Everything is connected, guys. I wrote an article on Colony Drop about the Wizardry anime because I was playing The Dark Spire. One day, as I was checking my anime source of choice, the name Wizardry came up. And I said "I'm playing Wizardry right now!" Because I am.
If you're interested in an old-fashioned dungeon-crawler RPG on the DS, look up the Etrian Odyssey games. They're great! It's intimidating to start with, but as your guys get stronger, the game becomes a breeze. If you're played Etrian Odyssey, on the other hand, and you think it goes too easy on the player, what with its low difficulty curve, and the way the game tells you where you are on the map-- how am I even going to get lost-- then look into Dark Spire. It's ten bucks nowadays, and it's not hard to find. Nobody really wants it but you.
Dark Spire is so old-school that you can actually switch the game's graphics down to "classic" mode, replacing the 3D dungeon with a monochrome outline of itself, the music with bleepy chiptunes, and the enemies with sprites from the 8-bit era. I turned this on as soon as the game started and I haven't switched it off: if you're gonna do this, you gotta do it all the way.
Dark Spire is so old-school that you can't even see how strong your weapons are: you just have to look at the price and the results and decide whether or not one piece of equipment is better than another. Armor uses the old Dungeons and Dragons "armor class" system, where lower is better, and swings in the almighty dice roll can, in one shot, determine your fate, usually in the direction of death. This is not a game you're going to be able to run through as fast as you can: you're going to spend a ton of time on the very first floor of the dungeon, both exploring and grinding for money and experience. This isn't even a fair game: keeping multiple saves, and saving every few encounters, is advisable. There are so many situations where even if you survive, loading up your last save is preferable to continuing to play. If you're in the mood for a challenge, then by all means, go for it.
Speaking for myself, the game got me with the flavor text. The game's on a really low budget, and a lot of the time it doesn't actually illustrate what's in front of you, instead dropping you into an empty room and saying, for example, that this is actually a fully furnished bedroom. You're allowed to check around, and the game will tell you in great detail what you don't see in front of you. Especially in the minimalist classic mode, touches like this actually create a weird sort of immersion: because every corridor, every room looks exactly the same, you start to fill in the blanks in atmosphere with your head. Atlus' excellent localization job on the flavor text just helps along this mental effort. I usually play my DS games on the subway, but I feel like that would ruin this one. Dark Spire is a game for right before bed, with all the lights off.
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