Club Retro 2020: February - Game Gear

Uh, that's a totally legit win with Dragon Crystal. Yes. It was. Except for all that save-stating at the very end.

I didn't dislike it, although as Ex 's old review says, the game gets brutal at the end. I also messed myself over a bit fighting the slugs. I thought they were temporarily reducing my strength, but no! It's a permanent drop. Later on, you'll find ones that sap energy, and even entire levels! Evil! Oh, and there are eyeball enemies that can rust your armor and weapons. That's... not good. I actually fought them by unequipping my good stuff, at least the armor ones.

My biggest problem at the end was that I didn't find halfway decent armor, so I was getting pounded. Ironically, I had the weapon I needed, though: the Dragonblade. It hits the mess out of all the dragons in the last stage, but I just couldn't absorb any punishment from them.

I think I could pull a better run, but I'm probably done with it for now. I'd say what's here is decent, so I'll give it a 6/10.

Yeah, occasionally I will actually play one. I happen to know that there are others that let you keep more of your progress throughout the game, or at least hit checkpoints so that when you die, you don't go all the way back to the start. Of course, this is much more patterned on, well, Rogue, right down to the multiple items where you don't know their effects.

And I actually recently picked up Chocobo's Dungeon 2, mainly to fill in one more divot in my PSX library. Still gotta buy those King's Field games, though. That will happen.

The weird thing with me and rogue-likes is that when I play them, I don't hate them, but I don't love them either. I think some of the genre nuances are lost on me at times.

Yeah, I figure playing a Shiren game might be better. I'm pretty sure I picked up the DS game, which is supposed to be good, and I know I have the Wii entry we got. I also happen to have Torneko's Mystery Dungeon, and have had it for a long time. There's also games like Azure Dreams, which also have a lot of rogue-like stuff.

Azure Dreams seemed kind of weak when I tried it. Both the PSX and GBC games. Torneko is really good, though. Really, you can't go wrong with the Mysterious Dungeon games if you like console roguelikes, and Shiren is their one flagship, non-licensed characters, so there's something special about the series. I'd recommend starting with the SNES game just cause it's the first, but I'm sure the DS game is good anyway. What I like about console / Japanese roguelikes is that they're meant to be actually beaten. There's a lot of chance involved, of course, but they give you a few tools that lets you steadily progress. The exception is Fatal Labyrinth (and Dragon Crystal), which are just basically a dungeon.