a trap into a harder level, these things are just for starters), and if you die in a roguelike, the next game you must start over.
This might sound like some kind of ludicrous challenge, but all of these aspects work together to make a completely different kind of game than most players have seen before. Player strategy can have profound effects in a roguelike, either for bad or good. These days it feels like many games have what amounts to laminated designs: you can't -really- screw yourself over, there's no way to get greatly harmed, nor is there a way to obtain any real power. Everything has been designed through, there's no way to escape the game's rat race, and all encounters are ultimately the same. Roguelikes, the good ones, managed to escape this kind of neutered gameplay.
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7-24-2007 @ 10:28PM
JC Fletcher said...
John: Thanks for coming in and taking us to Roguelike school. I can't sufficiently get my head around the things, except to say that they scare me to death and I have no idea what I'm supposed to do.
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7-25-2007 @ 4:48PM
James said...
The thing with Roguelikes is, they span the entire spectrum from Nethack (people have talked about needing a "Master's Degree" in the game to really understand it; I know people at college who spent more time learning NH than learning any of their course material) down to greatly simplified versions like Diablo or PSO. [Yes, I know, if NetHack is 10 on the scale, Dwarf Fortress is about a 16]
Imagine if you took the basic concept of Diablo -- kill stuff, get treasure, use your treasure to become more powerful and kill more stuff -- then had dozens of nerds spend a decade or more thinking of cool stuff to add to the game, and putting in new abilities, actions, character classes, options, items, etc., one at a time. Now, imagine that there's no manual for all this new stuff. No tutorial, nothing.
Except for the primitive interface (even the GUI-based games typically look like they could have run on a Super Nintendo), Nethack could be considered one of the most open-ended, unrestricted virtual worlds that exists today. Everything interacts with everything else, sometimes in unexpected ways. I'm not exaggerating: you can kill a cockatrice (which as we all know from Final Fantasy can turn you to stone), then put on gloves (so you don't petrify yourself), pick it up, and whack other monsters with the corpse to petrify them. That's just a tiny fraction of all the interaction NetHack contains. Every now and again I try to get back into it, but the learning curve is so steep I usually die within the first few levels. Oh, and the canonical NetHack is "hardcore" -- you can save to quit and continue later, but you can't save multiple times and if you die, you start over. You can of course copy the saved game and replace it if you die, but that's not the "real" game.
Anyway, I think everybody should try NetHack at least once, if you like dungeon crawlers. If you can get over the idea that it takes hundreds of hours to really "understand" the whole game, you can have a lot of fun discovering things for yourself.
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